The email marketing o Email marketing is a direct form of online marketing. A company has the possibility to send its advertising material directly to its target group, provided that the recipient has given their consent. This inexpensive variant compared to print business promotion is an important marketing tool for businesses, preferably online stores. This is illustrated by the annual increase in trade promotion budgets for this sector. Newsletters are the classic form of email marketing.
Context
Email marketing is often equated with informative newsletters. Regardless, email marketing involves more than just sending out regular newsletters to potential customers or clients. Actually, any promotional or sales promotion email can be considered part of email marketing. It can be a reminder email about a shopping cart not purchased or a note about a promotional action in progress. Communication in email marketing can take place between individuals (one to one) or between a company and entire groups of people (one to many). Under the new data protection law, the consent of the recipient is required for delivery. promotional or information emails, as these emails may lead to the issuance of warnings such as illegal commercial promotion. In general, the consent of the recipients is limited only to the receipt of regular newsletters.
How to develop an email campaign
To arouse the interest of the reader, mainly the introductory sentences of the writing must be convincing. This is the only way to avoid interrupting the reading procedure. Attention is highest after opening the newsletter and decreases with each additional line. The process is different for hard copy. The suspense can build until the end of the letter. The content should be brief and personally formulated. The division into subsections makes reading easier and keeps the receiver in a good mood.
The subject line plays a special role. If you can't get the recipient's interest in your content, your campaign hasn't met its goals. The shipping schedule must be reasonable. A flood of information and too long a time interval between newsletters is a disadvantage. It would be advisable to send a cover letter separately for the different target groups in order to convey the desired information even more specifically.
A thorough evaluation cannot be dispensed with to ensure continuous improvement of the newsletters. If the planned objectives have not been met, the cause needs to be determined.
The delivery time should also be included in the planning of the email campaign. Is it better to send an email in the morning? Is the target group more likely to read the emails on the weekends? Even though these questions cannot be answered clearly, they can be defined in advance and then made the most of through testing.
Goals of email marketing
First of all, email marketing pursues the objective of attracting new customers and keeping them loyal. Newsletters regularly inform about product innovations, upcoming events or internal changes. This integrates the recipient into the company. The recipients are part of the company, even if it is indirectly at the beginning, and this connection can be reinforced with each newsletter.
At the same time, brand awareness can be improved through this medium. The image of a product or an entire company can be maintained or directed in an entirely new direction by means of an attractive email advertisement. A good image leads to growing customer confidence and growing market value. Last but not least, email marketing is also a popular tool for product and market research.
Advantages compared to printed commercial promotion
- There are no material costs.
- Fast shipping and immediate response from customers.
- Great interest from customers, since the receipt of the newsletters has given their consent.
- Opportunity for immediate control of success through web analytics.
- Shorter delivery time than printed commercial promotion.
- Additional retargeting options
Possible downsides of email marketing
- Due to the large number of advertising emails, they often receive little attention.
- Digital emails can easily be perceived as less valuable than print products.
- In the case of a large number of subscribers or recipients, the costs of email marketing can also be higher.
- Too high a sending frequency can result in a defensive attitude on the part of the recipient.
Measuring the success of the marketing campaign
A successful campaign can be reflected in a selective increase in traffic to a website, as well as an increase in sales or conversion. Cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-sale KPIs provide meaningful information. The prerequisite for success is that emails arrive and that no bounced messages occur.
Tools like MailChimp or HubSpot they can be used to launch and track email campaigns. In spite of everything, it is also feasible to provide all the links of an email campaign with URL parameters that can be analyzed by means of analysis tools such as Google Analytics.
A link with proper tracking parameters might look like this:
www.examplesite.com/?utm_source=Newsletter%202015&utm_medium=Correo electrónico&utm_campaign=promotional_action%201
In this way, the traffic source and campaigns can be specified in more detail in the web analytics tool.
Open Rate
Open rate is an important KPI in email marketing. All the emails of the newsletters or other shipments that are opened count. The open rate is expressed as a percentage and is the number of emails opened divided by the total number of emails sent, multiplied by 100. Bounces are not included.
An example:
An online store sends 10,000 newsletters to its customers. Of these, 4,000 are simply open. The open rate is thus 40 percent.
Open Rate = 4000: 10000 * 100 = 40%
Regardless, the open rate is a relative value, unlike other tracking mechanisms. This is generated by the tracking method itself, at the same time as other factors. The opening of an email is registered by means of a tracking pixel, that is, an image graphic of minimum size. However, since many email programs or even mobile devices do not open image data by default, it cannot be guaranteed that all openings have been tracked simply using the open rate. To fine-tune the measurement method, it is usually also taken into account whether the recipient has clicked on a link in the email. This click can be considered as real evidence to open a mailing.
Even if the open rate percentage is just a guideline, this KPI can help with a comparison between individual shipments. Thus, the open rate can be optimized as a next step by writing the subject line of the email or newsletter in such a way that it motivates the recipient to open it and create interest.
The metric click-to-open rate (CTOR) is a duration of the open rate. At the same time, you can get information about the link between opens and clicks. The CTOR can be used to establish the extent to which interest in a mailing has been aroused or the extent to which the recipient has been motivated to click on offers or links to get more information.
Relevance for online marketing
Email marketing is underestimated by many advertisers as a sales promotion tool for customer loyalty. At the same time, the effort involved in email campaigns is often misjudged. The success of an email campaign can be strongly influenced by many individual factors. The delivery time itself is an important criterion that must be included in the planning of the email campaign. The target groups, as well as the frequency of sending, also play an important role. Like all successful online marketing activities, email marketing must be designed and created. It is necessary to structure all the factors, including a thematic plan, the documentation of the sent emails, the segmentation of the recipients and the clarification of all the legal requirements. Only then can the full benefits of digital mailing be used as a comprehensive evaluation. All results reporting should be incorporated into the creation of the follow-up to increase the long-term success of the campaign.
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