What is Email Marketing – And How Can It Work In Your Online Business?

Article by Terry Green

Email marketing is using email to deliver marketing messages. Whether you have an online business or offline business, keeping connected with your current and potential customers is a good way to grow your business and build trust and loyalty. Email marketing has become a method by which you can distribute, advertise and promote various types of communication to different recipients.

The best way to use this type of communication is by utilizing segmentation. In other words, send a targeted email personalized for a specific audience or recipient. Look at your list and divide it into groups — perhaps just dividing into prospects and clients. Then personalize your email to each group. Using this method will avoid a potentially downside to email marketing — sending too many emails.

There are many advantages to using email marketing to promote your business. One is the relatively low cost involved — especially when you compare it to traditional mailing costs. Another is the speed at which you get your message delivered to your customer’s or prospect’s hands. There’s also the ability for your recipients to forward the message to others who they think may be interested in the information. But most importantly is the ability to track and evaluate the success of your email marketing campaign. You have the ability to see who’s opened the email, who’s forwarded it, and who’s clicked on any links.

While there are many advantages to email marketing, you should not use it as your only means of marketing. Email marketing should be used as an enhancement to your other marketing activities. For instance, you should have a website your subscribers can go to. Your website should be designed to accommodate sales while your email marketing campaign highlights the benefits of your offerings and encourages your subscribers to visit your site.

Your website should also be the focus of other Internet marketing strategies, such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and article marketing. Once you have an entire plan for your Internet marketing strategy, you then use your email marketing campaign to enhance all your efforts and encourage your customers and prospects to patronize your business and become loyal.

One of the pitfalls, as I mentioned earlier, of email marketing is overdoing it. While there really aren’t any inherent disadvantages to email marketing, its downside comes from abusing it. If you’re sending emails to all 10,000 people on your list every couple of days, then they’re going to get tired of it and either delete the emails or — worse yet — opt out of your mailing list. That could potentially cost you a lot of business. The last thing you want to do is irritate your subscribers by making them feel you’ve tricked them into signing up for something they didn’t want.

Email marketing is a very valuable tool in every marketer’s toolkit. Making it a part of your marketing strategy adds this powerful tool to your marketing arsenal, and enhances your overall business success. Moreover, email marketing gives you an additional method to keep in touch with your customers and prospects and to build a loyal customer base.

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Great Email Marketing Strategy – Top 6 Steps For Business

Article by Tuula Olin

Email marketing has been labelled as the best performing marketing strategy of the century. It is also the most accessible marketing medium and has easily the best ROI because of its very low unit cost. Follow these 6 steps and your business will benefit from a great email marketing strategy:

1. Choose an email marketing provider

First thing a business needs to do when it gets serious about email marketing is to choose a suitable email marketing provider to manage and send the emails. There are plenty of excellent reputable email marketing services that will send the email campaigns, remove bouncing emails that dont get sent because of invalid addresses and even build up reports of the email campaigns.

2. Build your list of email addresses

Next thing to do is to start growing the email list. First you have to build an opt-in form that collects the emails of customers and prospects. Email marketing providers usually have easy to use form builders where you just add your own details and messages and the service builds the code for you to embed to your website.

There are two important things to remember with using the opt-in form:a) Give subscribers a valuable gift as a reward for giving their email address and name. It can be in a form of a coupon, store discount, free report, ebook or anything else that your customers find value in.b) Add the opt-in form on every single page on your website preferably on top of the page. Business Facebook Page is another important place for the form. Add the form also into business leaflets and ads

What Do Your Business Emails Reveal About You?

Article by Tim Knox

I am a huge fan of email. In fact, if you do business with me the bulk of our communication will not be through the telephone, but via email. Email is quick. Email is convenient. Email takes less time than long-winded telephone conversations. Most importantly, email gives me an electronic record of my communications with clients, employees, partners, and vendors; which makes it easy for me to refresh my quickly-aging memory by easily referring back to our electronic conversations.

As someone who receives and sends a couple hundred emails a day I have to tell you that I am constantly amazed at how poorly written and unprofessional most business emails are. I receive emails every day from fellow entrepreneurs that don’t even contain full sentences. They are often rife with spelling and grammatical errors or typed in all capital letters, and sometimes, are virtually illiterate.

One email I recently received from someone trying to sell me an expensive piece of equipment actually read, “tom– what you think — ready to buy?” First off, the name is “Tim” and secondly, what I think is: I will take my business elsewhere. Thank you, drive through.

