Email Marketing

What is email marketing?
Email marketing is an inexpensive technique used by an interactive agency to advertise a product or service via electronic mail, usually with the intent to encourage new sales from existing customers, to create brand awareness and loyalty, or to create relationships with new customers. Many companies choose to use email marketing because it is easy to track its influence, most people check their email regularly, and the communication is instant. You can monitor aspects of an email campaign such as click through rates, positive and negative feedback, and opt in/opt out features in order to quantifiably determine the impact that email marketing is having on revenue.

The basics of creating an email marketing campaign
Writing an email isn’t hard. Writing an email that potential customers will open, read, and respond to is a little trickier.

There are certain key points of creating an email marketing campaign that an interactive agency takes into account before sending mass emails to consumers. First, the email should be brief, easy to read, and visually appealing. If a customer feels overwhelmed by the amount of information in the email, it is likely that he/she will automatically delete it without giving a company a fair shot. Second, be respectful of your future customers by limiting the amount of extra advertisements in the email, and always make it convenient for a customer to unsubscribe to the email campaign. Similarly, only send emails to subscribers. No one wants to be bombarded with emails that they did not ask for – you do not want your company getting a reputation for sending out spam. Always use email best practices. Let ethics be your guide. Third, work on facilitating repeat business with the email marketing campaign because it is much easier to keep old customers who already know the brand, than to win over new customers. Keep your current customers happy with relevant information, expert advice, and even online promotions tied into email campaigns.

Once the basics of an email marketing campaign have been considered, an interactive agency can then determine the specific objectives of the campaign and work towards growing the email list. Special giveaways can be offered for referring a family member or friend to the subscription. The success of an email marketing campaign must be measured against the original objectives of the email marketing strategy.

The power of personalization
There is a major difference between email marketing and personalized marketing. Email marketing, by itself, can refer to mass email distribution with the exact same email being sent to thousands of people. How can a company be sure that one email will fully satisfy the needs of that many people?

Interactive marketing was created around the concept of knowing one’s customers and being able to market to people individually, so why should an interactive agency conduct an email marketing any differently? An interactive agency creating strives to create a personalized email marketing campaign based on customer preferences that are discovered through the relationships that the clients have with the interactive agency. Building respectful relationships with clients will yield quantifiable results – such as increased revenue - and qualitative results – such as brand loyalty - for an email campaign. Because of this, an interactive agency may be referred to as a relationship agency in that is specializes in relationship marketing. Relationship marketing by an interactive agency consists of knowing the consumers personally in order to most effectively keep the consumer aware of the company’s product, to facilitate the purchase of products, and to exchange information. To combine these marketing objectives together is to create relationship synthesis.