4 Oft-Forgotten Benefits of an Effective E-mail Marketing Strategy

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Today’s post is by guest author Dan Chaney. The excitement about social media takes attention away from email marketing. Dan’s post is a good reminder of four important benefits of the channel.  There is no podcast of this post.

E-mail marketing has all but replaced the traditional form of marketing via the postal service and with good reason. Many believe this is simply due to the cost effectiveness of using the Internet for marketing. While this is a very good reason to pursue e-mail marketing, it is hardly the most attractive part of the endeavor. There are many other reasons to send marketing directly to the consumer’s inbox.

1. Promote Good Customer Service

With traditional mail the mass production of the marketing material affords the businessman little leeway when it comes to personalizing the message. Even in face-to-face retail sales, good customer service dictates the salesperson get to know the customer in order to understand their needs; even going so far as to learn the customer’s name so as to give them the feeling that the store is catering to them. Mail marketing is still reaching that same consumer who enjoys that kind of personalization and only with e-mail marketing may that kind of personalization be brought to the consumer.

2. Timeliness

Timeliness is another way e-mail marketing benefits today’s businesses. Time is money and the near-instant communication available through e-mail marketing means faster communication with the consumer and more timely sales. Money is the bottom line to any marketing strategy and when a business has the opportunity to receive sales at near-instant speed means more profit at the end of the quarter.

3. Make it Easy to Spread the Word

Word of mouth can be a very powerful marketing tool, but one over which businesses have little control. Due to the ease in which an e-mail message may be forwarded with a simple mouse click, the likelihood of a consumer forwarding the message to a friend increases. With traditional mail marketing, a flyer being passed onto a friend is highly unlikely.

4. Know Your Customer

Knowing the customer is one of the most important things a businessman can do to increase sales. With e-mail marketing, the possibilities are staggering with regarding to tracking information. A business can track how many people opened the email, clicked on a link, which link, and how many people unsubscribed. With this kind of information, a business can streamline their marketing strategy to reduce overhead and know exactly who is interested in their product and who is not. With tradition mail marketing, there is no way to know who threw marketing material in the garbage or if it even made it into the consumer’s box at all. Additionally, when a customer does respond to an e-mail marketing advertisement it is much easier to keep track of their information.

Even though the cost-effectiveness of an e-mail marketing strategy may be motivation enough to pursue such an endeavor, there are a plethora of other reasons why e-mail marketing is hands down the best way to get the word out about a business’ product or service. Tracking the customer’s response to an advertisement, assisting the spread of information, personalization of the marketing material, and the timeliness of transactions are all reasons that are often forgotten when contemplating the implementation of an e-mail marketing campaign.

Dan is a blogger and also a contributing writer for a site that reviews domains called Who Is Hosting This.

Thanks for those great reminders Dan and I look forward to you sharing  more of your ideas with us in the future.

Wishing you success.