Customer Engagement – The best way to get more out of Email Marketing

Article by AlterSage

Email marketing is still one of the most powerful (proverbial) arrows in the eMarketer’s quiver. Email marketing is so effective because it puts your brand and message directly into your customers’ inboxes – many people’s most frequent touch-point with the Internet.

Fundamentally, email marketing is a customer relationship management tool and, when used effectively, this direct marketing method can be used to directly drive customer engagement with your business.

We all know that email marketing messages need to be relevant, permission-based and personalised to maximise open rates and responses. Segmenting your subscribers certainly enables you to deliver more targeted emails which are less likely to be perceived as spam, but now that you’ve passed the first hurdle and convinced the recipient to open the email, you’re ready for your second challenge – getting them to take action.

As we’ve seen through the rise of social media and social media marketing, customers like to be involved, they enjoy talking to brands and they value others’ opinions. Businesses that are able to understand the changes in their customers’ behaviour and mindsets, and that retain a focus on delivering added value, will enjoy the rewards of customer engagement. Ultimately, increased customer engagement translates into increased brand awareness, leads and sales.

In November 2009, Econsultancy published a great blog post detailing six steps to improve customer engagement in 2010. The post works to dispel the myth that email marketing is on the way out thanks to the meteoric rise of social media and other new channels of communication. Effectively, email marketing material needs to be relevant and worth reading – you need to cut through all the other noise to really reach your customers. The post’s author, James Gurd, summarises the challenges to engagement when he says:

“Where I think the challenge lies is in understanding how to engage customers using email marketing, integrating with other channels like social media, instead of relying on blast broadcasts and hoping that someone will respond because you’ve taken the time to email.”

Some of the tips for increasing user engagement and ultimately driving leads and sales through your email marketing initiatives include:

- Encourage your customers to engage through social media. This can be as simple as including a standard button on each mailer that links to your social media profiles. Also, use the opportunity to educate your readers about how they can engage with you elsewhere, and what benefits they’ll derive from such an interaction.

- Improve relevance with triggered emails. This works best if your site allows functionality such as bookmarking and wish lists. Basically, by allowing customers to tell you when important events are happening, what their interests and so forth, you can create a dynamic, tailored email to be sent at a specific time with relevant content and offers to meet their needs. This is essentially an extension of CRM.

- Drive clicks with customer reviews. People trust what other people say. Recent studies show that 74% of people indicate that they are influenced by the opinions of others when making a purchasing decision. So, first and foremost you need to get customer reviews onto your website. This shows credibility and drives customer engagement on the site. Next, you can use email marketing to drive traffic to your customer review pages.

If you think your Email Marketing campaigns needs sprucing up, contact the AlterSage team. Whether you are looking for an email software solution, a fully-managed solution or simply newsletter content creation, we will gladly assist.

How Email Marketing Software Can Give you More Leads That you Can Handle

Few will argue over the fact that there are hardly any online marketing tools that will give you results faster than email marketing. Yet it is also true to say that creating your opt-in email list can be quite a challenge. In fact it has often proved to be a nightmare to many webmasters.

The sad result has been the all too common scenario where a person plunges into email marketing very enthusiastically only to quickly throw in the towel in frustration shortly after.

This is where email marketing software comes in. This is one software tool that has made a huge difference for many online entrepreneurs all over the world.

Why Many Find Email Marketing Software So Useful

There are a number of good reasons why so many people find email marketing software so useful. The most obvious is the fact that email marketing is by nature very labor intensive and often involves lots of repetitive boring tasks that must be done. In actual fact the way humans were created is such that they quickly get bored and lose concentration when they get involved in repeating the same tasks over and over again. This is even truer in this information age we live in when it is so easy to get a computer with the right software to accomplish so many wonderful things for us.

Email marketing software ensures that all the necessary tasks are done quickly and constantly without you even having to think about it. In fat the people who use software often look back and wonder how they ever managed without it.

