What is Email Marketing?

The concept as the name suggests is utilising the power of email to market to people. This can take the form of:

• A relationship building message to inform, educate, and add value
• A direct response message, asking the reader to take a specific action
• Advertising in other newsletters or info sent via email

Relationship Building

Relationship building emails often take the form of a newsletter, perhaps including:

• Tips about using your product or service
• Success stories of other customers
• Info to help your customers in their own jobs or lives

The aim is to add value, build trust, and make you, in the eye of the reader, the subject matter expert.

Remember people buy from those the know and trust, and email newsletters are an excellent way to build this trust and your credibility.

Direct Response

Direct response emails have their roots in direct mail, where a sales letter promotes a product or service and has a particular action it wants the reader to take. This action may be to:

• Buy the product or service being promoted
• Request a demo, or
• Redeem a coupon

The great thing about direct response emails is that they lend themselves very well to testing, measuring, and tweaking. For instance:

1. Send out 500 emails to existing customers
2. Measure how many people open the email
3. Measure how many click through to a specific page on your web site
4. Measure how many take the requested action when they get there

Then tweak and repeat ...

And compared to other forms of direct response marketing, it is a fast way to test on a small scale before rolling out a bigger campaign.

Advertising

Placing adverts in other peoples' newsletters is a great way to extend your reach to prospects you probably would not have been able to reach normally.

The readers of the newsletter trust its source, so your ad is much more likely to be read.

A recommendation from the author of the newsletter is ideal, as it acts as a testimonial, a third party referral, and has much more credibility than just you saying it in the Ad.

Before you start your email marketing campaign

Here's what you need to know before you start your email marketing campaign:

• You cannot just email anyone, you have to have their permission, otherwise you are spamming them
• You need an effective way to measure delivery, open rates, click through rates, etc
• Your content must use the appropriate language, fail to get this right and you'll do more harm than good. (In other words it'll cost you money, and more importantly cost you your reputation.)

Getting Started

As exciting and daunting as email marketing may sound, once you get it working, you'll wonder how you survived without it.

At Web Gurus we have several options to help you with email marketing, be it small numbers or massive quantities, we can even tie them in with fax outs and postal mail outs.

A great place to start is with a sign up form on your web site. When people fill in their details you let them know you'll be sending them regular emails. And we automate this whole process. They sign up and out goes a welcome message, then on set days out goes email 1, then number 2, and 3, etc.

These emails work best when they are a combination of relationship building emails followed by a direct response email, more relationship building ones, then another direct response one, etc.

To find out more about how email marketing is what you're looking for, fill in the form alongside or phone us on 64 (9) 299 6618 now.