Email Marketing: Most cost-effective marketing tool

Business experts often talk about the 80/20 rule – 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your customers. It makes sense: Your best customers are the ones who already like you. They’re the ones who’ve bought from you once, and therefore, are most likely to buy from you again.

Email marketing is a perfect tool for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), allowing you to effectively stay in touch with your current customers and increase the amount that they spend with you.

If you aren’t sending out regular newsletters to your current customer database now, start doing it. Newsletter marketing is by far one of the best tools you have in your arsenal to boost your sales.

In fact, according to directmag.com, advertisers in 2009 had a return on investment that was twice as high for email marketing than for any other marketing channel.

But beware: If you try to send out bulk email yourself, and you’re not an expert in email marketing, you could hurt your Reputation, which is a score that internet providers give to organizations that send out email. If an internet provider gives you a “bad” Reputation, all of your email could end up in customer’s junk mailbox.

10 Tips for Successful Email marketing

1. Create a constantly updating database: Ask every customer or potential customer for their email address and keep it in a database that you can manage. Every time you interact with them, make sure you verify and update their address.
2. Get permission to send customers email: When you get a customers’ address, make sure you provide a checkbox where they can give permission to receive email from you. If you don’t, you will be violating federal CAN-SPAM requirements. If you haven’t done this in the past, don’t worry: You can send your current customers a notice asking if they would like to continue receiving email.
3. Allow users to stop getting email: You can send email to everyone in your list, but give them the option to stop receiving email. If you don’t, you will also be violating the CAN-SPAM rules.
4. Purge your list: If a lot of email gets bounced back to you, delete those addresses from your newsletter marketing list. The higher your bounce rate, the more your email will be considered spam.
5. Avoid keywords that classify you as SPAM: Don’t use keywords in subject lines that might classify your message as SPAM. Some of the keywords and combinations include: You are a Winner, Click to Win, Buy Now, Earn a Degree and Make Money.
6. Have a newsletter frequency strategy: If you have a good reputation with Internet providers, you can send newsletters out as often as once a day. If your reputation is poor, however, then even sending out a newsletter once a month will be bad.
7. Use short subject lines: Make sure you subject lines are 50 characters or less; most people won’t see the rest of the subject line anyway in their email client.
8. Use calls to action: Subject lines should be specific and use action words. And the text of your email should use action words, too. You don’t want your customers to just READ something; you want them to CLICK through to your website, and hopefully, buy.
9. Avoid too many graphics: Graphics are nice, but they can’t be seen by everybody, and the higher a ratio of graphics you have compared to text, the more likely your email will be considered spam.
10. Analyze the performance data: After each email send, review the statistics to see what is working and what isn’t. How many messages were undeliverable? How many bounced? What was the click-thru rate? What was the open rate? Use the numbers to improve your email deliverability every time.

The following is the average delivery rate for email, according to LyrisHQ:

Vance Marketing Solutions offers high-quality email marketing services that can significantly boost traffic to your site and increase your brand awareness among your best customers.

We have successfully helped Vance Publishing achieve a 99% delivery rate for their email by March 2009, which is 11% higher than the industry average.

Our email marketing services include helping you analyze your business needs, set a goal, plan a strategy and execute it with creative tactics.

First, we will help you analyze your audience. What kind of content do they want via email? How often do they want to receive an email? For example, if you send out email during the week, the content might be different than an email you send out on Saturdays.

Email sent out before you launch a product should be different than email sent out after the launch.

Next, we will help you execute your email marketing strategy by:

• Designing an email template
• Creating a landing page for your email marketing campaigns
• Setting up and managing your email marketing campaigns
• Providing you with reports on the status of your email marketing campaigns