Email Marketing

The goal of the Email Marketing is your website promotion through email campaigns. Email Advestising also know as "opt-in e-mail advertising" to distinguish it from spam.  The email marketing could be considered as one of the first forms of marketing on the Internet and  it's still an important feature if choosing it as an emarketing option.
We distinguish two types of emails used as marketing emails:

• promotional emails,   in order to aware a customer of a promotion  you are offering.
• retention based emails,  with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, these may include promotional message, but are usually referred to newsletters, usualy have the goal of bulding a long term relationship with a user.

Email marketing may be pretty high cost effective, but the campaign might fail, in case of being done wrong. As other eMarketing strategies it requires a careful planning (including testing, evaluating and optimising) in order to optimise your revenue, it can be highly targeted and customised .

When planning an email campaign we define the following steps:

Planning the strategy -  defining the goal you are willing to achieve. It can be connected with the goal of your internet page (the major goal of your business) or,  if  possible, to break the major goal in smaller goals and act on each of them individually (divide and conquer technique used to break a major problems into more subproblems). The promotional emails usually have an immediate goal: a sale, a download, futher information request. The newsletters usually focus on a longer term relations so the key performance indicator is more important in this case. Usually, if done effectively an email campaign tends to create long term relationship with the customer.

Defining the list.  As a decent internet company, it is good to have your own database with subscribers, from whom you have been granted the permission to send emails. It is a base feature, wich you should be looking for  in advance, if planning to start an email campaign. You can keep data like: name, surname and title, date of subscription (when have you been granted the permission), gender, country, telephone, birth date, etc. According to the data you store, you  can  personalise emails, send them according to the category of age, etc. Also ot be kept in mind that much information at the begining can frustrate a customer so this part could be done sometime after the subscription, in order to customize your campaigns.   When posting your Sign up form, make sure it will be visible, post also  how you value the privacy of your clients, inform your subscribers what they will get, check the email address is correct.

How to execute. Because nowadays the emails are not just a plain text  but can include pictures, videos and other applications, this section is about evaluating every field of an email in the best way. This comprises the header information ( from/to), the title, which is one of the most important things in a email campaign ( avoid using words that can put your email in a spam category or bulk, like "free","buy", "discount"), personalize your messages, create valuable content,  don't forget the unsubscribe link, think about the best fit  of your email layout for your email campaign.

Analysing and report generation. Because the email strategy is a measurable one, for to create the report on have to take in consideration the statute of every sent email:

• the number of delivered emails
• the number of bounces( hard bounces for nonexistent emails, soft bounces  for expired       emails or full email inbox)
• number of unsubscribers
• unique emails
• click through rate - the existing links inside the body of an email, this indicator usually shows what the user mostly is interested in.

Pass on. It is when a user values the content of email and sends it to a fiend, this way you can add up subscribers in your database. Once  you have the results from an email campaign, you can analyze them and make the next one better. Paying attention to the Pass on rate  you can customize the optimal number of links, also you can see the effect from video on your delivery rates, learn who opens, who clicks, who forwards, reach out your consumers with personalized, relevant and dynamic messages.
With the growth of the number of companies on the Internet many  people are email fatigued it requires  for your email campaign to be genuine, to offer valuable emails so the people may be interested in.  Permission based email campaign can bring the highest  return of investment, they are highly targeted and customisable. Successful email campaigns require tests on a range of users, tested for a spam core, before the  approbation of the campaign to launch.
It does not take much for an email to be marked as spam and being branded as a spammer by an ISP, the recovery way can be pretty difficult.

Benefits of email marketing

A well planned, effective, email advertising campaign, can help your business' products and services gain visibility. Here are few benefits of email advertising and email marketing. The "low cost" of marketing the business message makes email marketing most preferred choice of direct marketing their products and services among small and mid-sized businesses (SMEs). Big companies also find email marketing as most effective means. Thousand of email can be sent at one click thus saves communication time, very less turnaround time. With this e-marketing you start getting quick response once your email reaches your  targeted customers. Most effective as it increase traffic and sales ultimately.
Email marketing helps to create brand recognition.