Why should you worry about how your emails are reviewed by their recipients? Because in business, you are constantly being judged by your customers, your employees, your investors, your partners, and your peers. If your emails give the impression that you don’t put much thought into the composing of the message or that you’re too busy to be bothered or that you are a total idiot who can’t even use a spell checker, what do you think that says to the person on the other end?

Email is quickly becoming the business correspondence medium of choice for the reasons I covered above, and if you don’t take the time to learn how to effectively use email in a professional manner, it will come back to haunt you.

There are rules that should be followed when sending business emails. The website Email Replies gives 32 tips for email etiquette. Culling from that list and adding a few of my own, here are Tim’s Top 10 Rules of Email Etiquette that every entrepreneur, executive, and employee should follow.

Make It Short And Sweet

An email isn’t a letter from camp, so don’t drone on any longer than necessary. Keep in mind that reading an email on a computer screen is harder than reading printed communications, so keep it brief and to the point.

Use Proper Spelling, Grammar & Punctuation

This is not only important because improper spelling, grammar and punctuation give a bad impression of you and your company, it is also important to make sure your message is not misconstrued. Emails with improper punctuation (a comma and a period every now and then would be nice) are difficult to read and can sometimes even change the meaning of the message. And, if your email program has a spell checker do everyone a favor and use it.

Include a Signature Block In Every Email

A signature block in an email is the same as the signature block you would use to end a letter. You should include your name, title, company name and address, telephone number, email address and website address.

Reply Quickly

This is my number one pet peeve: people who take forever to answer email. Fast response is especially important if the email is from a customer or contains time-sensitive information. Customers send an email because they wish to receive a quick response. If they did not want a quick response they would send a letter or a fax or talk to your voicemail. Each email should be replied to within at least 24-hours, and preferably within the same working day. If the email can’t be answered in full immediately you should at least send a reply saying that you have received their email and that you will get back to them ASAP.

Read Every Email Before You Send It

There’s no better way to embarrass yourself than through a hastily sent email. A lot of people don’t even bother to read an email before they send it out, as evidenced by the many spelling and grammatical errors most emails contain. Apart from this, reading your email through the eyes of the recipient will help you send a more effective message and avoid misunderstandings and inappropriate comments.

Do Not Discuss Confidential Information

Sending an email is like sending a postcard. Once it leaves your computer, the end user can do whatever they want with it, so if you do not want a documented record of your comments or the information shared with others, don’t send it. Moreover, never make any libelous, sexist or racially discriminating comments in emails, even if they are meant to be a joke. There have been court cases where email correspondence was used as evidence. That’s a road you do not want to go down.

Don’t Use ALL CAPS

In email terms, IF YOU WRITE IN CAPITAL LETTERS IT SEEMS AS IF YOU ARE SHOUTING, so please tone it down. ALL CAPS are hard to read and can trigger an angry reply if the recipient mistakes the intention of your email. Emails should be written in standard sentence style. Turn the Caps Lock off and back away from the keyboard.

Avoid Abbreviations and Emoticons

In business emails, try not to use abbreviations such as BTW (by the way) and LOL (laugh out loud). The recipient might not be aware of the meanings of the abbreviations and in business emails these are generally not appropriate. The same goes for emoticons, such as the smiley and his depressed pal . If you are not sure whether your recipient knows what an acronym means, it is better not to use it.

Don’t Use Backgrounds or Silly Graphics

I actually received an email from a fellow entrepreneur that had an animated smiley face waving a gloved hand in his signature block. If the email had come from Walt Disney I wouldn’t have been shocked. Coming from a small technology company, I had to wince. Not much to smile about there. Remember That Email Is A Formal Business Communication

You wouldn’t send a formal letter to a customer that lacked a salutation, a well-thought out body of text, and a signature. You should use email in the same manner. A proper business email should be structured like a short letter. It should have a salutation, the body of the message, a sign off, and a signature.

Next time we’ll discuss email issues that should be a concern to larger companies. If your company doesn’t have a formal email policy, you should. Tune in next week to find out why.

Here’s to your success,

Short tutorial on how to add photos and files to email. This shows yahoo, hotmail, and gmail.
Video Rating: 4 / 5

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Improve your Business with a Smart Email Marketing Campaign

Article by Jeff O’shea

Is your business not working the way it should? Are you not able to attract loads of customers due to lack of publicity? Try to get an email marketing campaign. Yes, it will surely help you in attracting new business.

Understanding email marketing campaign

Since technology is developing and progressing at a very rapid pace, the use of the internet has increased more and more by many businesses in order to market and publicize their products and services.

