Email Marketing Solutions Let You Speak Directly To Your Customers

Mass physical mail and advertising campaigns simply don't pack the punch they used to. That's why smart marketers are increasingly turning to more responsive, modern and nimble email marketing solutions to engage with customers one-on-one via the most pervasive medium of our age.

Over 75% of Australians use the internet, and with most of those users checking and sending email every day, it makes sense to explore which email marketing solutions can best help your business to tap into this massive audience.

The Benefits Of Email Marketing Solutions

Like many online marketing techniques, email marketing is incredibly measurable. You can track who opened your email, who sent it to someone else, who it was sent to, click through rates on offers and a whole host of other data that will help you test and refine your marketing initiatives.

The measurability of email marketing solutions is possible because email messages are so simple to trace. An advertiser can track users via auto-responders, web bugs, bounce messages, unsubscribe requests, read receipts, click-throughs, etc. Using these mechanisms to measure open rates, positive or negative responses, and to correlate sales with marketing is a benefit that other forms of marketing simply don't provide.

The flexibility of email marketing solutions enables you to test the effectiveness of different headlines, images and offers in a matter of hours. Expert email marketers split-test their campaigns, testing initiatives on a small section of their list to find the best performing version, which they'll then send on to the remainder of their email list.

Finding the most effective methods and messages benefits both you and your customer because instead of shouting like a town crier, you can talk to your audience more directly and with more relevance. Personally relevant emails secure customer trust and interest, they also boost response rates and overall sales effectiveness.

So test and segment. Segment and test. Identifying and targeting your audience by gender, age, profession, new purchasers, repeat purchasers, VIP buyers, etc is an effective way to hone your message, find your customers and reap the massive benefits email marketing solutions can provide.

Types Of Email Marketing Solutions

There are 2 types of email marketing solutions. Pull and Push.

Pull email marketing occurs when people have sought out your business and opted-in to receive updates, newsletters, whitepapers, articles, tips or whatever else you're offering. This breed of email marketing solution is one of the most effective and valuable marketing assets you can possess. Having an active, willing, easily contactable audience for your email marketing campaigns is like having a hotline to the bank. Well, almost.

Counter to the voluntary, permission-based nature of the pull approach is push email marketing. This email marketing solution typically sees businesses buy an email list to market to. This approach can be intrusive and must be done with care. The best and most obvious way to avoid ending up under the delete key is to focus on lists that match your target market.

Get Out From Under The Delete Key

The single biggest concern with the push email marketing solution is spam. No-one really wants to be it, and no-one wants to get it. So if your email marketing solution is not permission-based then you need to take some steps to prevent your message being seen as spam by both ISPs and your potential customers.

People want engaging content, so make sure your email communication is well written and adheres to simple design and configuration standards that make you look professional. You can use templates to ensure a quality look and to give you the power to control the look of your message at the recipient's end. For instance, you can configure your newsletters etc so as the images can be viewed even if the recipient's email client blocks images.

The other concern with both push and pull email marketing solutions is being blocked by ISP spam filters. There are ways around this. Firstly, don't send bulk emails from your MS outlook account. Secondly, use a respected autoresponder/email providers that offer double-opt-in mechanisms and that manage unsubscriptions well (Aweber or Constant Contact are two such examples).

Whether you're pushing or pulling customers to your site and product, email marketing solutions can do wonders for your business.