About Web-Based Email Marketing

Email marketing reaches customers across the world.

With the ever-increasing availability of the Internet on mobile phones and personal computers, email marketing can be lucrative for businesses across a range of industries. Marketing emails, which are also called email blasters, make use of inexpensive web technology to reach a wide audience across the world. As you plan an email marketing campaign, consider your audience, content, and timing for best results.

Setup

Email marketing is attractive because it is inexpensive and convenient. The main setup costs include the purchase of an email blasting program like Constant Contact, which handles mailing lists and sending emails. This type of program will also walk you through creating HTML and plain-text versions of the email blaster. Once you have input content, you can choose a mailing list and send your email.

Target Audience

Email marketing is most effective when it reaches an audience that can relate to the product or service; if the email blaster is irrelevant, it is likely to end up in the trash. To start your mailing list, go through your business address book and pull email addresses of clients, vendors, and other partners who might be interested in your services. You can add to the list by going through the phone book or an email directory of local businesses in your target audience group, looking up their websites, and extracting the appropriate email. Alternately, you can purchase a mailing list from companies like Route 72, that sell lists based on industry and location; be cautious with this option and purchase only opt-in lists, which contain emails of people who have elected to receive marketing emails.

Content

The goal of an email blaster is to create further engagement with your company; this is generally achieved by providing new content. When creating an email blaster, take every opportunity to offer your customers value. Consider promoting special sales or events, or offering a discount for viewers who print off the email and bring it in. Email marketing is also used to direct viewers back to your company's website: to do so, you can provide abstracts of articles with a link to the site for the full text. An email blaster is a good place to announce webinars, training, media mentions, and new products.

Frequency

When using email marketing, you must send out just enough emails to keep your company on customers' radar without irritating them. This number will vary by industry. A restaurant, for example, can send a daily email with specials and promotions because the information changes rapidly. An engineering firm, on the other hand, might only send out an email blaster once a month or once a quarter. Consider also the day of the week and time of day you are sending the emails. According to the ZeroMillion website, consumers are most receptive from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday through Sunday, while business customers respond best to emails that arrive between 11 a.m., and 3 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday.

Credibility

Because of the prevalence of spam email, consumers tend to be cautious when reading marketing emails. To make your product or service stand out from the group, you must make a special effort to appear credible and reliable. Avoid the common pitfalls of spam emails: over-the-top promises, too many exclamation points, generic imagery, and insincerity. Use photos of your product, service, or facilities, write genuinely and truthfully, and provide information that adds value to your readers' days.

References

• ZeroMillion
• Constant Contact
• Route 72