Email Marketing Software Makes List Building Scientific

There is one particular common mistake online marketers make all the time. And this is to approach the task of list building blindly, going about it in some trial and error manner. This is a big mistake that has cost so many people their businesses. The right approach is to start with a specific goal and objective in mind and then to work out what exactly you need to do to reach that goal.

Email marketing software makes all this extremely easy. In fact the software forces a scientific approach to your online marketing, which virtually guarantees success in any email marketing venture or campaign.

Email Marketing Software Forces You to Be Focused

It goes without saying that for you to be successful at anything on the World Wide Web, it is very important for you to be focused in everything you do. The web is a huge place where it is easy to get lost. To start with there are so many distractions and things bound to lead you off in the wrong direction or just divert you off-course.

The truth is that ordinarily it will take a lot of discipline patience and hard work to be able to achieve this on your own and without the help of any software. However when you introduce email marketing software into the equation it becomes very easy. The marketing software is already built to focus unemotionally on some key specifics in the whole marketing effort.

Email Marketing Software: Makes Testing Much Easier

The sad thing here is that few online marketers realize how important testing is in any form of direct marketing and especially in online marketing, which is as direct as they get. Testing and then carefully measuring the results and comparing with other test results is a very powerful marketing tool that will help anybody quickly arrive at what is the most ideal way forward which will give the best results and response from the market.

Software naturally makes testing much easier to accomplish complete with the measurement of results. The best thing about most email marketing software is the fact that you get everything in one software package and literally almost on one page. This makes analysis very easy.

In Conclusion

It is not just any software that will help you accomplish all this wonderful things. The truth is that you require good email marketing software created by people who understand the challenges of email marketing. Once you have gotten this right, there is really no limit to what you can achieve.

Email Marketing Solutions Provide Help For Car Dealerships in Bringing More Clients Service Centers

Email marketing solutions can help your car dealership enhance the number of vehicles that come in for service. Keeping consistent numbers is all well and good, but everyone knows having increasing monthly numbers is better. Email marketing solutions track the campaigns you send out so that you get real time data on the customers who are interested in the promotions you offer them regarding your service centre.

By reminding your customer to bring their cars in for service, you have the opportunity to multiply the amount of vehicles coming in for service. More vehicles for service means higher numbers in sales.

So, how do email marketing solutions help you bring more cars to your service center? Simple, all your customers really need is a reminder: “Hey you know that asset of yours that you paid thousands of dollars for? You need to make sure it’s in tip top shape, and it will only cost you .”

Your computer database most likely lists all of your clients’ contact information, such as how many times they have visited, and when their vehicle is due for service. This is vital information for you to use when creating a campaign through email marketing solutions.

You can also use the “number of visits” and the “vehicles due for service” categories, to help you segment your email marketing solutions campaigns into frequent users, sometime users, and seldom users.

Now you are ready to create three different marketing campaigns, for three different target customer groups, while reminding them all how important their investment is to them.

Once you have created your campaigns, the magic happens. Email marketing solutions are equipped to track how many people have opened your email, if they have clicked on the promotions, or if they have sent your email on to friends or family.

The data gets even more in depth than that. You can know exactly who opened the email you sent, who clicked on each link within the email, on what day, and at what time. These insights can help you further segment your email marketing solutions campaign. As an example, let’s say that you are tracking those that “frequently” bring their cars in to your service center: 50% are clicking on their ” off preferred customer” promotion on the weekends; and the other 50% are opening and clicking on their emails from Monday to Friday.

You now have two more customer groups to better target your audience: weekend readers and weekday readers. You can then split your future email marketing campaigns into 2, so that your emails arrive into your customers’ inboxes exactly when they’re most likely to read it.

You will also be able to grow your list with a “forward to friends” button that is available on most email marketing solutions. For those customers that are constantly forwarding your email (we love these guys) you can show your appreciation by segmenting yet again.

You can offer them a special promotion for forwarding your email. This will keep them in the business of continuing to spread the good word about your service center.

