When Should You Use Email Marketing?

Email marketing can be an effective way of supporting your online campaigns and funnelling more traffic through to your site. However, it can also lead to problems relating to privacy and may even scare off regular customers by bombarding them with uninteresting or spammy content.

Therefore the key to successful email marketing is to deliver effective messages at a regularity that doesn’t block up the recipient’s inbox. This is a somewhat simplistic explanation though, as there is far more that needs to be considered in order to achieve optimal benefit.

First of all you need to find a decent distributor for your emails. A company or platform that will enable you to fire out your message on demand and without too much fuss. Dotmailer is a good example, but there are many others that you might consider.

Then there’s the design and focus of your emails. If you’re an ecommerce site, it would make sense to promote your latest deals, big sellers and upcoming promotions. This will give customers an incentive to return and you can even tailor the messages to target recommendations specific to individuals based on previous activity (much like Amazon and other large stores do).

For those offering services, you might simply want to keep existing customers up to date on developments within the business, new services being offered and any awards you might have collected. These don’t need to be excessively regular. Larger businesses may have enough content to send one out weekly, but in the most part monthly emails will normally give you enough exposure.

If you’re not currently using email marketing, then how do you know if it is going to be right for you? Well, it’s certainly true to say that not all online businesses will see a major benefit from it. There are expenses involved too, which can push it beyond the budgetary parameters of some, particularly smaller businesses.

However, if you’re in the ecommerce sector particularly and have an existing customer base, it could certainly help to improve loyalty and encourage future sales. Remember, an email can easily be forwarded on and shared amongst friends, so even if the recipient isn’t in the market for any products they may well know someone who is. Therefore sending regular emails can help this kind of viral marketing on your behalf.

And it is this that your email marketing or newsletter can provide. It is a way of syndicating your advertising efforts and delivering the message away from your website. If you get it right, the results can be fantastic, get it wrong and it could be a very expensive mistake.