When a specifically targetted customer recieves
a proposition, they are much more likely to respond positively...
Email marketing is sending emails
to customers, newsletter subscribers, members, users; in fact anyone who has
agreed that they are happy to revieve marketing emails.
Businesses will usually have a "sign up to our
newsletter" tick box when someone registers on their website. Once sign-up
is completed, the user's email address will be recorded in a list of
subscribers.
The business will then regularly email the list of users
with promotional offers, newsletters, etc. It is also common that automated
emails are sent when for example; someone makes a purchase on an ecommerce
site, and the site then sends them an email to thank them for their custom, and
invite them to take advantage of a special offer, or other promotion.
This is email marketing in it's purest form - getting
sales as a result of sending an email. The profit on the sale can be very
large, and the cost of the email can be less than 0.1 pence. Hence why an ROI
of well over £50 is possible from every £1 spent on email marketing.
mi provides businesses with powerful easy-to-use email
marketing software which can be "plugged in" to any website;
automating emails, reducing man hours, and increasing sales.
Email marketing is the modern
incarnation of a traditional mail merge. Of course a traditional "snali
mail shot" is costly, wasteful, resource-hungry, time consuming and
comparatively ineffective.
It is costly when compared to email marketing as the cost
per recipent is generally between £1 and £3 when the factors of postage, paper,
envelopes, and undelivered mail are considered.
It is also incredibly wasteful. When someone moves house,
their address changes. However an email address can travel the world, and is
much less likely to change. The medium its self doesn't involve ink, paper, or
fuel which are all consumed in a traditional mailshot.
Because people move house, there is much more scope for
address information to be incorrect or out of date. The time taken to deliver
the message can easily take a week, makling the message less relevant than when
it was concieved, and due to the massive cost of printing and sending a
mailshot, the return on investment is much lower. In fact email marketing
offers around 40 times the ROI of traditional mailshots.
This can also be attributed to the fact that it's easy to
respond to email marketing: You recieve an email when you are already at your
computer. Clicking the email takes you to the site where you can part with your
money - compare this to recieveing a leaflet for a shop through the door, or
reading a magazine article with an advert beside it.
Recent evolution in computer software brought us the
"mail merge" - combining a letter with a list of names and addresses
to produce a mass mailing. Email marketing is the very latest incarnation of
this medium. While mail shots are still adopted by large firms such as banks
and insurers, email marketing is so cheap and effective it is being adopted by
businesses and organisations of all sizes.
However, the immediate benefits of email marketing aside;
there are other far more powerful advances with this technology. Real-time
tracking and reporting enables you to see exactly when a recipient opens your
email, clicks a link to your site, and makes a purchase (or unsubscribes!) - enabling
businesses to fine-tune their messages, their website naviagation, even colour
schemes to make them ever more effective as a marketing tool.
In addition to the old method of personally addressing a
letter with a mail merge, email marketing facilitates this; yet also adds
another feature which allows you to segment customers and market to them
accordingly. Say for example you were an online electronics retailer. If you
group all the customers who recently purchased an LCD TV together, and then sent
them all an email offering; an extended warranty, a discounted blu-ray player,
or wall mounting bracket, all of these offers will be relevant and targetted to
that customer group.
When a specifically targetted customer recieves a
proposition, they are much more likely to respond positively; hence email
marketing adds a new dimension to the modern-day marketing world, with a
low-cost and highly effective marketing platform.
Montpellier Interactive Ltd, founded in
2005 by digital specialist Alex Clough, has cornered the market in providing an email marketing
company for a variety of businesses across all industry sectors.
