Email marketing is a direct marketing platform that creates a commercial message to be sent to a group of people using an email service. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.
Email Marketing often involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing is delivered to current customers, list subscribers or website visitors who opt-in to receive messages. The term is also used to refer to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage repeat business, acquire new customers, or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.
Out In Front Marketing is a Constant Contact partner and as such we are expert advisers on the full line of Constant Contact products. We also have clients that work with Mail Chimp and we are familiar with many other email marketing services.
Email Marketing Success
The success of email marketing lies in the development of a good contact list. Here are a few tips from Constant Contact:
- When in Doubt, Ask for Permission – Not sure if someone would want to receive your emails? Simply ask them! If they say no, add them to the unsubscribed status so you don’t mail to them by mistake in the future.
- Offer Options – Edit your sign-up form to let people choose what kinds of information they want to get in your emails. If you send an email to more than one contact list a time, anyone who is on all of your lists will only get that email once.
- Set Expectations – Tell new contacts upfront about what’s in your emails and how often you’ll be sending them email.
- Be Smart with Incentives – There’s a right way and a wrong way to use incentives to grow your contact list.
- Save Contacts’ Signup Dates – When collecting contacts offline, keep a record of the dates when contacts join your list. These records will come in handy when you clean up your list in the future.
- Consider Confirmed Opt-in – When your Web Sign-Up form’s Confirmed Opt-in feature is turned on, you can only send emails to contacts who click inside an email that asks them to confirm that they joined your mailing list.