Best Practices in Email Marketing

An email which has advertisement information and is sent to a prospective or an existing customer is a "Marketing Email". The concept of Email Marketing is very new and is being used a lot for promotion of products, services and offers. Emails have a powerful impact if they are personalized well with more relevant messages. Email marketing has become one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways of communication.

Email marketing is sometimes confused with SPAM. However, there are major differences between Spam mails and Marketing Emails. For Spam, the email addresses are mostly collected illegally and such mails do not always contain information the recipient is interested in, where as Marketing Emails are legitimate mails sent to prospective and existing customers informing them about promotions and offers.

Marketing Emails can be categorized into 3 types: Direct Marketing Email, Customer retention Email, and Advertisement inserts in other company's email.

Direct Marketing emails are mails with advertising or promotional messages which are sent to prospective or existing customers.

Retention email is a periodic informative email which may have promotional messages, but its main aim is to develop a long-term relationship with existing customers.

Advertisement inserts in other company's emails are emails placed in e- letters or newsletters sent out by secondary sources. Many organizations create e-letters to sell space to other vendors. Marketing through such emails falls in this category.

Email marketing, a very cost effective and easy way of reaching customers, has its share of demerits. Let us see what are the merits and demerits of this type of marketing campaign:

Merits:

• Cost effective way to reach a wide the range of receivers.
• The emails are the most inexpensive way of communication in today's world.
• Consumption of time is very low as compared to other forms of communication.
• The bounce backs, unsubscribe mails, read-receipts, click-throughs etc. help in measuring the responses.
• Emails can be tailored keeping in mind the target audiences and dividing them in subgroups. This helps the marketers to send information which is relevant to a particular group.

Demerits:

• Some organizations send bulk emails which are discarded by customers as spam.
• Legitimate commercial emails and spam emails can't be easily differentiated.
• People worldwide use spam filters which often filter the legitimate emails.
• Though email is relatively a newer concept and is more cost effective, the chances of the email ending in a target customer's junk folder is more than ninety percent.

If used well, email marketing provides the greatest reach of all the other marketing options. It is very cost effective and has been considered to be the world's least expensive and most effective marketing tool. That's precisely why many businesses have embraced it. Below are some of the tips to get the best out of Email marketing campaigns.

Readable on any platform

Recently conducted surveys tell us that 65% of customers check emails on their mobile phones, so the beautifully done images are not viewable by most people. So, even if there are images included in the email, text content should make enough sense even if the images can't be viewed. It's a good idea to send marketing emails as plain text and include a link to a HTML, web version of that message. This reduces the size and makes it readable on any platform.

Trustworthy preview

An e-mail's destiny is decided by its preview. Most of the recipients take the decision looking at the sender's email id and the subject line. The response to the emails becomes better if the name of the sender is familiar, visible and trustworthy. As we know, in most of the cases trusting the sender is the reason for opening an email. The subject line should summarize the email content and should look trustworthy. Flashy subject lines do not always impress!

Avoid Spam filters

The chance of an email ending in a target customer's junk folder is more than ninety percent. Very few care to even have a look at the emails which get sent directly to their Junk/Spam folders. Anti-spam filters can be easily avoided. Do not use subject lines that contain words or styles that are popular on spam messages.

Personalization

The open rates for the emails can be increased to a great extent by inserting a person's name into an email. Mail merge software can be used to send out mass emails that have the person's name or any other information which is personalized and relevant to the viewer. The mail should not look like a computer-generated spam; rather, it should have a specific offer which meets needs of the recipient.

Improving Email deliverability

Marketing emails are generally sent out in large quantities. For bulk emails, the sender should check the mail server provider settings. Mail server providers stop spam by restricting senders from sending too many emails in one go or in a short period of time. Hence, it is very important to have a clear idea of the norms set by the Mail server provider before sending bulk emails, else the mails can be blocked and the sender's mail account can be suspended. Email deliverability success also requires good content management. Avoid inserting images that are downloaded from the web, as these are blocked by most email software. Subject lines that contain words that are common on spam messages should be avoided.

Email marketing is one of the most effective, and the most cost-efficient way to communicate with your clients. An Email can be personalized with relevant messages, and the impact of such a mail is powerful. This is a great medium to improve existing relationships and build valuable new ones. E-mails can help every phase of marketing, from bringing in traffic, branding, and customer service, to marketing attractive offers. Email communications save a lot on time and there is no postage cost involved.