E-mail Marketing

In recent times I (and I sure that a large number of the Internet community) noticed that almost every site has a newsletter or e-mail offer of some kind. E-mail newsletters are liken to the most holy of marketing grails "word of mouth" although today most people call it viral marketing.

Like most marketing techniques people grow weary of e-mail, email they probably really don't want is delivered everyday. If however, a business provides a newsletter that offers real value to the customer then the company is likely to build a relationship with the customer in question. Building a relationship means building a better relationship that some day may develop into "BRAND LOYALTY". And after all its cheaper to keep a customer than to entice new ones.

So lets analyse the anatomy of a newsletter:

1. The Subject: Thus perhaps more than anything else is the most important part of an e-mail campaign, it must inform the user about the content of the e-mail while attracting their attention and generating interest enough to actually open the e-mail;
2. The Salutation: To personalise or not to personalise that is the question. I think that the judge is still out on this one, there is no really answer, if you ask me personalisation probably does no harm and some people appreciate it so why not;
3. The First Sentence: Usually this take the form of some kind of offer similar to magazine ads "lose 5 kilos in 2 weeks", "win a computer worth $4000" or something similar.
4. The Content: Well written e-mail news letters focus on how the customer can from not only reading on but also visiting the website or sending the e-mail to a friend.
5. Unsubscribe: No matter how good your news letter is people who subscribed by mistake will need a way out, so don't forget to put a link at the bottom of each letter that provides for un subscribing.

Notice in point 4 I talk about e-mailing to a friend, well this is about as close to word-of-mouth marketing as it gets in the online world. People tend to read e-mails from friends and e-mails received from a know source hold a certain credibility. We all know that online businesses need all the credibility that they can get.

E-Mail newsletters can improve customer relations as businesses gather more and more information about the customer. Each interaction a customer makes through a newsletter or through the website can be used to determine what customers needs and wants are.

Newsletters can be a way of spreading details about the business to a very select and attentive market segment, who may in tern send it to other individuals of similar taste. But what is the difference between "spaming" and emailing to a select and attentive group? Well it basically boils down to is that spam is unwanted

In terms of income generation newsletters provide two main methods:

1. Increased bottom line, more sales as a result of more efficient marketing; and
2. Banner ads, i.e. income derived from displaying banner ads.

So now that you have decided to go ahead and include newsletters as part of your overall marketing strategy what are the steps required to start?

1. Get market share - Develop and refine an idea for an offer that will draw attention and build a need to subscribe to the newsletter;
2. Build and get someone to build a subscription interface (www.scripthost.com offers a free one);
3. Have a clear objective - what is the marketing objective of building and sending the news letter;
4. Use other newsletters to promote your great new newsletter;
5. Calculate ROI - placing ads in other newsletters will cost so make sure that its all worth while;
6. Launch; and
7. Take note of feedback, review and improve the news letter as time goes on.