Email has become an extremely cost effective method of marketing a business. There are various aspects that are essential in carrying out a successful email marketing campaign. Email marketing companies just do not send mails to customers all over the world, they focus on the email content that has been delivered, as well. The following are some tips for an effective email marketing campaign.

Focusing on the content

The company that is carrying out an email marketing campaign must focus on the most essential aspect that helps in the success of a marketing campaign, that is to let customers know what is in it for them, how can they benefit from that product and earn loads of money. The more customers get attracted to the site, the more will they think over it. Also, companies must stress on the exclusive advantages of the product or service they are offering to their customers so that the customers get complete knowledge about the product or service they are viewing on the website. This is the major tool of growing a business and is necessary for every business at its initial stage.

Sending emails to all customers

Then another most essential step during an email marketing campaign is to send emails to all those thousands of customers who may turn out to be the most precious customers in the future. The email marketing campaign companies can easily get the email list from different directories, websites and records but the companies are suggested to use the best way and that is to go for permission based email marketing. This would include opt in emailing options for clients in website pages.

Companies can also send emails through an SMTP server which responds automatically instead of manually sending mails to thousands of people and then keep checking their response.

Carrying out an email marketing campaign

Well, carrying out an email marketing campaign is a big task. It needs experts in the field of internet marketing with skilled resources in order to achieve the best benefits. Choose an established email marketing company that can hold responsibility of everything from sending mails to responding to mails and so on. An Email marketing campaign is the best way to enhance a business but you should do it very intelligently and smartly in order to make his effort worthwhile.

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Three Things You Need to Know About Online Email Marketing and Your Internet Business

Online email marketing is not hard to understand but it can get pretty dicey in determining if it is the right fit for your online business. In my opinion no matter what the circumstances online email marketing is a must for any internet business but still there are factors to consider.

1. Your target audience

Before you spend time, currency and effort into email marketing, you have to figure out how often your target audience will be online. An email marketing campaign is not worthwhile if people are not even online to check out your information. Find out if a market exists for your product or service. You can open your browser, type in any keyword search terms you wish and hit enter. Is there an audience? Next, use a keyword research tool to check out how often (per month) people are searching for information utilizing a general keyword and all the variations. This is powerful stuff. Knowing what and how your audience is searching for information can greatly help you determine whether you should start an email marketing campaign.

2. You’re Selling What?

Since we live in an advertising world that is 24/7, it is easy to get caught up in the hype. This goes for many email marketers who choose a product because it promises a big affiliate commission but they never have a clear understanding of what they are selling. This translates into not being able to explain in your emails why people need your product or service. It’s also important to remember sending people a sales letter in the disguise of an email will usually not work. Promote by providing quality information that people can utilize. Put together a small report consisting of five articles you write and give it away free to your email list. Integrate the product links into your report but use sparingly. Avoid trying to hard sell your readers. Let the report stand on its own merit while enticing people to find out more. Leave the sales pitch to the product sales page.

3. The Dreaded S-word

It is not hard to get accused of spamming these days. In the early years of email marketing you could send out unsolicited email as long as you didn’t overdo it. Guess what? Some people overdid it.

According to Anti-Spam Spam-Unit, “some researchers estimate that just under 100 billion spam messages are sent worldwide every twenty-four hours as of June 2007″. You cannot blame people for not wanting to open an email box full of spam but it’s gotten to the point that a straight forward email can now come under the heading of spam if the recipient wishes to complain. I have seen customers sign up to an email list then forget about it. When an email arrived promoting a product, they quickly yelled spam and wanted to know how the marketer had gotten their email address.

Even if people do remember signing up to your list, they have gotten so use to deleting emails without reading that getting them to open it is a science all to itself. This is why you want to give real thought to your subject line. Stay away from extravagant promises that will only trigger the spam filters. Keep in mind that certain topics (like money) in your subject line can also trigger the spam filters. Ask a question or create a top five list on the problems and or solutions to your topic. Think of your subject line as a strong push that gets your list to open your email so they can get more useful information

If you are having any doubts about incorporating it into your online marketing system just focus on your target audience by doing some keyword research, provide useful information that helps you to state the benefits of your product or service clearly and craft an email (particularly the subject line) that won’t raise a red flag with the spam filters. Email marketing is a powerful tool. Do not let any obstacles stand in your way to using it effectively.

Visit BusinessEnglishPod.com to view and download more videos on Business English for writing emails. In this episode of Email Tune-up we’re going to look at an email request to an external supplier asking them to speed up the delivery of a shipment.

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