Email Marketing

Email Marketing

Email Marketing, eNewsletters

Why use email marketing?

It is often said that a company's clients are its greatest assets. The ability to communicate effectively with customers is vital, and gCast now makes that task simple and cost effective with its web based interface that can be managed by even those with limited computer skills. There's no need to invest in expensive software, receive special training, or have extensive IT experience.

Quite simply, email is proving to be the most prevalent emerging advertising and marketing medium.

The benefits of email are that it is instantaneous, cost-effective, and durable. Your message reaches the desired recipient instantly, and can remain in their inbox, acting as an ongoing advertisement for your products, and services. In addition, response rates for email marketing are substantially higher than traditional marketing techniques while the costs are much lower.

As a result, email marketing is experiencing dramatic growth as practically every sales and marketing effort is beginning to take advantage of this powerful technique that helps to increase revenues and reduce sales costs. Here is some data to consider:

Jupiter Research reports that e-mail spending will continue to surge from $2.7 billion in 2004 to $6.1 billion in 2008. Quris Research reports that loyal e-mail subscribers -- those "who would go out of their way to patronize a company whose permission e-mail programs they like" -- make more purchases and spend more online than those customers who do not feel the same loyalty.

With statistics like those it is obvious that email marketing should be a significant part of your online and offline marketing strategies.

Email marketing is simply one of the most efficient forms of communication you can utilise with your prospective and existing customers.

What is Email Marketing?

In simple terms Email Marketing is the equivalent of taking your website and sending it to your potential & exiting customers email address. They then have your company’s information sitting in their inbox available every time they check their email. To do this you use an email marketing studio, we use gCast, created by the leading email marketing software provider in Australia.

So why is that better than just emailing them a link to your website? First of all it will appear in their email inbox as if it was your website as it can be written in HTML just like your website. More importantly though you can send them a special version customised to suit them. You can collect detailed data about your customers such as age, sex & postcode and then email different demographics an attractive branded email tailored to sell specifically to them.

It gets even better. You can track through your gCast studio when every single person opens their email (it will even tell you if there email address in no longer active). What you will really love is that it will tell you which links in the email they click. So if you advertise two red hot specials in your email with two “click here” links that take you back to your website, you will be able know which link every single person clicked on. How good is that for finding out what product your customers are really interested in. As we have all come to learn ‘testing is king’ in internet marketing.

There is many more advanced features you can do such as send your customers questionnaires where the answers go into your gCast database. You can then send them a special email automatically based upon their answers. For example based on one simple email with a few questions you could craft a second tailored email to go to only people aged under 45 living in Brisbane greater CBD who follow the World Cup.

We have not even touched on Sequential Auto responders yet. They are automatic emails that can be sent out over specific time period in a sequential order. Why would you do this? Well, to sell many products and services effectively requires several client interactions. You may need to create sense of familiarity with your potential customers or it may be that they have to be exposed to a lot of information over a period of time before they can appreciate the benefits of your offering. That could be quite a time consuming process to do in person. With Sequential Auto responders you could have the first five sales calls happen automatically at a time convenient to the client – the beauty of email is they can read it when they are good and ready.

Just quickly, more and more people are using their email folders (Microsoft Outlook) as their business knowledge base. Every time they need something they try and remember if they have it in an email. The latest desktop search plug-ins from Google & Microsoft actually allow people to search their thousands of email as if it was the web. If you have sent your potential customers an email packed with your offerings they will be able to find it in one simple search.