Email Advertising: A Promotional Favorite
Throughout the years, many types of promotional methods have caught the public fancy. Television commercials. Radio ads. Direct marketing. Now that the Internet has taken over the game, from banner ads to social network pages, the one constant is that email marketing has become the most affordable, effective and targeted promotional tool out there.
If you're not sure why, just keep reading.
Email marketing facts:
Email marketing brings in as much as $47 in ROI for every dollar spent
Even in a shaky economy, email marketing is the only promotional tool that businesses consistently spend more money on
Email marketing will be a $1.1 billion business by 2010
Close to 90% emails are delivered and that number is expected to grow over the next few years
According to a recent large survey, an average of 50% of people clicked on a link because a product interested them.
The case for email marketing
Email marketing is incredibly affordable
There's not a single promotional tool out there with the same level of affordability of email marketing. Emails cost only pennies on the dollar, and even get cheaper when you send more. Compared to buying TV, newspaper or radio advertising, email marketing is a true bargain
Email marketing is completely targeted
What other type of advertising allows you to call each customer by name, write copy based on their needs and wants, and cater individually to whatever product the customer fancies at the moment? Only email marketing gives you a true one-to-one relationship with your customers.
Email marketing is trackable in real time
When you send out an email survey or just an HTML newsletter, you can see when your email is opened and which links are clicked on, down to the minute. Your reports will give you a great, quick picture of how well your campaigns are doing in the easiest way possible. Here's an image of a Benchmark Email campaign report:
Benchmark Email offers real-time tracking, down to which links were opened and forwarded. View your bounces, unsubscribes and unopened emails at any time, 24/7, as long as you have Internet access. Find out more about
Benchmark's award-winning, real-time email reports.
Email marketing has a broad reach
When it comes to sending emails, it's as easy to send an email to New York as it is to Bangalore. Email marketing knows no boundaries, and you can cater to customers all around the world effortlessly and easily with it.
Email marketing is a flexible medium
No other type of mass marketing gives you the freedom to send images, video, text, links and more. You can make your emails as simple as plain text with few graphics, or as elaborate as you want.
Benchmark lets you put videos in your email! Insert product demos, showcase your service, or simply have your CEO send a personal message. Find out more on on our video email capabilities.
Top rules for successful email marketing
If you're still not certain about how email marketing can affect your business, whether you run a one-man, home-based operation or a large retailer, here's a good list of what you can use email marketing for:
To promote products and services
To give your customers step-by-step instructions and tips
To let your clients know more about how your business works
To solicit donations for your nonprofit organization
To survey recipients and get valuable market data
To offer customers content they can't get anywhere else
To compare your product with other products
To introduce your recipients to your new CEO, facility, sales team and more
To showcase customer testimonials and case studies
To show all your recipients which products they like the most
To offer discounts and coupons on a product or service
Are there more applications than the ones listed above? Of course! But these are the primary ones.
Top tips for successful email marketing
Before you send out an email marketing campaign to your customers, start by following these rules to ensure success.
Build a permission-based email list
Don't fall into the spam track and get yourself blacklisted. Create an opt-in list where every single customer has given you permission to email them. How do you do this? It's simple. Use a Signup Form. A Signup Form or sign-up box on your Website helps you gather email addresses without any effort at all. At Benchmark, we give you the capability to build your own custom Signup Form. When a customer enters their email address and other info, it's automatically added to your email list and you can start sending.
Craft a compelling, honest subject line
Your subject line is the first thing your recipients see, and is your one and only chance to get them to open your emails. Make your subject lines interesting and appealing. Here are some additional subject line tips:
Put a brand name in it, if possible, if you're promoting a sale
Exclude exclamation points, dollar signs and other over-the-top punctuation
Never use all caps
Keep it under 50 characters to avoid it being truncated
Don't lie about what's in your email
Avoid obvious sales speak like "mega sale!" "save loads of cash!"
Test different subject lines to see what works best
Use a personalized template to build familiarity
The more you stick to the same template and layout look, the better chance you'll build customer trust and get recipients to open your emails. Familiarity matters. If you need a template that truly reflects your business, contact Benchmark Email and our award-winning design team will create a personalized email template just for you. You can also use one of hundreds of themed layouts included in every Benchmark Email paid plan.
Don't over or under send
Frequency matters quite a bit in email marketing, and your best bet is to craft a schedule that focuses on quality, not quantity. Send once a week, twice a month or even once a month. If you have a sale coming up you can send more frequently, for instance, three times in one week, but we recommend sending no more frequently than that. You want to find the perfect balance to avoid spam complaints, which can come from emailing customers too much, or believe it or not, emailing them too frequently.
Create an autoresponder campaign
A sequenced email campaign lets you create multiple email campaigns in advance and set them up to go out on the dates you specify. If you have the time to create a sequenced email campaign, also known as a “drip” campaign, you can relax knowing that your emails will go out on time and you won't need to worry about manually scheduling each campaign. Benchmark Email's award-winning autoresponder feature lets you create and send an unlimited amount of campaigns. You can set it and forget it with Benchmark's email marketing autoresponders.
Email marketing is a powerful technology that can greatly enhance your company's promotional arsenal. You can certainly get by without it, but with so many companies large and small using it, it would do you good to harness it and use it as your primary or ancillary method of promotion.
