Email Marketing- What is it and how can a company use it.

Email marketing is the use of bulk emails to communicate with existing or potential customers. A company can use email marketing to attract new customers to to communicate and build relationships with their existing customers by sending coupons, reminding them of events, new products, and sales.

Email marketing tools can help you manage your email campaigns and enable you to upload or create email lists, create email templates, send out emails/newsletters, monitor click thru rates and other statistics, manage bounces, unsubscribes, etc. Email marketing tools can include:

• Your own database or excel files: this becomes extremely difficult to manage once you increase your email list. It is usually better to use the free services of the cloud based services as they automate things for you and give you a lot of analytics.

• Software: you purchase it, own it, and manage it on your computer. The software tends to be expensive, usually anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000.

• Hosted Services (Cloud Based Services): They host it for you and you just log in and use their services. Everything is automated and they give you a professional template that you can use. Prices are usually charged monthly and can range from $5 a month to $100 a month depending on functionality. Examples include MailChip or Contactcontact.

There are 3 main ways that companies collect email lists:

• Purchase from a list broker (average $.10 to $1.00 per name)

  • purchase is based on demographics and psychographics of target market

• Lease from a broker (magazine, industry associations, brokers, etc.)

  • You do not get the actual list. You send the brokers the email you want sent out and they send it for you to members of their list. They send it to the target group that you specify and provide you with statistics such as click thru rates, conversion rates, open rates, bounces, etc.

• Collect your own list

  • This is the best form of email list generation. You can create a form on your web page for people to fill in if they want to receive emails or newsletters from you

How do companies use emails for marketing?

• General communication

• Promotions (coupons, sales, etc.)

• Announcements (PR, company announcements, recalls)

• New product introduction

• Reputation management (damage control)

• Reminders (for example, if you need to get your car serviced)

• Reaching out to potential customers

• Announcements about events

• Solicit and receive feedback

• Featuring case studies of customers