Understanding Email Marketing
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Do you understand email marketing? If you do not, you do not have to worry just yet. This is because the concept of email marketing is relatively new and many business owners have not started to take advantage of this wonderful marketing tool yet.
However, there are some savvy business owners who are already employing email marketing techniques to create additional business for themselves and to gain an advantage over the competition. While not having a great deal of knowledge about email marketing is not an immediate threat to your business, you should start learning about this concept to ensure it does not become a problem for you later as more and more business owners in your niche begin to take advantage of the concept of email marketing.
This article will provide information on email marketing which should be useful to business owners who do not have experience with the subject matter.
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Business owners should first understand the options available to them in terms of email marketing. The most common options include sending out mass emails with promotional materials, publishing and distributing e-newsletters and offering correspondence courses via email. The advantage to all of these marketing strategies is the ability to reach a worldwide audience.
Unlike traditional methods of marketing such as television and radio ads or print media ads which only reach an audience in a limited area anyone with access to the Internet can benefit from your email marketing techniques.
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Mass emails are the most popular form of email marketing. This includes emails which are sent to hundreds, thousands or even millions of recipients at once. The problem with this type of marketing is the potential for having your emails viewed as spam. This is likely to occur if you send your emails to recipients who have no interest in your products or services and have not expressed interest in receiving emails from you.
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E-newsletters are also becoming increasingly popular as a form of email marketing. E-newsletters can be a simple or as complex as you prefer and may include text, graphics, advertisements, links or any combination of these elements. One of the first decisions you will have to make is whether you wish to make your e-newsletter strictly text or include graphics in the e-newsletter.
If you are on a tight budget, it may be worthwhile to only include text to avoid the need to hire a graphic artist. You may be able to incorporate graphics yourself but they won’t look nearly as professional as the graphics provided by a professional. Likewise you can certainly write your own copy for your e-newsletter but you will likely create a much better impression if you hire a qualified professional writer to create the content for you instead.
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Hiring a professional graphic artist and a professional writer may seem like an extraneous expense but it is actually quite important. Your e-newsletter may be the first impression many potential customers get of you and your work so it is important to make sure everything is of the highest quality.
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Correspondence courses offered via email is the final email marketing strategy we will discuss. These courses may be either offered for a fee and turn into a source of income themselves or they may be made available for free.
The theory behind offering these courses for free is they often contain subtle advertising urging visitors to invest in the products and services offered by your business. Whether you charge for your email correspondences courses or offer them for free, care should be taken to ensure the information contained in these courses is completely accurate.
This is critical because potential customers who receive these email courses will be judging your business based on the quality and accuracy of these email courses. If they are filled with errors the potential customer may doubt the quality of your work and seek out the products and services offered by others including your direct competitors.
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Effective Email Marketing
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Email marketing is quickly becoming one of the most popular forms of Internet advertising. This is because there are many distinct advantages to the concept of email marketing.
However, email marketing does have some disadvantages as well. In this article we will examine the advantages and disadvantages of email marketing and will also provide some insight into how to plan and execute an effective email marketing campaign.
Email marketing certainly has a set of unique advantages over other types of marketing both online and offline. Perhaps one of the most significant advantages to email marketing is the ability to reach a worldwide audience with minimal effort.
It is certainly possible to reach a worldwide audience with other types of advertising but traditional types of advertising such as television, radio and the print media are not nearly as effective for reaching potential customers around the world all at once.
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Another major advantage to email marketing is it is extremely affordable. This is significant because there are many other types of marketing, including Internet marketing, which are significantly more expensive than email marketing.
The costs associated with email marketing are minimal. Ideally you will already have a list of email recipients who are interested in your products and services so there is no cost associated with obtaining a list of email addresses. Additionally the cost to send out emails is minimal and can be considered part of your regular operating costs. All of these factors already make email marketing extremely cost effective.
However, there is some cost involved in email marketing. Primarily this is the costs associated with writing the advertisements and creating any graphics which will accompany the email advertisements. This will require hiring a writer to write the copy for the advertisement and a designer to create and implements the graphics.
The cost of these services will vary pretty widely but in general you will pay more for writers and designers with more experience. This is because these writers and designers are expected to be able to produce a higher quality of work than those with less experience could produce.
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The most obvious disadvantage to email marketing is the possibility of having your email marketing viewed as spam. This is a very important problem because it could prove to be quite costly in terms of the profit margin for your business. Each day Internet users are bombarded with unsolicited emails serving as advertisements.
This problem has reached epic proportions and the abundance of spam infiltrating the email boxes of innocent Internet users has to be cautious and suspicious about any email they receive which is unsolicited and appears to be promoting a particular product or service.
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Emails which contain subject lines or content which appear to be similar to spam may be automatically transferred to a spam email folder by the email system. Emails which are not automatically deleted may be deleted without being opened simply because the recipient does not recognize the sender of the email.
Both of these problems can result in essentially wasted time for the business owner because the recipients are not even viewing the emails advertising the products and services offered by the business. Additionally, they may result in complaints being lodged against the company for being a purveyor of spam.
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Now that you understand the advantages and disadvantages of email marketing, you might wonder how you can maximize the advantages to use email marketing to your advantage. The most important factor to consider is your email distribution list.
This should consist of former customers who have expressed a desire to receive emails with information and advertisements as well as potential customers who have also expressed interest in more information.
The content of the emails should also be carefully considered. They should certainly highlight the products and services you offer but should do so without appearing to be a hard sales pitch.
A writer with experience in writing this type of copy should be able to assist you in providing insightful and accurate copy which also entices the reader to find out more about your products and services. Finally your emails should provide the readers with a call to action. This should be a statement urging the reader to take a specific action such as making a purchase or researching a product.