Email marketing basics

Even though you might think email marketing is outdated, this is one of the fundamental ways companies are reaching out to their existing customers and making new accounts. Though a lot of spammers have been misusing this, many reputed companies – both B2B and B2C have been successfully using email marketing with strong results in sales. With a strong content and good method to building your list, you can achieve big bang for your bucks through this. In this multipart series, I will take you through the processes to master email marketing.

4 main processes involved in email marketing

1. Deciding on what you want to send to your prospects. There are roughly 5 types of marketing emails:
   • New offers – if you have a sale coming up or a discount that is available to your customers, this is the type you need to send. Daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social use this type extensively.
   • Newsletters – This is used to connect to your customers by giving relevant information to them. If you are running an electrical store, you could send your customers updates about new inventions and products in your market (not necessarily the ones you sell), conferences, tips on using certain products and tutorials. Newsletter should be something like a newspaper – while it could promote products on the side, the main focus should be about good information.
   • Catalog of your products – You can create a list of your products grouped in various categories (summer wear, things for gardening) and include product codes etc that will lead directly to a sale.
   • Press Release – This is when you want to connect to the press and bloggers. Press Releases are written in a certain format and if they are newsworthy they get picked up by the media.
   • Quick announcements – this includes mails you send about your new store opening, changes in timing, new products etc. Be brief and informative.

   Be upfront about what you will be sending to your subscribers, or else you will risk irritating them and getting tagged as a spammer.

2. Getting subscribers to your list – forget about spamming. You want to send the content to only those who have explicitly asked for it. There are many ways to collect subscribers legally – including link in your blog, asking your existing customers to be added to the list or renting a list from an another organization.
3. Building up a good template to send. Creating a good template that reflects your brand along with great content will make your newsletter something that people would want to read.
4. Setting up the delivery mechanism. If you want to send 2000 mails dails, free services like Gmail and Yahoo wouldn’t work. You would also need to track the mails you send and need more statistics to fine tune your campaign. There are many paid services like Mailchimp that can do the job for you.

In the next parts we will see these email marketing proceses in detail.