Back to all articlesEffective marketing essentially comes down to great communication – and one of the best (and easiest) ways to keep in touch with your audience is through an email marketing campaign.
Compared to other forms of marketing, email campaigns come with a much lower price tag – you can go completely DIY (if you know what you’re doing), or use an agency e-marketing tool, which can be set up with branded templates that you can then manage internally.
Gathering contacts
Before we look at the main benefits, it’s important to recognise that without a database of contacts, your campaign won’t take you very far! If you want to integrate this approach into your marketing efforts, you need to implement an effective data capture method.
Set up a function on your website that allows people to sign up for your newsletter, and you can even send an initial email out to your current and past customers to point them to it too – this is much better than taking the risk of adding them unwillingly, and then having your first attempt marked as SPAM by unappreciative recipients!
5 key benefits
In addition to the fact that the cost is relatively low, here are 5 more benefits of using email marketing:
1. You can personalise them – people respond much better to personalised marketing: our tool allows you to tailor your marketing campaigns, addressing recipients by name, location or targeting content according to purchasing history.
2. Repurposing – you don’t need to create brand new content, but instead you can send out a newsletter directing readers to blog posts, case studies, or you can repurpose other existing content to save time.
3. Event-led – you can jump on current news stories, or send seasonal or event-based campaigns to keep them relevant.
4. Primed audience – by sending your campaigns to people who have already stated an interest, you’re able to target towards an already receptive audience.
5. Monitoring – by using analytics and monitoring tools, you can further segment your campaigns, and measure effectiveness to help you hone your approach in the future for better response rates.
Don’t forget to utilise your social media channels too, by using content that’s had good levels of engagement, or promoting your fab newsletters to your followers.
Things to consider
While email marketing campaigns can be a real boon to your overall strategy, there are some important things to bear in mind. The main thing to ensure is that you strike an appropriate balance; send out emails too frequently, and people will opt-out to stop the constant stream of incoming mail filling up their inboxes – send them too infrequently, and people will wonder why on earth they ever signed up in the first place.
Take a consistent and measured approach – perhaps try for a monthly update, with additional emails when you’ve really got something worthwhile to say, a new product or service to shout about, or a special offer to promote.
The other thing to think about is content and design. With so many people using mobile devices, you need to make sure that the design caters for this type of user – don’t assume that everyone will be using a big screen to view them. In terms of content, the most important line you’ll ever write is the one you’ll use in the subject field of your email – you need to give them a reason to open and read, so offer a solution, a benefit, or something else of value.
Email campaigns can help to keep the lines of communication open, and build trust and confidence in your brand – and with the right tools, they can be easy to implement and provide a really effective approach that will reap a great return on your investment.