Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. The purpose of these emails is to:

• enhance customer-merchant relationships
• encourage customer loyalty and repeat business
• Acquiring new customers
• Convincing old customers to buy something immediately
• Adding other advertisements to customers

Advantages of Email Marketing

• The ability to distribute information to a wide range of specific, potential customers at a relatively low cost (when compared with direct marketing).
• An exact ROI can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly.
• It is instant, an email arrives in a few seconds or minutes.
• It lets the advertiser "push" the message to its audience.
• It is easy to track specific details (e.g. open rates, click throughs, unsubscribe).
• Advertisers can generate repeat business affordably and automatically.
• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers.
• Over half of Internet users check or send email on a typical day.
• Specific user actions can trigger automatically delivery of other messages.
• Green - email marketing is paper-free.

Threats to Email Marketing

Threat 1: Illegitimate Email Marketers

• Obviously, the biggest threat to email is spam. 75% of email volume is spam. This often leads users to censor their viewing based on a cursory glance at the sender and subject of received marketing emails.

Threat 2: "Clueless" Email Marketers

• Marketers, who observe the minimum legal requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act, but fail to recognize some basic best practices, sending an unending stream of irrelevant offers and repeat themselves over and over again.

Threat 3: Phishing

• Financial scams have become more serious over the past few years, with hackers and even organised crime rings becoming increasingly sophisticated in their attempts to gain consumer credit card numbers and bank account information.

Threat 4: Internet Security Technology

• Technologies filter through incoming mail and divert or delete messages that follow an invalid format or contain questionable text. This creates the problem of “false positives”.

Key Concepts

Focus on the Value Exchange

• Increased relevance is the secret to effective online marketing: understand who your audience is and why they want to hear from you.
• If there are no children in the household, you shouldn&jos39;t send them "Back to School" promotion.
• Consider a long-term, "nurture" approach rather than simply sending promotional offers.

Segmentation Studies

• Helping clients build and analyse customer profiles may uncover attitudinal and behaviour insights assisting planning messages and offers to key customer groups.
• You can also pre-plan email contact stream that are triggered by customer action or market event.

Software exlusive from the house of BuzzDrivers for the Indian market.