Email Marketing

What is e-mail marketing?

So what is e-mail marketing? In a nutshell you send an electronic communication which contains a message to your customer or client. It could be a message about some updates regarding your business. It could contain a voucher for a particular promotion. Other popular calls-to-action (i.e. the purpose of your e-mail and the reaction that you require from the respondent) might include a free game, money off codes, a paid for or free webinar, and any other tool which helps you to retain customers and to extend new products and services to them.

It’s important that your e-mail is something that your respondent wants to open. So you don’t even need to have anything major to offer since you could just be telling them about a small change in the law, or you could summarise key events from your particular market from the previous week’s news.

Why is e-mail such an important digital marketing tool?

Today Information Technology (IT) means that the high cost of traditional direct marketing or mailshots is reduced substantially. In fact if you recall your first direct online dialogue with a company, you will probably recall that e-mail was the first social interaction which you had via the Internet. So e-mail marketing is one of the cornerstones of social media marketing as we know it today.

E-mail is still a powerful medium of online communication. It is simple, straightforward and your visitors and clients are familiar with e-mail, where they may not be so familiar with Facebook or LinkedIn and other popular social media solutions. However you want your e-mail communications to be focused and targeted, and ultimately to retain customers and keep them buying from you. You don’t want your communication to be a piece of on opened e-mail in someone’s inbox, or worse labelled as junk mail or spam (which Is mass, unsolicited e-mails). To your loyal customers your communication has value, and so does e-mail marketing.

E-mail marketing is a foundation of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and there is plenty of material on the Marketing Teacher website about CRM. A popular definition of CRM is Customer Relationship Management is the establishment, development, maintenance and optimisation of long-term mutually valuable relationships between consumers and organisations. CRM is designed to recruit and retain customers, and to extend products and services to them over their lifetime. E-mail marketing is a fundamental approach for this.