Reaching Out To Your Email List

Email marketing has changed the way many companies do business. If you have built up a list of email addresses which is ripe for marketing purposes, the last thing you want to do is let this opportunity to grow your business slip through your fingers. The eternal question for a lot of email marketers is this: “How do I avoid losing customers through over-enthusiastic marketing while not losing out on custom because I was too cautious?”. Being measured is the absolute key here. It is important to get the approach just right if you want to have the best results.

Of course, all of this is easier said than done. How do you strike the right balance? It requires you to think about your reasons for sending an email to a mailing list. It requires an equal amount of thought to go to what you put into the email. You want people to read these messages, and knowing how you react to spam, you will be aware that that is no easy thing to ensure. Email marketing depends more than anything on being a skilled communicator.

It will probably come as no shock to you that people tend to skim read, and if they haven’t got to the meat of the message within the first few lines they are likely to either delete the email or return to their inbox to read something else. They are unlikely to come back to the email you sent them if they feel that it was unimportant. Therefore it is important in all email marketing to hit the topic right away. It should be mentioned in the subject line – if they delete your email without even opening it then it might as well never have been sent – and you should get on topic right away, which means in the first line.

If you have a particular gift for writing in an entertaining way, then there is no need to shy away from doing so. If you can offer customers a deal and make them laugh in the same email then there is every reason to do so, but retain an aspect of relevance the whole way through. Don’t give them three paragraphs of gags and finish the mail with “Oh, and by the way, printer cartridges are no at 50% off until July 1st!”. They are more likely to close the email thinking “Funny guy!” than “Printer cartridges 50% off!”

Email marketing when done well can really boost your conversion rate and return on investment – an investment that it next to non-existent given the fact that email is free. But if you don’t make it work for you then you are better off not doing it at all. If you send out emails for no reason that the neutral observer could understand, you will find that you start getting bounceback messages from some addresses – and from there, it is a short leap to no-one reading at all. Email marketing is a powerful weapon, but it can backfire.

Building Your Mailing List

Direct marketing is a development that has allowed numerous small businesses to increase their market share without having to go to the often excessive expense of a marketing campaign. By going straight to your customers, you can keep yourself in the eye of your market without having to worry about overstretching yourself financially. In order to do this, you have to build what could be considered a one-on-one relationship with customers – and the ways of doing this are becoming more tried and tested as time goes on.

The first necessity for anyone looking to build a customer relationship that will aid them in the long term is building direct mailing lists. In order to do this it is necessary to get contact information that allows you to go straight to your customer. How you do this is up to you, but a popular way of going about it is to include a section on your business website which allows customers – or potential customers – to sign up for email updates. People are naturally much more ready to give their email address than any other contact information. Although an email address is direct contact information, it is less personal than a telephone number or a home address.

An email contact form on your website is also a good way of getting the required contact information. As a marketer one of your most important tasks is to be receptive to customer requests – and very often, the requests will be for information. You can include a great deal of information on your website, but there is never enough space for all the information your customer may need to know. Some will have very specific requests, which can only be answered with a direct reply. As long as you give this, you have the customer’s confidence, and you can then use that to build a relationship.

Direct mailing lists are indispensable for smaller businesses who want to up their customer share. If you are in direct contact with customers you can inform them immediately of important developments – a special offer, a sale or anything similar – and increase the amount of return business that you get. Additionally, you will gain a reputation for being customer-centered. The value of this cannot be overestimated, as customers today want to know that the business they are dealing with has their interests in mind.

One thing that must be remembered, though, is that direct mailing lists are not an invitation to bombard customers with emails telling them about everything your company is doing, nor to send them “spam” which simply reminds them that you exist. When it comes to sending mass email, the key is always “less is more”. A lot of companies make the mistake of mailing their customers too frequently and all that will happen as a result is that the customer will begin to ignore the email. Do not consider your direct mailing lists to be a reason for sending an email for the sake of it – they are to be used occasionally and at the right time, for the good of your customer retention.

