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HTML e-mail is an easy and effective way to gain a wealth of knowledge about your customers, while bringing you and them closer together. Sound too good to be true? Let’s break it down and see how it’s done.
E-mail’s Return on Investment (ROI) is spectacular:
E-mail’s ROI was projected to return $48.29 for every dollar spent in 2007. Compare that to print catalogs, which were projected to return $7.24 for every dollar spent in 2007, and non-email Internet marketing which returned $22.52 in 2005. (According to the Direct Marketing Association)
E-mail is cost-effective:
Compared to print-based marketing, e-mail is cheaper to produce and send in the long run. Once you add up design costs, paper costs, ink costs and postage or distribution costs per mailing, your dollar goes further with an e-mail marketing campaign spaced out over several mailings. Not only that, but your campaign will be going to people who sign up for your messages, meaning your money is going towards customers already invested in your business.
E-mail is flexible:
To send a print campaign, you first have to design it, then wait for it to be printed, then wait for it to be distributed/mailed. With e-mail campaigns, you can quickly and efficiently send a campaign in a timely manner. And if your e-mail campaign service offers a segmentation option, you can send targeted emails to just parts of your list.
E-mail can be tracked:
Some email services offer reporting statistics on your open rates and unsubscribes complete with graphs and charts detailing your results. With these tools you can quickly measure your campaign’s success and evaluate your stats to make your next campaign more effective.
E-mail is easy to manage:
With automatic subscribe, unsubscribe and bounce processing, email services remove the tedious aspects of maintaining an e-mail list. They also offer you peace of mind because they monitor blacklists, deal with spam complaints, and avoid overloading your mail servers – something your IT department will thank you for. This lets you focus on your customers and your message, not the technology.
E-mail brings you closer to your customers:
Instead of waiting for people to respond to your print ad or to remember to look up your website, e-mails can instantly announce sales and special events. E-mails also keep customers up-to-date on information relating to your company, and drive traffic to your site and your business with the click of a button. It helps you keep in touch with your customers on a regular basis and establish a connection between you and your clients that you can’t get with traditional marketing.
So if you’re ready to jump into cyberspace or do more than just put a website out there, HTML e-mail can be an effective, quality addition to your Internet Marketing campaign.
Addendum: Since this article was written, Datran Media has released their annual survey results – http://success.datranmedia.com/research/2008survey.php – that indicates most industry leaders will be increasing their e-mail marketing in 2008, most likely due to the results they’ve already seen in 2007. So if you haven’t thought about using e-mail marketing, now is the time.
Cas Johnson is a web development specialist at Absolute Marketing Group. Feel free to call 218-284-1111 or e-mail cas@absolutemg.com for more information about e-mail marketing.
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