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Growing your Business using Email Marketing

The email marketing systems available today offer much greater power than just sending basic emails to your friends and wo rk colleagues.

Whilst basic email will continue to provide the backbone of people to people contact services - in addition alongside these - can be run a whole range of managed email services that can be used to send out and control a wide range of business information to customers, suppliers, employees and other interested parties.

Uses of Email Marketing

There are numerous uses for Email Marketing. The following are just some illustrative examples:

* Promotion of new product offerings
* Brochure registration and distribution service
* Sending out service updates and changes
* Automated distribution of periodic training courses
* Distribution of Newsletters

One of the main benefits of using Email Marketing is that it provides the ability to make contact with many new target customers in a more cost-effective, and less intrusive way, than using traditional methods such as sales rep visits and telephone calls.

It can also be very effective in helping to retain and develop existing customer relationships through the use of newsletters and other regular mailshots.

But it is most effective when integrated with your overall business marketing strategy, and not used as an isolated contact tool.

Current Regulations

The sending of all electronic marketing communications in the UK is subject to “The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003” – which covers telephone, email, fax and text communications.

In general this should not be a bar to business to business marketing communications, but it is recommended that a permission-based approach is the right one to take.

These regulations apply to you, even if you use third-party suppliers to provide email data and services on your behalf. For further information visit the Information Commissioners site at www.ico.gov.uk

Email Tools

There are a wide range of tools that can be used to enrich your Email Marketing Campaigns and help to generate interest, including :

* Video and Podcasts for sending multimedia messages.
* Autoresponders can be used to automatically send one or more emails to a pre-determined list of recipients over several days or weeks
* Surveys enable you to obtain feedback, viewpoints, and reactions to your products and services.
* Management Tools enable you to track the recipients who opened your emails and even particular links they clicked onto.

Preparing your Campaign

For those new to email marketing, it is worth running a trial campaign to assess the effectiveness of this channel for your business.

Here are some tips to help in preparing your campaign :

* Plan a campaign running from around one week to a month with up to 3 to 4 emails
* Choose target customers who you feel will be interested in your offer
* Ensure you have permission to email the selected customer group
* Write your email content around one clear offer or message
* Include one or two links that you can use for tracking
* Personalise each email to the named recipient
* Include an opt-out option in every email sent out

Once your campaign is underway be ready to fine tune your message based on feedback / response, and use other contact methods such as telephone contact to gain additional feedback from selected recipients.

To find out more about Email Marketing you can register via this link for our :

FREE Email Marketing eCourse