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Businesses need to make email marketing relevant and engaging

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

August 26, 2011 | 4 min read

Email marketing has come under fire over recent years. This is mainly due to some receivers seeing many forms of email marketing such as newsletters or product news and regarding them all as spam.

Once a company understands the difference they will be able to produce quality email marketing techniques that can effectively improve the profitability of their business and also develop a strong level of interaction that they have with their collection of current customers and any potential future customers.

Spam email, or more commonly known as junk email, is unsolicited email sent to a customer’s inbox. It is highly unwise to use spam email as a form of direct marketing as spam involves sending identical bulk emails to every single recipient. From one perspective a reader will not pay much attention to a generic spam email as the content will not be personal to that particular reader and another point is that many email providers can detect when bulk spam emails have been sent so they would end up in a reader’s junk box filter anyway and may never be read.

The best approach is to avoid sending just one generic email to all of your customers that could be mistaken as spam email is to set up numerous email lists, with each list dedicated to various ‘groups’ of customers that your business has or plans to attract. You can narrow your different lists with demographic data factors such as customer age, gender, lifestyle and even their shopping habits.

Efficient customer data profiling and being able to group people into specific email lists means that rather than contacting large audiences you will be able to actually contact audiences that are relevant to your products and services. This is important from a costs perspective as there is no point spending money on contacting as many people as possible, as these people may not even be interested in your business. Therefore the best approach is to actually spend the money in investigating what kind of groups of people there are and which ones would be interested in your services. This improves your chance of profitability as targeting the right person with the relevant communication will lead to a more successful email marketing campaign and ultimately more sales.

Once you have arranged your current customers and potential future customers into specific lists you can really start planning relevant email marketing campaigns that will target specific products or services to the correct customer groups. This involves creating engaging content in your email marketing campaigns so that the people you target will actually take the time to read through emails you send, be it latest product reviews or business newsletters highlighting your services.

Another key factor you can consider after targeting the relevant customers is the timing of your marketing campaigns, although this can be expensive to maintain, having the option to target customers at key times in the day or around key events that match your products and services you will have the ability to truly improve the sales of your products through the result of your successful email marketing campaign.

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