Why Email Marketing?

Email marketing is one of the most cost-efficient marketing tools out there. If used in the right manner it can send your sales right through the roof. Whether your company is a small home office business or a big firm, you are sure to profit from email marketing.

This form of marketing can usually turn uninterested onlookers into prospective customers, and prospective customers into lifetime patrons.

Email marketing, as the name suggests, is the use of electronic mail for marketing products and services. It usually refers to-

• Sending direct emails about your business, to attract new customers, or persuade current customers to try your products or services again.
• Sending promotional emails informing your customers about new products or services that have been launched, as well as special offers, discounts and contests.
• Sending newsletters or e-zines to help build your brand and promote customer loyalty. These are designed to develop a long term relationship with the reader. Other than the usual sales talk, these newsletters need to contain valuable content that instructs, entertains or benefits the reader.
• Placing advertisements for your business with web mail providers and newsletter services. This ensures that all emails sent by people using that web mail provider display your marketing message. It also guarantees that all users who subscribe to a particular newsletter can view your advertisement.

Here are seven reasons why you should go in for email marketing:

1. Great Reach: It is estimated that more than half of Internet users check or send email every day. This makes email marketing the perfect way to get your message across to a vast untapped market.
2. Connect With A Targeted Audience: Many people opt-in to receive email communications on subjects of specific interest to them, such as hiking, gardening or cars. Depending on your target market, you can choose to advertise only on relevant e-zines or newsletters. This ensures that your message reaches specific groups of, who have particularly requested for content on these topics.
3. Generate Instant Action: Promotions and offers sent through email may translate into immediate online sales, downloads, registrations and queries. What's more, people who need your product or service, right away, may also visit your offline store in the city.
4. Get Repeat Sales: Most businesses find it quite hard to get a first time customer to visit their store again. Email marketing contributes to brand building, which boosts trust and strengthens loyalty. Keeping in touch with a valued customer can generate a lifetime of goodwill and sales.
5. Gain Valuable Feedback: You can easily get honest feedback from your customers by asking them their opinion about your products, service and business, in your email. As email is a type of anonymous communication, you are more likely to get useful tips on bettering your business practices, than if you asked them yourself.
6. Cost Saving: Email marketing costs much less than other mass media advertising such as direct mail, printed newsletters, radio and television.
7. Simple To Track: User responses and sales can be smoothly tracked through click through ratios, bounce messages, web bugs and unsubscribe requests.

To capitalize on email marketing, you need to send out relevant, content rich emails at frequent intervals to persons who are interested in reading your message. If you are uncomfortable drafting corporate communications like writing newsletters, or just don't wish to do it, you can hire a content writing company to do the job for you. These companies have spent time researching what campaign techniques work and what does not, and can help create powerful content that will drive traffic to your website and enhance revenues.

By Denize Rodricks