Marketing, by definition is: "the business activity of presenting products or services in such a way as to make them desirable" - what email marketing does, is take this previously expensive excercise widely considered as a black art, and place it in the hands of the layman.
This has it's pros and cons. A little knowlege is often a dangerous thing and this is certainly true of email marketing.
Get your email marketing
What's the difference? Well in a word: Relevance. If you contact your customers, there are some basic rules of thumb to follow:
1. Address the customer by their name in the email.
2. Send them something relevant that will interest them.
3. Don't put all your customers in one group.
4. Don't send emails to customers who haven't asked you to.
5. Make it easy for them to do what you are promoting.
1. By personalising the email and using the recipien't name you massively improve the chances of both the email being read in the first place, and more importantly, the recipient responding to your proposal.
2. Fail to send something relevant and interesting and you will be able to see almost immediately that your unsubscribe rate increases, loosing you valuable customers.
3. By grouping your customers by age, area, purchases made, etc... you can then send them a message with much closer appeal to their needs. Sending an amusing cartoon email to a pensioner will probably not go down well and is likely to cause them to unsubscribe; send it to their grandchildren and they'll be much more inclined to click on it and visit your site.
4. The risks of sending a unsolicited emails are massive. You risk damaging your reputation, alienating customers, all kinds of internet-connection related issues, and generally dragging your name through the mud by doing this. You'll also upset your ISP and be in breach of a number of Internet codes of practice.
5. By sending a relevant, interesting, targetted email you have only won half the battle. The other half is to get the recipient to do something, like send the email to a friend, visit your website, or make a purchase. Considering every mouse click as a barrier; you need to break down the barriers between the email and the end goal, providing incentives and interest along the way.
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