Email Marketing – What Is It?

Email Marketing Alive or Dead?

Whenever you send an email regardless of content and information it is a form of email marketing.

Unless you want to manage to become the most boring email writer on the Internet there are some rules you must follow.

If you want to have an engagement with the recipient, and most important in email marketing emails that are acted upon.

This article is right for you.

There are many types of email some offering expert coaching and tips or marketing tips and strategies others tools and guides.

So many new Internet Marketers enter the market buying a list of email addresses, sit down to write email messages with a promotional message that to them will appeal to every recipient.

They take the view that everyone will take up their business opportunity. They believe recipients wait with credit card in hand and rush to their blog or website, only to suffer disappointment, when they discover they receive a nil return.

Email marketing is not just sending opt-in email advertising, anticipating a positive response.

The mistake most email marketers make is sending email advertising to people who have never heard of them. In doing so, they expect a successful response for their business or services. When they do not get a response many of them believe that email marketing does not work.

Just to state a couple of known facts here.

When sending out a bunch of emails accept that only 11-15% will get opened.

Even if there is a constructed Call-to-Action feature only 2.1-5% will respond to those email messages by clicking through.

On top of you will discover about 0.1 – 0.2% unsubscribe.

Most will not unsubscribe because they know that if they do they are alerting the sender that their email is live. This will lead to a deluge of unsolicited marketing messages from other amateur marketers.

So, what is email marketing?

It is a proven media of engagement with new and existing clients giving information, terms and data about your company and the features of offers you have which are right for them. Long before making any offer a professional email marketer will try to build a relationship through building trust. The last thing a successful professional marketer will do is use electronic communication to send a sales message in the first email.

Yet when I look at my personal inbox I see messages from complete strangers offering me access to their marketing blog that holds the secret to discovering hidden wealth.

Emails advertising the secret the Gurus refused to release!

How many of those email marketing examples do you think I even open?

You have to make your email stand out. Did you know that there are 122,500,453,020 emails sent through the Internet every hour? Yes, that is 122.5 Billion. Yet, because someone has said, “buy a list and you will be successful†many individuals buy into the myth. worse again are the individuals who are registered in some scheme to send me an unsolicited newsletter, because they have been told to send seven messages offering reducing pricing structure to reduce my resistance.

Let me look at it another way.

For ease, will we say that your commission on affiliate business is £50? You send out 1000 messages offering your business or services. That will take some doing as most email providers you discover will limit the number of emails you can send. But, stay with me.

Of those 1000,

1. 110 will open the message.
2. 2 will click-through.
3. 1 in 10 goes on to buy the product or service.

You will have to do that 5 times to make a sale. Now, you have to send 5000 emails to make 1 sale of £50. Even using social media the figures are not that much different.

I know that these are rough figures I create them for an illustrative view only. But I wanted to show you why sending sales emails to people who do not know you or your product is not the pathway to success.

If the above is true does that mean that email marketing is dead?

An emphatic no!

Otherwise, thousands of major corporations would not be in existence. One hundred and twenty-two billion emails would not be winging their way across the Internet every hour.

So, why do those companies use people to refine their email marketing tools and campaigns?
Email marketing is the cheapest form of contacting existing and new customers. Properly constructed Email newsletters are an established and popular way of retaining clients or winning clients.

Just look at the expensive time consumed by traditional mail methods. There is the pricing for developing, designing and printing the marketing message. The cost of packaging, addressing and posting the message all take from the bottom line that costs to sales.

Unlike traditional advertising, with email marketing it is easy to calculate the return on investment (ROI). When done well the ROI can be high yielding profits into the company coffers.

Advertisers can reach large numbers of customers and prospects fast. They can check results and the message modified to improve results if necessary. Traditional marketing involves increased costs for each change of a message.

Individual messages can be written to target customers and prospects with features and benefits of doing business together. Each message can highlight subjects that will be of interest to them.

On average Internet users check their emails at least twice every day, many check on a desktop and then on their mobile device.

Open and Click Rates By Day.

According to the metrics maintained by Mailer Mailer, open rates decrease over the week. Worth noting the open rate peaked at 10.7% for a Tuesday and Wednesday delivery. The lowest results being delivery on a Saturday or Sunday.

Monitoring Click to Open rates is a major analytic that you need. It tells you the effectiveness of your email message. The Recruitment and Staffing sector is the most successful followed by Security and Law Enforcement. But, of interest to you could be that Deals and Coupons comes a close third in the click to open rates. That could be because this sector is offering the recipient a value for opening the email.

This should give you a massive clue when constructing your email. Offering a benefit for opening your email will enhance your click to open rates.

The subject line plays an important part on whether an email gets opened or not. A Mailer Mailer survey indicates that a subject line of between 4 and 15 characters has the greater chance of success.

You should spend as much time on your subject line than the body of your message.

Finally, you must be aware of the spam laws in different countries. Read details of CAN-SPAM act for the USA and European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. Do not fall foul of these laws if you want to build a sustainable email marketing campaign.

If you want to build a successful and sustainable email marketing campaign ensure that you are sending the best email every time.