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.