Brick and mortar businesses, as well as those that operate entirely within the realm of e-commerce, are driving traffic to their Web sites with email direct marketing. This powerful marketing tool is a great way to maintain a relationship with prospects, giving you more opportunities to sell them your valuable products and services. Here are five elements to help you take your online marketing to the next level with direct email.
1. Protect Your Reputation
Whether you realize it or not, every time you communicate with your audience, whether it be a direct sales letter or an ad, you are creating an emotional character for your audience. Whether your audience is interested in what you have to say largely depends on the reputation of this character. No one wants to do business with a persona that seems dishonest, unqualified, or untrustworthy. That is why you need to provide your audience with value every time you communicate with them. Give them informative, engaging content in your weekly email blasts. Provide proof of authenticity by using secure email and opt-in practices that are respectful of your customers.
2. Be Relevant
Direct marketing is all about cultivating high quality relationships with your best customers. In order to find these customers, your email marketing needs to be as relevant to your business, and your customer's related needs and interests, as possible. Additionally you should only market through mediums that are similarly relevant. Put thought into how and where you will capture email addresses, and only buy email lists from sources that capture information through methods relevant to your business.
3. Relationship Building
The best way to build quality relationships with your market is to consistently deliver value to your customers, even if it is only in the form of information. Regularly emailing your customers with informative articles and videos related to their most pressing interests or concerns, is a great way to prove your value in their mind. With a little forethought and considerable planning, you can set up auto responders for your email content so that each customer sees the same information in the same order, helping you automate maintenance of your customer relationships and create a uniform sales funnel that can be easily measured and refined.
4. Refine Your Processes
Keep metrics on which emails are sent, received and opened. Pay attention to direct marketing pieces that have particularly high conversion or click through rates. These vehicles have some quality that your audience found particularly useful or enjoyable and had the desired effect of getting their attention. If you can figure out what those qualities are, you can refine your process to focus on those actions that are most effective. Have some kind of data collection process in place to track metrics on every email that has your name on it.
5. ROI
At the end of the day, the most important measure of whether your email campaigns are effective is if they generate more revenue than they cost. Return on investment is always the best measure of business success. If email campaigns are not generating more money than they cost, you will want to re-examine your processes and content to make campaigns more effective.
For more information about how email direct marketing can help you generate more business, contact the industry experts at ComarkDirect.com now!
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