Creating a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
E-Commerce Businesses Can Use Email Marketing to Promote and Reward
Aug 27, 2009
Email marketing is one of the best ways to get the word out about any business, as well as promoting special offers, rewarding loyal customers, and encouraging new visitors to consider buying. But although it's a tool in widespread use, it takes class, good web etiquette, and smart writing to ensure that business email marketing offers solutions rather than seeming like part of the email problem.
The Best Email Marketing Offers Solutions
Smart e-commerce people know that competition is stiff in the online business world – and that it's best to use every tool to advantage. Email marketing is one of a handful of tools that a serious online business should consider in the pursuit of profitability on the internet. That said, there are many ways to use email marketing, some of them more beneficial than others.
Whether the email campaign is directed at individual customers or is business to business email marketing, the secret to success is to offer solutions to real problems that the target customers have. That means knowing the kinds of challenges they're facing in their business, home, or personal life, and doing a good job of presenting ways that the products or services offered will solve them.
The following examples are some of the ways that any business can use email marketing to increase sales, improve relationships with loyal customers, and build a reputation.
Business to Business Email Marketing
Business to business email marketing is ideal for any e-commerce business that offers services to may be useful to other businesses as well as to individual consumers. Anything from an online coffee wholesaler to a computer repair service might choose to offer a premium package to small businesses or local companies. This means crafting a special email marketing campaign directed at other businesses.
Targeted Email Marketing
One of the secrets of successful email advertising – just as in any facet of marketing – is to know the consumer. An ad campaign that pinpoints the ideal customer's problems and offers a targeted solution will appeal to the people who are likeliest to buy the product. This makes targeted email marketing the only way to conduct an effective email campaign.
One of the best examples of a low-cost, targeted email ad program is the "Tell a Friend" button that appears almost ubiquitously across the internet. It's everywhere – on web articles, on e-commerce business pages, on personal blogs. The "Tell a Friend" button is targeted email marketing at its best. It allows readers and customers to share a product, service, or piece of expertise with someone they know will be interested – the perfect target market.
Affiliate Online Marketing
Affiliate marketing invites customers to advertise an internet business, and earn a commission off the revenues generated by their referrals. This makes affiliate online marketing a cheap and often very lucrative way to use email marketing to best advantage. All it takes is a loyal fan base willing to share the product or services with their friends.
Email Marketing Tracking
Whatever the internet business or the type of email marketing that is being used, it's important to not only create great marketing emails but to use those emails intelligently to track which approaches work… and which don't.
It's possible to create a different landing page for each email campaign, and use the sales and conversion rates from each landing page (or discount code, or printed coupon) to determine which email marketing approaches work, and eliminate those that don't.
The internet is still young enough that a lot of the process is trial and error. But using smart approaches and smart tools to determine their success will put an email marketing campaign ahead of the game.
Reference
Muendel, Jeff, "The Landing Page as a Multipurpose Tool," PracticalECommerce.com, 6 July 2009.
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