Email Marketing is all about quality, not quantity

In a recent analysis by Forrester Research, sixty percent of marketers are not utilising the power of email marketing because their efforts are mainly concentrated towards growing databases and sending out the information to the maximum number of users, thereby ignoring the fact that it is not the quantity, but the quality that matters, and we are not talking about the quality of the email addresses, but the strategy that is implemented while blasting out mails. The best strategy in this regard would be to segregate your mail addresses in accordance to the data being sent, and this is particularly important for those involved in the email marketing domain for external clients. For instance, depending on the age demographics, you might prefer sending sports goods' mailers to only young audiences, a step that would also reduce the bounce rate of the host site drastically, besides increasing the click-through percentage. Another example would be in case you know the geographic locations of your potential customers as well. According to this location, you can send them mailers specific to their location (Of course, you would not be selling sweaters to someone located in Africa!)

The most imperative precaution while gathering your email database is to capture as much (accurate) information about the user as possible. Based on these, you can start off by defining targets for a better analysis of both your strategy as well as your approach. Even a simple segregation like male/female can bring about a whale of a difference in terms of click-through. Further, in case you own a website offering the facility to the user to subscribe to promotional offers, discounts, etc., make sure you take as much information without being too taxing on the user or taking too much of his time (both are basically the same thing for an average user). A side-point here would be to keep updating your database in case a few users unsubscribe every now and then. This is also important in case you are running mailers for diverse verticals or products, since a user interested in sports goods might not be wanting to receive offers on sweaters (quoting the above example)!

In the end, all that matters is how you play with the number of mail addresses you have, and send out mailers at the appropriate timings to the right audience. There is no set formula for this, and everything is trial and error. However, the upside to this is that once you hit the right strategy, all you have to do is to blast the mails, and get revenues the click of a button.

No Money, No Brand-Presence? Try e-mail marketing!!

What would you do if you had to market your product in a short span of time but had no Search Engine Optimisation professionals, budget for online or offline advertising and were a newbie with relatively no chance of word-of-mouth promotions?

Confused? What seems to be a near impossible task in the above circumstances can in fact be dealt with in a very effective manner by the means of e-mail marketing campaigns, thanks to the growing use of the internet and the fact that a clear majority of the 1.5 billion plus users who currently use the internet globally would be definitely having (and checking) their e-mail accounts. Coming in as a relatively unknown means of promotion of both online and offline products, e-mail marketing has come of age and is on a high since the past 5 years or so, with incremental ad spends year on year. However, there are some measures of caution that should always be taken to ensure proper effectiveness of any e-mail marketing campaign.

Following are some of the guidelines of the same:

· Confirmation Mails: A website must always send confirmation or welcome mails to customers after they have signed up. These might also contain recent updates, and other features that the user can benefit from. Accordingly, this can help start a chain of weekly, fortnightly or monthly mails to remind the consumer of his existence on the portal and ensuring brand recall value.

· Privacy Policy: Promotional e-mails must always carry and convey their privacy policy properly to the end user. Since internet crimes are on a rise, more and more users globally are increasingly becoming skeptical of revealing any kind of personal information on the internet. Hence, in order to ensure sales/leads/registrations, it is important to win the trust of the consumer.

· Relevance: An analysis of past e-mail opens, click-through, and sales or registrations generated through different promotional e-mails is extremely important in ensuring that you send the right mails to the right audience, otherwise there is a high chance of mails being sent in the spam folder, or even worse, unsubscriptions.

· Timing: E-mails must always be sent at a time when they are convenient to be opened by the audience they are intended for. Further, in case of international mail marketing campaigns, the time gap between countries must always be considered before sending mass mails to prospective clients, since there might be a high possibility that by the time the user opens his inbox, he already has many other promotional, or even work related and personal mails, and your mail gets ignored in the process.