Your first question is probably, what is email marketing anyway? Well, basically email marketing is any marketing that uses email as its main way of delivering the marketing message to consumers. It is a type of direct to consumer marketing.
To engage in email marketing you need to build a targeted email list, invest in the right email list technology, and focus on writing awesome content, sales messages and other information to send out to your email list.
Email marketing is much more than just sending bulk emails to a bunch of random email addresses. It’s not wise to purchase email addresses in the way a business might purchase a snail mail list. The truth is, effective email marketing is so much more, and it’s a lot more direct than snail mail marketing. It’s so much more personal. When you consider that most people now check email on mobile devices, and they keep their device right near them (often 24 hours a day), you realize how truly big email marketing really is.
To be really successful at email marketing, you must have a targeted list to whom you send personalized targeted messages. You’ll need to consider the buying habits of your audience, what they’ve purchased of yours so far, what actions they’ve taken on your messages, and more. You don’t purchase this targeted list either; you build it through other efforts such as content marketing.
As well as being targeted, email marketing needs to build relationships while driving sales in order to be successful. What’s really great about email marketing is that the technology that exists today allows you to be very data driven in your email marketing endeavors. You’ll be able to segment your email marketing in ways that will make your email marketing even more successful.
If you develop an effective email marketing plan, your email marketing can create sales opportunities, build customer loyalty, and even demonstrate your expertise to your target market – assisting in your rise as a thought leader. Making decisions about what type of email marketing you want to engage in, and what technology you’ll use to get there, will be your hardest decisions to make once you embark on using email marketing.
Your email messages don’t actually have to be direct marketing messages to be considered email marketing. Perhaps you send out a newsletter that has a few select advertisements in it. That is still email marketing. This is a great way to get involved in email marketing as a starting point. A newsletter along with sending messages to your audience to help build a relationship with them are great email marketing methods, in addition to sending specific sales messages via email. If you’re not spending a good portion of your time on email marketing, you’re missing out on a high return on investment.