Everyone can see that technology is
starting to change the lives of people all around the world. Anyone can access
their computers or smart phones and shop for any type of product that they
want. The coming of newer technology has also brought our world a different way
of communicating with each other. Emailing has become one of the best and
fastest ways for people to communicate, and it has also became a massive way
for companies to broadcast their products to people throughout the world. Once
a customer has shopped and purchased a product at a certain store, the company
will ask for their emails and will send them promotion items or discount
offerings through their email. This can be seen as a form of email marketing.
People get tens to hundreds of emails every day providing them with different
types of information. It’s pretty easy to not read an email due to the large
amount of emails that you already have. With people having so many emails a
day, it still seems to be one of the best ways of marketing out in the social
web today.
Is email marketing effective/ some
of the keys to developing successful campaigns
Yes! Email marketing can be seen as a
very effective way of marketing within the business world today. Studies go to
show that email marketing is 40 times more effective than forms of social media
such as Facebook and Twitter, and can be seen as very alive in today’s market.
Even with it being so effective compared Facebook and Twitter there are
still a few things that people need to pay attention to in order to make sure
that their marketing emails are effective. Companies need to make sure that
their subject line is interesting and to the point in order to gain its
customers attention. It can be seen that 33% of email recipients open email
based on subject lines alone.1 This goes to show that companies
really need to pay attention to what they are saying to their customers in
order to gain their interest.
Elements that should be combined to
maximize response rates
Companies can
start putting in different forms of marketing such as advertising and promotion
in order to gain more customers interest in certain products. If they see
promotions for a certain product on TV or on the Internet and then they see
sales for it in their email, they will probably be likely to buy it. If they
keep on promoting the products so that consumers can see them before the email,
they will hopefully get more responses.
The words that
you choose to put in your subject line really do effect whether or not the
reader is going to open up the email or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s from a
big brand name company, if the subject isn’t interesting its just going to go
right into the garbage can. One of the biggest things you can do is make sure
that your message is short and to the point. Nobody likes to read a massive
subject line when they already have so many other emails to look at. Its
important to keep your subject line fewer than 50 characters or about five to
seven words in order to keep it short and to the point. You also want to make
sure that your messages aren’t sound too spammy. This is one of the biggest
things that will send your email right to everyone’s spam box. Subject lines
that are aggressively sales-ey are often to be more likely to be marked as
spam. Avoid loud punctuations like all caps and multiple exclamation points, as
well as overtly promotional language like “Buy now” or “Free”.2
How to do it right
Another way to think about email marketing is to think about
how you would like to be approached. Would you like it if a company sent you
tons of stupid emails that gained no interest to you or just wasted your time
viewing them? No I don’t think that you would. You also have to think about if
your going to be building good relationships with your customers instead of
just nailing them with nonsense information trying to get a sail out of them.
An effective way of email marketing lies in a notion known as “permission
marketing.” This is meaning that you should build goodwill with your customers
by allowing them to be comfortable and let them decide if they want your
company’s emails or not. You should ask permission from your customers and
prospects before adding them to your email marketing mailing list.3
Its also very important to let the customers know about the benefits or
opportunities they could gain if they chose to continue with your companies
email marketing.
Key metrics to measure response rates.
How they differ by industry
There can be
multiple different ways of measuring response rates or to see if people are
looking at your email marketing campaigns. One of the ways to measure them is
to see the amount of messages that got opened with the sent out emails, and
then to view the click through rates that you got from the campaign. The click
through rates are the number of times a customer clicks on any trackable link
within the email sent out.4 These are one of the key metrics in
measuring response rates on the amount of emails sent out on the email
marketing campaigns. Response rates for email marketing differentiate from each
other due to the size of the industry and for what the the company has to
offer. Response rates for bigger retail stores tend to be different and have
larger responses than response rates for grocery stores. The industry heavily affects
the amount of response rates due to the product and services being sold.
Will email marketing be effective within
the next 5 years?
Email marketing
can be seen as a very effective way of marketing, companies just need to know
how to properly use it in order for it to become and stay effective. I believe
that email marketing will continue to be a key component in IMC campaigns due
to how effective they are right now in the business world and because of the
amount of rising technology in the world. Businesses are going to keep on
growing and the amount of consumers is going to grow with it. People are always
on their smart phones and computers and will continue to use them for many
years.
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