Increase sales, product/ service launch, drive brand loyalty, brand engagement, brand awareness.. whatever your objective – email marketing can help.

It was hardly surprising to hear that in 2010 email marketing would be the top area of investment amongst business executives. StrongMail’s Marketing Trends in 2010 Survey found that 69% of businesses are planning to increase their email marketing budgets, with the second area of investment being social media marketing (59%).

The true benefit of email marketing – it can be used across any business types. You don’t have to be a large business with a huge marketing budget to use it. Email marketing can be relatively inexpensive in comparison to the revenue it can generate. It is also a known fact that email marketing is up to 20 times more cost effective than direct mail where there are postage and material costs.

In my business, we spend about £3000 a month on email marketing and for that spend regularly generate in excess of £70,000 a month from this type of marketing. You have to try it, if you haven’t you are missing out on the most lucrative forms of marketing. Read here for further information on email marketing

Not only is email marketing relatively inexpensive but it is easy too. Think of all the different customer touch points – registration forms, phone calls, face to face meetings – these are all opportunities to collect customer data. By building an in-house list you can email existing customers with new offers and incentivise repeat purchases through driving brand loyalty.

Email marketing can reap potential benefits with the majority of response being received in the first two days. It can also be used to target an audience of interest. For example, you might choose to send emails to only individuals that have children when promoting school wear.

Email marketing campaigns are also being integrated with other forms of advertising.

Its all about being creative:

• You can use emails to drive traffic to your website by offering down-loadable coupons, research reports, competition entries or even advertising opportunities.

• Or you could use emails to create greater brand awareness through sending e-newsletters.

• And did you know…. emails have entered the Web 2.0 world? Yes that’s right StrongMail also found that 69% of businesses plan to integrate email with social media in 2010.

Want people to engage with you? An effective method of getting your existing and news customers to engage with you is by incentivising them through email to join you on facebook, twitter and the like. Remember – offer them something but make it relevant to your target market. Individual consumers love offers whilst business customers may be keen to hear about the industries latest news…

In short, email marketing brings immediate gains, it is cost effective, targeted and easy to do for any organisation and can be used for a wide span of business objectives.

A few of my best practice tips:

• Be creative – nobody wants to read a boring email. Make the first 2-3 lines really punchy and try to ensure that your email has a theme. Maybe a seasonal theme – Christmas for example!

• Make sure it is relevant to your target audience – you should only be promoting goods/services that are suitable for the group that you want to engage with and it is imperative that you do your research first. For example, is it just the younger generation that are interested in the latest mobile phones or are the Generation Xers catching on – you wouldn’t want to miss anyone out!

• Get permission – use only emails that have opted in to receive such communication or if it is a first time target – give them a choice to opt-out. (You could even ask them why?)

• DO NOT create spammy emails – there is no point in creating a great email if it will get deleted as soon as it is sent (like the viagra ones I keep getting to my work account..kudos for their determination though). You can check if your content is spammy here at: http://www.lyris.com/resources/email-marketing/contentchecker/

There are a variety of different ways that you can use email campaigns within your marketing framework. A few key questions to ask yourself (in order of importance) are:

1. Who am I targeting?

2. What is the objective?

3. What is the method? – through an in-house or external list?

4. What is the cost? (work out the revenue you could generate from the distribution statistics)

5. How will I be creative? Will it integrate with another marketing platform like Twitter?

6. How will I measure the campaigns success – remember open rates and click through are not the be all and end all. How much revenue was generated? Did traffic to the website increase (use google analytics for this!)

No one campaign is the same – you have to tailor it to your company, audience, offer and objectives. Start by asking yourself these very important questions and remember creativity is key!

I do offer a whole variety of other information on how to do email marketing as well as work with SME’s in constructing and implementing their campaigns. If you would like more information please contact me by posting a reply below.

All the best Simon Rickett