What’s So Great About Email Marketing
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 4:13 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine
Notice, there’s no question mark in the title. That’s because, for me, there’s no question about it.
Everyone who has tried it knows all about the continual and continuing challenges entailed in email marketing. Getting a high percentage of delivery is still a high hurdle. Avoiding the spam filter is part of that. Then there’s the eternal dilemma: to target or shotgun.
Sure, it’s easy to go on all day about all the tough aspects of email marketing. But there are advantages that make it the perfect channel for certain personality types.
Face it, some people just aren’t website designers. If you look at many sites, you’ll see that the layout is poor. Navigation is non-existent. Finding products is tough for customers and buying them even tougher. All that isn’t necessarily a criticism of the designers; those things are very hard to do well and not everyone has the cash to pay to outsource.
None of those problems loom large in email marketing, though. With this direct form of contact — once you get into the Inbox and opened — you can easily present your product. No navigation involved; the reader just reads some text and clicks a link. No finding the product or descriptions; it’s all right there in front of him or her.
And, one of my favorite aspects:.it’s an active enterprise. Affiliate marketers make huge, and often ingenious, efforts to draw traffic to a site. With email, you go to the customer, you don’t have to get them to come to you. Of course, there’s still that little problem of getting the message to them and read. But, still, you’re reaching out, not waiting for them to come to you.
It can be frustrating to design the best website possible, buy PPC or acquire links, and then hope they show up. But with email marketing, you can stay busy for a long time building a list, writing copy, and delivering messages. There’s a direct ratio between your efforts and the reward that is sometimes missing in other channels.
Targeting
One of the first things to consider is targeting your audience.
However you acquired your list, not every message is for every recipient. Find out as much as you can about your potential reader and write for him or her. Even the same product can, and should, be sold differently depending on age, gender, hobby or interests, and a dozen other important variables.
The more you know, the better you can target.
Email marketing is not a complete strategy for most marketers. But as one leg of a powerful platform, it’s a dynamic way to reach out. Devote at least 25% of your efforts to this channel and you’re likely to reap more than 25% of your revenue this way.
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