Harness the Power of Email Marketing

Do you have an email marketing or newsletter strategy?
If you don’t, you’re seriously missing an opportunity to make more money.

Email marketing, or the science of sending out newsletters to your customers or audience, is one of the oldest online marketing tactics and remains to this day, the most rewarding initiative you can implement for your business or organisation.

Newsletter emails sent by businesses are reported to have returned on average $43.62 (USD) per dollar invested in 2009, according to the Direct Marketing Association‘s “Power of Direct Economic Impact” report.

In comparison, the next most financially rewarding initiative would be Search Engine Advertising (Google Adwords keyword advertising for example), which returned $21.85 (USD) for every dollar invested in 2009, according to another study by Global Insight.

This means that if you have to put any effort into marketing your products or services online, you should first focus on developing a newsletter strategy and then on buying keywords in Search Engines.

The benefits of Email Marketing

1. Customers who subscribe to your newsletter give you permission to send them emails. This is an important demonstration of trust or loyalty to your brand. This also means that if you send them information, they’re likely to open that email and read it.

2. It is fairly easy to setup a newsletter registration form on your website. Once you’ve set it up, it will start collecting email addresses over time and will grow your customer database. You will always have visitors to your website who will be interested in signing up for your newsletter, even more so if their friends tell them that they receive interesting information.

3. Using an email marketing service is very affordable. Depending on the size of your subscriber list or the volume of emails you want to send out per month, prices can start at $15 to 20 a month. Some suppliers offer this service for free up to a certain usage. For example, MailChimp.com enables you to send up to 12,000 newsletters per month to a list of up to 2,000 subscribers for free. ConstantContact.com (one of the most popular newsletter platforms out there) enables you to send unlimited emails to a customer database of 500 subscribers for only USD $15 a month.

4. You will see direct impact on sales, whether online or in store, when you send out coupons or promotional deals to your subscribers. This is where you’ll get the highest return on investment.

5. If you have a fairly important list of subscribers, you could generate advertising revenue by finding interested advertisers who would want to sponsor or advertise in your newsletter for a certain period of time.

6. You will drive more traffic to your website by sending out newsletters with hooks back to your website. It is very common to see spikes of traffic on websites after sending out newsletters.

The challenges of Email Marketing

1. To keep your subscribers interested, you have to send them relevant information. People subscribe to many newsletters and they will unsubscribe in a heart beat if they don’t see any value in your emails. This requires being relevant and creative in the content you send them (unless it’s only deals and coupons).

2. The most effective way to grow your subscriber list is to make sure you ask for your customers’ email addresses whenever you can (front desk, over the phone,  in contests, etc.) in order to sign them up . This often requires thoroughness and staff training.

3. To keep your subscribers engaged, you need to send newsletters on a regular basis. This depends on the nature of your business of course, but sending out regular emails will maximize return traffic to your wewbsite or in store and potential sales.

4. You have to keep an eye on your analytics in order to improve the performance of your newsletter. Most online newsletter solutions offer statistic dashboards that tell you how many people opened your email and clicked through to a link in it. They also show you how many emails “bounced” (wrong email address, spam filters, etc.).

If you don’t track performance you won’t know how well you’re doing and if your newsletters have a positive effect. For example a high open rate and low click through rate means that you’re missing out on driving traffic to your website.

Is email marketing only newsletters?

Email marketing is mostly newsletters but another way of doing email marketing is related to email alerts or notifications.

For example, when you create an account on an eCommerce website to order a product, you usually receive a notification email confirming your registration. You then receive another one when you place an order. Such emails offer another opportunity to promote your products and services. You could for example promote the benefits of also subscribing to your newsletter with a short text in that notification email.

5 best practices for successful newsletters

1. Write an engaging and actionable subject title. For example: Learn how to earn 5,000 reward points; Discover why you’ll love our great Spring deals; Participate to win a free trip to Las Vegas, etc.

2. Unless you offer online printable coupons, don’t write all your content in the newsletter. Rather, write a teaser with a link back to your website and of course insert the link in the content. This way you will benefit from return traffic to your website.

3. Make sure that the tool you use to publish your newsletter enables your subscribers to read an online version of your newsletter in case it gets messed up in their mailbox.

4. If you have a lot of content for your newsletter, segment your content and send several newsletters over a certain period of time rather than one very long newsletter once.  Readers’ attention span is shorter when reading newsletter emails. You could also put all the content on your website and link to it from your newsletter where you’d just write a teaser text.

5. Plan for publishing regularly. Plan to have at least a couple emails ready ahead of time that are to be sent in the future. Most tools now enable you to schedule when your newsletter will be sent out so that you can set it and forget about it.

The most efficient newsletter marketers are the ones who have a predefined editorial strategy where they know the periodicity of their newsletter and plan ahead of time for writing engaging and actionable content for each email.