How Can Email Marketing Benefit Your Business
Quite simply, email marketing is reaching your target audience through the medium of email. This is in contrast to using direct mail, telephone marketing, face to face selling, websites, radio, and television. Of course, email can work in conjunction with any of these methods and is often complementary to many of them.
Email marketing is simply communicating to a select subset of your target audience who have given you specific permission to do so. By specific permission, I mean that the person has clicked on a link that says, in effect, “please add me to your email list”. In many cases, the person is also required to confirm the subscription by clicking on another link in an email sent specifically to their email address.
Due to these precautions, email marketing should not automatically be labeled as “spam”. What is spam? Briefly, it can be described as unwanted commercial email. Your uncle Bob who forwards all those corny jokes is not spamming you. Ethical email marketers are not in the same class as spammers due to the fact that the recipient is added only with their express permission, and in addition, every email contains a unsubscribe method that is easy to carry out.
What are the contents of email marketing communications?
You can usually expect commercial email marketing to include the following:
The latest news important the subject in which you and your readers share a common interest. You might be in the homeschool niche, in which case you would likely want to discuss about legal matters, new tools and curriculum, and similar information. When you offer relevant information and even better, place your own spin on it, this will help you to become an advisor that your readers trust.
Helpful tips and hints. One common use of email marketing is to provide introductory level training. A great example would be sending out a short course via email on how to get started playing the guitar. Or you could merely address one issue that new guitar players often struggle with.
Sales messages. No surprise here. Marketers want to sell something! The precise “most desired action” will be different based upon on your industry and positioning within in. In other words, you may not be offering something for sale immediately, but you will almost always be giving your readers the opportunity to move farther down the sales funnel.
Common encouraged actions of email sales messages include:
* Checking out a sales page
* Call a phone number for information package
* Participating in a complimentary teleseminar
Email marketing messages can either be “broadcast” message or “sequential” messages. The sequential messages are often called “autoresponders” because the process for adding a reader is automatic, and the system keeps track of which messages get sent when.
