Many small businesses still wonder why they should use email marketing. The answer is simple. It works. In fact, it may work better than just about any other type of marketing effort, as long as you are trying to keep past customers buying and convert leads interested enough to accept your emails.
According to the Direct Marketing Association’s most recent study, email marketing returned $43.62 for every dollar spent on it. For comparison, direct mail, the most similar category, returned $15.22 for every dollar spent in 2009.
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 91% of Internet users use email. Pew also reported this January that 74% of Americans are regular users of the Internet. So, email effectively reaches 64% of all Adult Americans. And most, though not all, are willing to invite trusted companies to continue to send them email.
Sure email doesn’t deliver new leads very well. Anti-Spam regulations make it necessary to get recipients permission before sending them email, something the Post Office doesn’t require of stamped mail. However, email is now the ideal medium for reaching out and staying in touch with current and past customers or clients.
Not all email marketing is created equal. Here are some of the capabilities you should look for in email marketing.
- Automatic signup forms for your website or blog that send an automated confirmation email upon signup.
- Unique Designs
- Ability to automatically send a series of emails at a scheduled interval. One example of how this is useful would be to automatically send a new signup an email with a coupon.
- Ability to segment the list by various standard and custom data fields. A photographer could, for example, ask for wedding date and send emails about wedding photo services until the wedding day, after which they might switch to sending emails about portrait services.
- Ability to create multiple email lists, if you’d like to provide customers with an option to receive just special offers, just newsletters, etc.
- Ability to mail merge customer’s names and other important information, such as a sales representative’s name and phone number into the email.
- Alerts you to subscribers who have marked your email as spam and removes them from your list.
Can your email do this? If you’d like to learn more about what we can do for your email, please contact us.