When an email is used for sending a commercial message to a group of people, then this procedure is known as email marketing. But if you look at a broader aspect, then an email which is sent to a consumer or a potential customer also comes under email marketing.

The purpose of email marketing is to build brand awareness through the transmission of advertisements, and to solicit sales and to get donations for business recommendations. It can be done by sending an email to existing customer base or by selling lists respectively. Moreover, the current customers can be persuaded for the purchase of certain products or services through email marketing.

Forms of Email Marketing

1. Direct Email:

This type of email marketing involves sending an email intended for communication through promotional message. For instance, making an announcement for a catalog of products or providing information about a special offer. In this regard, different companies gather lists of existing email addresses of the customers.

When the email addresses are known, direct promotional messages are sent to the people. Sometimes, the email addresses can be rented from the service companies.

2. Transactional Email:

This kind of email marketing makes use of those messages which are produced through customer’s reaction to the company. In other words, the communication is done after the recipient agrees to receive email from the company. In this regard, the messages may be in the form of dropped password reset emails, order confirmation emails, basket messages, reorder emails, in addition to purchase or order confirmation emails.

The purpose of a transactional email is to provide information in response to the action that had caused it.The firms or companies may also keep customers engaged and build an email relationship with the subscribers or customers for longer time period.

Effect of Email Marketing

1. Email marketing can be used to track return on investment.It is one of the most effective means for professional internet marketing and comes second to search marketing.

2. Email marketing is estimated to be cheaper and a quick means when compared to traditional mail since the costs of designing, printing or packaging gets eliminated respectively.

3. Email marketing is an easy and quick tool for advertisers; they can reach thousands of people or subscribers within a few minutes as recipients can receive details on those subjects which interest them.

4. Email marketing may result in much higher response rate and higher average order value for an e-commerce business.

5. Email marketing provides flexibility irrespective of the types of businesses which are executed on a regular basis.

How to use Email Marketing Effectively

If you are a marketer conducting email marketing in a professional manner, deploying different strategies enables you to reach many consumers in short time. Following are the various ways in which email marketing can be done effectively.

1. Personalizing email with or without the receiver’s name:

For quite some time, most people were in a habit of beginning the email with ‘dear sir’ or ‘dear madam’. Now this sort of greeting in the beginning is not popular; but faking familiarity in a wrong way with the recipients is not good and it turns away the potential customer.

What you can do is send an email which acknowledges the subscriber’s individuality based on demographics or purchase history.

2. Professional use of Subject Lines:

When it comes to writing a subject line, then using only 60 to 70 characters is considered non-professional tactic these days. Such trend was noted by ‘Adestra’ which had tracked 900 million emails for its report, there was no increase in click-through rate or open rate when only 60 or 70 of the characters were found in the subject line.

Good content in subject lines having 70 or more characters proved to be engaging and motivated a lot of readers and subscribers for clicking through the content.

3. Prime time to send email:

Though most quality emails are usually produced during business hours, yet they do not turn into a clickable response from the readers. The prime time for a marketer to send emails is during the night.

In the quarterly report published in the year 2012, it was observed by’ Experian Marketing Services’ that the prime time for sending emails was between 8 pm up till the time of 12 am. The company noticed a higher open rate, click-through rate, and sales.

It has been noted that Saturday and Sunday stayed ahead from other weekdays when it came to weekly performance respectively.The volume of emails sent over Saturday and Sunday is low, but the least number of revenues may become massive if no considerable click-through rate or sales are achieved in other days.

4. Free tools:

It is real that most people enjoy a free lunch, have a free computer or something else which is free. In a study conducted by ‘Bluewire Media’ on their email list of sixty-three hundred subscribers, the content which raised most clicks or open rates included templates and tools. This shows that most subscribers are fond of getting something free via email.

5. Email has an edge over Facebook and Twitter:

Though social media websites such as Twitter or Facebook have become very popular these days, still email or inbox has more effective influence. This research was noted by ‘SocialTwist’ which conducted a study over an eighteen months period and the results showed that an email had more effect on the recipients or potential customers when compared with Twitter and Facebook.

What ‘SocialTwist’ did was that it had monitored one hundred and nineteen different campaigns from famous companies and the brands. Out of three hundred thousand different referrals who became customers, 50.8 percent through email while only 26.8 percent through Twitter and only 22 percent through Facebook respectively.

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