Maintaining an email marketing list
Marketing is a method that businesses the world over use to advertise their services, products and the business and brand itself. With a growing number of businesses having their own websites email marketing is big business with new customers subscribing to newsletters, updates, press releases and promotional emails with their favourite companies. Using email marketing is a cheap, fast and effective way of delivering news and other information to customers directly with none of the usual marketing costs associated. This makes it the ideal marketing tool for any business that is looking to reach a wide audience almost instantly directly into their customer’s inboxes. Not only that but email marketing is the preferred option for businesses who want to be seen as Green and thinking of their impact on the environment.
For email marketing campaigns to be successful they must target people who are likely to a) read the email, and b) likely to respond to it. Here are a few hints and tips to make sure that you are maintaining your email marketing list so that you are getting the most from it;
1. Get your customer’s email addresses on your contacts list – this might seem straightforward and common sense but it is surprising how many businesses fail to ask for this information during a phone call. Obviously if a customer contacts you by email their email address can be collected easily – but make sure you add it to your contact list.
2. Make sure that you don’t send too many email marketing campaigns out each month – repeatedly getting emails from a business is a sure fire way to annoy your customers and potential customers. No one likes their inbox being flooded with marketing emails so make sure each one you send has something worth reading.
3. Use S3 CRM to create and send your email campaigns then you can check on the reports to see which emails have bounced back. By doing this you can delete any email addresses that are no longer valid, this will give you a better indication as to how successful each campaign you send is.
4. Delete any subscribers from your list who wish to unsubscribe, once again doing this will give you a clearer view of how many subscribers are reading their emails and clicking through. After all if you send an email to 1,000 people and 100 of these expressed a wish to unsubscribe you are losing out on 10% of your potential unique reads before you have sent a single email.
By adhering to these few hints and tips you will be able to successfully maintain an email marketing list that works with you and presents statistics that are more valid than one that is filled of bounced back emails and people wishing to unsubscribe. If you get into the habit of maintaining your list you will find that it takes less and less time each week or month as you will only be adding new contacts and deleting old / expired ones as you find them.
Tags: Email Marketing, Small businesses