It’s really easy to take “tracked” information and turn it into another campaign. Email marketing solutions are very user-friendly, so the tracking feature of most email marketing solutions gives you the option to export the data found within any given field.

Email marketing solutions will bring more people to your automotive dealership service center by providing you with the information you need to segment and target your customers. Catering to your audience’s exact needs will bring more of them to your service center and provide you with a better opportunity to grow your sales per month.

Tutorial passo-a-passo de como disparar uma campanha de E-Mail Marketing através da 123 Site. Funcionalidades e Relatórios

Email Marketing Solutions: Choose the One That Suits You More

 

Are you searching for email marketing solutions to give your business a lift? If you are, then this is going to be your best business decision ever. Business means revolving around the axis of opportunities and grabbing them as and when you get a chance. If the Internet has created opportunities for businesses to promote their products, then it will imprudent on their part not to utilize them.

Email marketing is the best marketing option for any business whether big or small. Start ups need email marketing solutions more as they go about creating a market niche for themselves. If you have invested money in setting up a business, it is very essential to expect fair return on your investment. Anyway, business is all about earning profits at the end of the day.

There are hordes of email marketing solutions to choose from. You can select opt-in email marketing. As email marketing depends on the target audience, it is essential to analyze which audience you are looking to target. This way you save time and money. It helps help you concentrate your energy on particular potential customers.

Email marketing Tips is the first among the basic email marketing solutions, which is not time bound. You can upload various Tips List into your auto responder and transmit to opt in list as per the requirement. These tips normally relate to market, containing articles, recommendations, ideas and the ongoing trends in the market. It is a time saving exercise as you can copy write your own articles and get them written from outside sources and give them a personal touch.

Newsletters are another way of promoting specific products and services. It is a time bound email marketing solution. Newsletters are sent to customers at their email addresses as and when a new product is slated to be launched or has already found its way to the market.

Ezines also greatly serve as great email marketing solutions. Ezines are electronic magazines that they are sent to the subscribers at their email addresses unlike magazines that are sent through mails. You can advertise your products on ezines.

Related Email Marketing Articles

Many online businesses are using email marketing lists to send ads and other promotional materials to people in an effort to generate traffic and sales. This opt in email marketing can come in the form of newsletters, updates and special discounts as well as software upgrades announcements. This is a chance for website owners to keep in touch with those on their email marketing list and to hopefully gain new and repeat customers.

By submitting an email address, a web site visitor agrees join an email marketing list and to receive updates and other promotional information from the website. Use only opt in email addresses for your marketing campaign. There are many legitimate email suppliers out there but with any email marketing list that you purchase, be sure that the addresses also include full name, IP and date stamp in case you need proof.

Using email marketing lists, companies can send their promotional materials in a number of different formats from plain text, to pages complete with animated full color graphics. Each business has their own unique layout design, but more important than the style, is the content. Email content is what grabs the attention of potential customers subscribing to an email marketing list. So what is essential when sending promotional materials to your email marketing list and what keeps subscribers interested?

Preparing Your Email Marketing List

Keep your promotional materials light, creative and original. Most people on your email marketing list don’t have the time or interest in reading a stuffy emails filled with technical information. So keep it light and friendly. Short is better than long but if necessary divide your promotional email into several short articles. Taking in several smaller bits of information is easier to digest than one long run on article.

Your email promotional materials should be clear and informative but not overly technical and should appeal to a wide range of people. In creating an opt in email marketing campaign, well written content and articles are important, Effective copy should outline the benefits of your product or service and why those on your email marketing list need what you are offering. This is where a professional copy writer can come in. They can write content that builds trust between your company and your customers.

Add photos and color in your marketing materials. Provide clear and crisp images of what you have to offer subscribers to your email marketing list. An image might be just the thing to get a reader to click through to your site for more information.

Email your promotional information or newsletters from Tuesday to Thursday. On Mondays people are usually busy with getting back to work and on Fridays they are just too busy looking forward to the weekend. So an informative and light email arriving in the middle of the week might be a pleasant little break.