How-to: Market via email
Many business owners do not invest a great deal of time, energy or money into orchestrating an email marketing campaign because they mistakenly believe all email marketing is viewed as spam; but email marketing can actually be much more effective than these business owners, and some other Internet users, think because the view that email marketing is spam has absolutely no merit. It’s just not true! Ask those business owners who have discovered how to market via email successfully
, and are enjoying a great deal of success, how they feel about this type of marketing. You will certainly get a starkly different perspective!
This article will discuss how email marketing can be successful and will provide some insight into how to determine the reception of your email marketing by both actual and potential customers, as well as regulatory agencies (FTC [CAN-SPAM Act enforcer], Consumers Affairs, etc.); but before we can discuss how to determine the reaction to your email marketing campaign, it is important for business owners to understand how to plan and execute a successful email marketing campaign. Perhaps one of the most important elements of such a campaign is to ensure your marketing efforts are not viewed by the recipients as similar to, or mistake it for, spam.
Making the distinction
One way to distinguish your email marketing campaigns from spam is to carefully develop your email distribution list; because although you may be able to reach a tremendous audience by sending out your email marketing materials to a large email list, this is not the most effective method of email marketing, especially in view of the fact that you know little, or nothing, about the list members (or subscribers); and you probably know even less about whether or not these subscribers will even be interested in your products or services. The point therefore is that, reaching a huge audience is not more important than reaching a highly targeted audience.
Focusing your email marketing efforts on millions of recipients who do not have a specific interest in your products or services is not nearly as effective as focusing your email marketing efforts on only hundreds of email recipients who are likely to be very interested in your content and your brand, as well as the products or services you provide. This is because you are much more likely to generate sales from a small, targeted group than you are from a large group without a specific focus.
Measuring effectiveness
Now that you know a little more about email marketing than perhaps you knew before, and how it can be effective, you might wonder how you can determine the true effectiveness of your email marketing efforts in the long run. This is important because it is not worthwhile to invest a great deal of time, energy and money into an email marketing campaign if your efforts are not generating positive and measurable results.
Likewise, if your email marketing campaign is wildy successful, you might want to consider organizing additional marketing efforts to further your success. One of the most important tools you will need, if you don’t already have one, is an autoresponder which can be obtained through a service that specializes in autoresponders.
Surveys and website traffic
That having been said, customer surveys have been proven to be one of the best ways to evaluate reaction to your email marketing campaign. Asking customers to fill out simple surveys when they make a purchase can provide a great deal of insight depending on the questions you ask. Questions such as where the customer learned about your products/services may seem rather innocuous but this information can actually be rather useful to the business owner.
Getting feedback related to where a customer learned about the products and/or services you offer provides excellent information about which of your marketing efforts are generating the most interest. If you receive a great deal of responses stating that customers learned about your products/services through emails, this is a good indication that your email marketing campaign is effective.
Another very popular way to evaluate the reaction to your email marketing efforts is to closely monitor your rate of sales, as well as your website traffic immediately after you issue a new email to members of your subscriber list. This can be helpful because an increase in sales or website traffic after an email was sent out is a strong indication that the email was well received and encouraged recipients to visit the website and make purchases.
Avoid simultaneous campaigns
However, there is one caveat to this method of evaluation. It can be quite difficult to determine whether or not the emails caused the increase in website traffic and sales if more than one marketing effort was made at the same time; so try to avoid starting an email marketing campaign at the same time as you launch a banner ad, otherwise you will not be able to determine which one is more effective and is therefore driving the increase in sales and traffic.
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