Email marketing has a huge potential for businesses; but it is not as simple as it may first seem. Certainly a successful email marketing campaign is an art form. There are many pitfalls to completing an email marketing campaign, many bravely march blindly into trouble. Often this can cause irreparable damage such as a dwindling list size at best, or a damaged brand or worse! This article aims to cover some of the benefits of email marketing and some of the pitfalls, and in general, whether it is worth considering a professional company to maximise the benefits of email marketing.
Expand your reach
A single marketing email can reach thousands of potential customers without the expense of postage, giving even small companies the opportunity to reach new markets. In fact, most companies misunderstand or misuse the potential of email. Most recipients delete marketing emails at best or block the sender at worst. A specialist company such as Square Balloon can help businesses customise their messages in order to get the maximum response from their emails.
Brand Strength
Custom-designed email templates help businesses maintain consistent branding and are more visually appealing to readers. Creating these templates can help improve conversion rates (the rate at which readers follow through to purchase the product or service being advertised). Email templates come with some risks, however. HTML email may display incorrectly in some browsers or email clients, particularly on mobile devices. Well-designed templates can address this problem by targeting email messages to users of specific browsers or devices.
Better-designed HTML email templates can lead to an increase in conversions. Other factors that improve conversion include subject lines optimised to match the interests of the target recipients and integration with social media sites such as Facebook. Consultants work constantly to improve the effectiveness of marketing email by comparing results from different templates, message texts or images. This method of testing, known as "split testing" or "A/B testing", allows marketers to determine which version of a message produces the highest level of success and gradually refine the email campaign.
Growing your audience
Email marketing relies on maintaining and expanding a list of email recipients likely to be interested in a company's products. Specialists in the field, such as Square Balloon, continually expand and revise email lists to ensure that email advertisements reach not only a large number of people but that they are genuinely potential customers. No company wants to acquire the reputation of a "spammer", a company that sends bulk email to uninterested recipients. In fact, sending large numbers of bulk emails through Outlook can cause ISPs to blacklist the sender; many inexperienced email marketers make this simple mistake.
Although there are a number of possible pitfalls in using email lists, the potential benefits are numerous. Properly-managed email lists can improve sales and customer retention by establishing and supporting the relationship between company and customer. Marketing emails can allow a company to communicate with its customers about products relevant to their interests in a timely fashion and at low cost. Companies ignore the sales potential of professionally-managed email marketing at their peril.
