27 Dec E-mail Marketing: Marketing Made Easy
Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel, a form of direct marketing as well as digital marketing, that uses emails to promote your business’s products or services. It can help make your customers aware of your latest items or offers by integrating it into your marketing automation efforts. It can also play a pivotal role in your marketing strategy with lead generation, brand awareness, building relationships and keeping customers engaged between purchases through different types of marketing emails.
Anytime a company sends out an email, aside from order confirmations and direct responses to customer questions, it could be considered a form of email marketing. Email marketing is one segment of internet marketing, which encompasses online marketing via websites, social media, blogs, and more.
The very first email was sent in 1971 by a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson. The message he sent was just a string of numbers and letters, but it was the beginning of a new era of communication. Tomlinson was also the person who introduced the usage of the “@” symbol in email addresses.
In 1978, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corp named Gary Thuerk used this new method of direct communication to send out the first commercial email to let people know about a new product. His email list only had 400 addresses, but the emails he sent resulted in about $13 million in sales. By the ‘90s, the internet had become commercially available to the masses. The way people communicated with one another began to change dramatically, and marketers discovered that email could be an effective way to advertise.
Email marketing allows you to target particular groups of customers or even specific individuals. Offering individual customers special birthday deals on merchandise or services is one way to do this. A restaurant might send an email to customers on their birthdays offering 50% off an entree. This kind of personalization helps a business develop and maintain a relationship with a customer—and that can lead to increased sales and customer loyalty.
Advantages of Email Marketing:
- Creating personalized content.
- Collecting feedback and surveys.
- Improving sales.
- Communicating with your audience.
- Generating traffic to your site.
- Sending timely campaigns.
- Increasing leads.
- Reaching the right people at the right time.
- Producing cost-effective campaigns.
- Providing more value to your audience.
- Having a forum for self-promotion.
- Owning your media and contact lists.
Here are some top marketers and their take on e-mail marketing.
“Out of all the channels I tested as a marketer, email continually outperforms most of them. Not only does it have a high conversion rate, but as you build up your list, you can continually monetize it by pitching multiple products. Just look at ecommerce sites like Amazon: One way they get you to continually buy more products from them is by emailing you offers on a regular basis.”
– Neil Patel – Cofounder of KISSmetrics & Crazy Egg & writer of the Quicksprout blog
“If you rely on Facebook or Twitter, you are at the mercy of them allowing you to talk to your customers. When you email it gets in your customers inboxes. Then it’s up to you to make sure you are sending things your customers want to receive. Email is the most scalable way to make sales with new customers and build deeper relationship with deeper customers. AppSumo.com is a 7 figure business and 90%+ of our revenue comes from emails.”
– Noah Kagan – Founder of SumoMe
“Email marketing is an essential tool in every smart marketer’s tool belt. Nothing else is as good at reaching your customers where they are, and nothing else is as effective at building personal relationships with customers. If you want your business to succeed, start building your email list on Day 1.”
– Dan Oshinsky – Director of Newsletters at Buzzfeed
At its best, email marketing allows businesses to keep their customers informed and tailor their marketing messages to their audience. At its worst, this kind of marketing can drive customers away with persistently annoying spam emails. Thus it all comes down to how you use it to your advantage.