The best way to get people to buy a product or service is to expose them to it in a context that is nonintrusive, yet also clearly relevant to their wants and needs.
One modern way of doing this is by sending advertisements to people through email. Email marketing is a tried and true way to keep customers, both current and potential, informed of all your firm’s products, services, and updates.
The advantages to email newsletters and other email marketing techniques are numerous. For one, they’re cheap: Emails cost only a few cents to send, so contacting even thousands of people costs next to nothing compared to what it would cost to send direct mail or other traditional advertisements to people. Just as importantly, email newsletters are easy to distribute.
Once you’ve designed them and filled them with content, all it takes is the press of a button to shoot them to the inboxes of everyone on your contact list. Such ease of use and cost effectiveness makes email marketing an attractive option for businesses of all sizes.
Another advantage to this style of advertisement is the sheer scope of consumers you can interact with. Businesses with international relevance, such as those offering online services, can advertise themselves to consumers in France, Spain, China, Canada, and Ghana, all at no expenses beyond those they’d face marketing at home; and businesses with only local clientele can still contact everyone in their surrounding areas directly with little in the way of extra servers or specially trained personnel.
At this point, people usually see that email marketing has its positive side, but they often ask how it can be so effective if only a few people read the emails. While it is true that not everyone who gets an email advertisement will read it, the sheer number of people you contact and the low cost of advertisement make for extremely high ROI, which is ultimately what any company is aiming for.
Some estimates put the return at a few hundreds of a cent per ad, but when all the calculations have been run, even this can work out to be break-even at least, and returns as high as $2 for every $1 spent on the advertisements aren’t uncommon.
A long-term advantage to email marketing is your ability to track its results and easily test the effectiveness of certain campaign strategies and advertisement characteristics.
You can, for instance, send several different versions of an advertisement to different customer demographics, and from there, determine what characteristics are most effective at getting people to respond. Over time, your marketing campaign will become more and more refined, and as it does, your revenues will grow larger and larger.
Email marketing is easy to integrate with other modern forms of electronic advertisement, as well. Such devices as SMS marketing, for instance, can easily be attached to email marketing campaigns (people can be prompted to opt-in to a text messaging campaign through the emails, for instance), and well-written emails frequently find themselves circulated on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. This means more exposure for your firm, which translates to more revenue and greater profits.
One of the biggest advantages to email marketing is the fact that it requires almost no overhead. You don’t need thousands of employees, hundreds of computers, or hours of training to start an email marketing campaign.
It’s as simple as employing the right service, planning your emails, writing your content, and clicking a few buttons. This way, you can save the money you’d otherwise spend printing paper advertisements on more important things, like financial investments or better technology.
Additionally, email marketing makes it very easy for you to target different demographics at different times and with different content. This sort of ‘consumer segmentation’ is a powerful tool that allows you to appeal to different subsets of the buying population by sending information relevant to their interests.
While this is possible in theory with traditional modes of advertising, what you can do with email that you can’t with paper is keep those consumer segments updated in real time. When a new promotion or service hits, your customers will know and be able to buy immediately, which means you’ll get their business before competitors are even able to inform them of their offers.
Something about email marketing that consumers really like is the fact that the messages can be easily personalized, and this sort of segmentation really helps you personalize your email newsletters.
Everyone likes to be addressed by name and have their interests touched on in any email message, and with the data available to you from email marketing, it’s easy to determine what people like, what they want to know, and what they want to read.
This way, they’ll become enthusiastic about what you have to tell them, open to your organization, and interested in your goods and services – exactly what you want a marketing campaign to accomplish.
