Effectiveness of Email Marketing

Email marketing is like direct mail marketing. The hope is to encourage customers to buy your products or services, but a simple mass mailing without a strategy or an understanding of what makes that type of mailing effective is a waste of time and expense. With the flood of SPAM filling mailboxes every day, emails that arrive unsolicited are deleted unread by most people. Research and trial and error by email marketers have discovered ways to increase the effectiveness of email marketing.

Reaching Customers

The key to getting your emails read is to target the customers and prospects who want to hear from you. Give them the option to be added to your mailing list on your website and in your online ads. Make it worth their while by adding special discounts to subscribers and by including well written and interesting newsletter articles. Not only will this encourage your customers to open and read your emails, they will look forward to them. Nicely designed HTML emails have shown to be more effective than plain text messages, so keep aesthetics in mind when creating your mailings.

Track Effectiveness

Tracking the effectiveness of your email campaign will help you discover the number of customers that are reading and responding to your messages. It also helps you to test different key messages, HTML designs and discount offers so you know which ones are resulting in the highest number of sales. Add special discount codes that you only give to email subscribers. Create hyperlinks in the email that take customers to a special page on your site where you can track the number of visitors. The more information you collect the better you can design your messages and target your customers to make your email marketing as effective as possible.

References

• Is Email Marketing Still Effective?