Email marketing is the bulk sending of emails to various recipients. Sometimes email marketing is referred to as email broadcasting, but broadcasting implies that you are blindly sending emails to individuals and businesses. Email marketing is much more targeted than that. You can select the people that you want to email and send your promotion to them; this is called direct mailing. Direct mailing is when you send messages just to your customers through a single communication channel.
Email marketing can help to boost sales in your business by leveraging your existing contacts to generate more revenue. You can limit and mitigate the effects of churn by enhancing existing relationships with suppliers and clients. By enabling your customers to be aware of your current offers you develop the affiliation you have with them and increase customer loyalty.
Email marketing can also be used to append advertisements to emails sent by other organisations. This variation of email marketing can broaden your marketing net to get new customers. These advertisements you place in these emails should be targeted to the desired audience.
Email marketing has the following benefits over snail (traditional) mail:
- Having mailing lists that are large and the cost of distributing to the whole list is very low
- You can broaden your net and email more customers because of this low cost
- Email marketing has the benefit of return on investment (ROI) tracking, so you can see how well the marketing campaign is going.
- Also ROI is quite high in comparison to other marketing media.
- Time to distribute an email is very quick, normally only a few seconds or minutes in comparison to much longer times for surface mail, which can take weeks for international mail.
- You can track who open, click and visit your email marketing campaigns which means that you can send emails just to customers that are interested in your email marketing by segmenting the email contacts list.
- Half of the world’s internet users check their email daily.
- Automatic process of targeting potential buyers; this is done by an automated processes of indentifying customer behaviours that result in a purchase.
- The tracking of email interactions means that the email marketing campaign can be tweaked to optimise for certain interactions and behaviours.
- Email marketing does not use paper so it is greener per mail, but due to the scale of email marketing the greenness of it is questionable.