How Email Has Helped Businesses Evolve

The Internet has made a major difference to the way we do business in this day and age. People who never would have considered even starting a business a decade ago are now doing just that because of the increased opportunities the Internet has offered them. A major part of this change has been the way that email works for a business, and in particular the difference between using email for direct mailing and the old way – using the postal service.

Think for a moment about how you used to treat the mail when it arrived in the morning. Any letter that looked “important” would be opened and read, while anything that was obviously marketing content would be thrown in the trash, usually without even reading it. Considering the expense of using the postal service for marketing purposes – the cost of postage, producing the marketing material etc. – this was never really a worthwhile use of time and money, but companies still did it because anything that might create repeat business was considered to be something that had to be done.

With direct mailing having become much easier due to the advent of email, those problems are in the main no longer relevant. Where before you had to pay for the materials used, and often for the design of any marketing material, typing your marketing information into an email is free of charge. Sending it is free, too, and even if a stamp is cheap and you have a deal with a postal service it can really begin to add up when you are writing to a number of people. If, as a conservative estimate, you were to say that it cost $1 per address to write, produce and send marketing material, a single mailshot to a hundred potential customers would cost $100 – less any deal for bulk.

However, as any mathematician will tell you, one hundred times zero equals zero. Therefore direct mailing using the Internet is a much more cost-effective way of getting the message out there. Given that one of the key rules of business is to keep your return on investment high, any sale which results from a direct mailing campaign using email represents a profit. It might be argued that there will be a number of people who do not read their email unless it is from someone specific – but even if someone does that, it didn’t cost any money to send them the mail so it does not represent a financial loss.

Of course, this does not mean that direct mailing will necessarily pay off. There is no doubt that there is an art to doing it correctly, and this tends to separate the successful from the unsuccessful direct mailing campaign. You need to give those customers a reason to read and react without laying it on too thick. Incentivizing repeat customers is an important consideration. This may involve offering them money off for using a particular order code, or developing a reputation for having an entertaining marketing campaign. One way or the other, if you make it work for you direct mailing can be a real money-maker.

What Is Direct Marketing?

Although people may not be in the habit of referring to it by the name, direct marketing has been practised for a very long time. This is nothing out of the ordinary, of course – we are by nature an informal species and are in the habit of shortening words and phrases down and using slang to refer to things. Therefore it is really no surprise that a term like “direct marketing” is more of an industry-specific item of jargon than a phrase used commonly in everyday conversation.

For clarification, direct marketing is really any form of marketing that takes place without an intermediary such as a newspaper (which carries an advertisement in among the columns of text about the day’s news) or something similar. With direct marketing, you are going right to the customer without passing through anyone else. Much of the standard marketing of the day is done by going to the media outlet that will carry your advertisement and paying them for the privilege. Perhaps just as often, a business will go to a dedicated advertising agency and get them to find outlets willing to carry the advertisement. To see your advertising spend break even, you will need it to produce a lot of customers.

Direct marketing has removed this necessity – but in a way it has always existed. People have been going direct to their customers for a while. Anyone who has printed off a sheaf of flyers and stood in the street handing them out is going right to the customer. The limitations of this method are clear enough in themselves, though, especially to anyone who has walked down a street and seen just how many discarded flyers litter the pavement from time to time. Direct marketing has existed for longer than we sometimes imagine, what has changed is the method and the efficiency.

You can place flyers in the hands of five hundred people, but if they are five hundred complete strangers you can make no guarantees as to how interested they will be to receive them. Even if the flyer is telling them of something that will benefit them a great deal, the fact that it has been handed to them by someone they don’t know makes it all the more likely that it will end up with all the others on the pavement. Knowing your customer, and giving them a reason to be interested, is the key to effective direct marketing.

It is important to make sure that your marketing campaign is targeted as efficiently as possible. A well-conceived direct marketing campaign need not cost you a penny, but it will take some time out of your day and so you will want to see some return on it. Assuming, for example, that you are sending a group email to a range of potential or previous customers, it should not read like a typical advertisement. It is somewhat jarring to be “sold to” in the impersonal manner a lot of advertisements employ, when you are reading an email addressed to you – which despite what some people may say, is a personal medium. It is this balance that you will need to strike.

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