Learning about business e-mail marketing

I spent a lot of time at the end of 2012 reading many interesting and useful books, trying to improve my marketing and communication knowledge. Now, I will need to apply many of the lessons in practice and when the time will allow me, I will try to share more experiences on this blog.

For a long time, I thought e-mail marketing is quite outfashioned, especially when you have so many fast and interesting social media tools. However, after reading Jacqueline Biggs' book, Business e-mail marketing, I changed my opinion. As in many other situations, it is important to evaluate the potential of your market and check what are the main requirements and demands, but in most cases, this marketing tool is very much appreciated and used. For instance, over 60% of the UK businesses and customers questioned answered that they are responsive at this way of marketing.

What are the objectives that you can reach through it, according to Biggs? You can drive loyalty and customer satisfaction, creating brand awareness, driving sales and improving customer retention. Practically, everything a business will need in terms of achievement. The e-mail marketing can be used either by a service provider or by a specialized department if the company. In both cases, it is important to have a good coordination of the messages and a permanent evaluation of the ways in which the objectives were implemented. In fact, the regular evaluation - weekly, monthly - is  very important for being able to adapt your strategy to the needs of the market. Of course that in time of crisis, there are different parameters to be considered, but the book focus on the regular e-mail marketing. 

There are a couple of interesting tips that should be considered when you want to avoid to be considered a spammer. According to my own experience in e-mail and online marketing, there are many situations when your mail risk to reach the Spam section, without a specific reason. Hence, the lack of response from the people that you eventually want to network or do business with. Some of the suggestions presented by Biggs are: avoid capitalization, don't create an e-mail that is one large image file, avoid to use in your sentences words such as 'free', 'no risk' or 'low risk'.

The strategy for any case of e-mail marketing activity should have: clear objectives, an established content strategy, consider a segmentation of the data base, integrate the e-mail marketing with other marketing strategies and again, regularly test and evaluate the results. 

The segmentation of the data base should be done up to the location, area of activity, size of the business, demographics, buying behavior, the type of product or service. 

A creative suggestion that I would love to use one day is to permanently keep your customers interested. For example, after someone purchased one of your products, within one week - the books mention 3 days - send an automated e-mail that will recommend an accessory or a discount for an incoming production. This tip works extremely well to charitable causes, educational products, book marketing and many other products. In my opinion, if you want to keep your customers involved you should to invest considerably in offering them permanently interesting information. 

Writing original content is very important, and many companies are using experienced copywriters for valuable content creation. The texts should be short, gramatically correct, written in consideration of the grammar rules. The majority of people do not have time and thus, you rather include a smart Call-To-Action from the first lines: create a sense of urgency, while offering something to the reader/customer. 

Time for some more practice now!