Every business can benefit from Email Direct Marketing as a part of their marketing mix. Email Marketing is a cost effective solution to generate immediate business thereby offering a promising return on investment, it’s also an excellent tool for building and maintaining relationships. The best way to use email marketing is in association with a promotion.

Email Marketing has a number of benefits that make it the most important marketing mechanism available to small businesses today:

Benefits of email marketing

Builds customer relationships
Re-enforces campaign strategies
Allows for targeted marketing strategies
Attracts more consumers via promoted offers
Provides a platform for the promotion of special events & promotions
Allows you to showcase new products and services
Provides Brand awareness
Email Campaigns cost less to produce and distribute than traditional marketing.
They can be produced and distributed extremely quickly.
Response rates for email campaigns are higher than traditional direct marketing.
Recipients have the ability to respond immediately.
Email allows businesses to create an ongoing dialogue with customers.
Results are immediately measurable.
Allows for testing to be done at a fraction of the cost.
Adds value to products and services.
Email Campaigns provide the ability to focus on target markets and to personalize with a name.

Elements of an Effective Email Campaign

There are a number of elements to a successful email marketing campaign:

•Insert your recipient’s first name to personalise the email.

•Attention grabbing subject line of 50 or less characters – it must entice the reader to want to read on.

• Email body that relates to the subject line.

• Content that is valuable in itself, whether or not they purchase from you. Keep it short and succinct and selling the benefits.

• Entertaining as well as informative

• Promotions - From time to time, offer special “subscribers only” promotions and follow through. Don’t have the same offer on the sales page everyone else goes to. Give them a special link for a page you create with the discount just for them. The same holds true for the “customer only” promotions. This should be exclusive offer to your readers

• Link to your Site - Always include a link to your sales page or home page in url form so that they can copy and paste if they prefer, as many do for security reasons. For example, instead of linking “Canvas Marketing Email Solutions”, link “http://www. CanvasMarketingEmailSolutions.com”.

• Contact details - If you’re not selling on your site, then be sure to include a phone number and/or location, as well as a link to your site where they can learn more.

• Call to Action - Include a short call to action, but don’t make every email a pitch. Just include a one-line call to action once or twice in the email. Save your pitches for special promotions, etc. and make them exciting. Show subscribers you care about giving them the valuable newsletter you promised. Email campaigns build relationships, and relationships open the door to sales and referrals.

• Signature – Be sure it includes name, title and website url. If you have a contact number and/or physical address you want them to call or visit, add that too.

• Image – An image can tell a different story to the body text, be sure to use high quality images. Often incorporating an image with a person in it can relate much better to your audience as it personalises the message.

• Distribution Time Counts – Send your emails at the times most people are likely to be online in your main geographical region, Statistic say Tuesday morning at 10am is the best time to distribute an email and second to that is Thursday at 10am.

Streamlining Your Email Campaign

Be sure to respect all anti-spam laws. To check up on these, go to Spam Act 2003 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/sa200366/
Rather than bombard your database with numerous emails you can always create a newsletter whereby people who’ve opted in will expect to receive information and offers.
Avoid the “hard sell”
Collect a good database. It is also a good idea to segment your database and test the response of your email on a small section. You will then be able to predict the overall outcome once it’s fully implemented.
Incorporate into an autoresponder service (many are free) you can handle a much larger subscription base as many email services like Gmail, Yahoo and website hosting based email don’t allow you to send out too many emails at once as this is a red flag for spamming. Keeping track of all those subscriptions can get tricky too.

The autoresponder service’s software will automatically generate delivery of sequenced emails to your subscribers. You set the intervals, such as first email within 24 hours, second email, two days later and so forth. You load the emails you write into the system. And they deliver.

Once in a while you may want to send a “broadcast” to the entire list, such as when you have a special promotion. The autoresponder can also handle this.

If you subscribe to any email newsletters, tips, etc. you most likely have autoresponders in your inbox.

As you can guess, autoresponder services can save you a great deal of time.

By searching Google for “free autoresponder,” you can find decent services. Be sure that the service you choose complies with anti-spam laws. With most of these, the tradeoff for the free service will be that they advertise in your emails. If so, make sure their ad won’t distract from your message.

Some, such as Autoresponders 4 All, don’t place ads but simply require you to link to their site from your home page. Know that some of these free services use the “double opt-in.” This means that the subscriber will receive an email asking them to click (or copy and paste) a url to designate they really meant to subscribe. This cuts down on subscription numbers, although it’s not the end of the list, and the features with some of these free services make it worth it.

If you don’t mind paying for a service that does even more for you, such as tracking subscribers’ interactions with your email and site, AWeber is one of the best and allows you to pay per amount of subscribers while having as many lists as you want. They start out at around $25 a month. And they don’t require double opt-in.

Canvas Marketing provides Marketing Consultancy and Marketing Services such as Email Marketing. If you want improved results and more business from your email marketing campaign or simply want to start to use Email Marketing in your business contact us on:

Tel: 03 9482 5187 or
Email info@canvasmarketing.com.au