How not to and how to do email marketing
Emails are quick, cheap and easy to send out which is one of the reasons why so much of your inbox is full of unwanted messages.
Emails are simple and quick
It is simple to send out a hundred emails in a relatively short period of time. Because it is so easy to rapidly churn out such messages you may be inclined to focus on volume rather than quality on the basis that you may think it is a numbers game and, therefore, will receive the positive responses that you had targeted. Regrettably, this is just not the case entirely and you need to put a lot more effort and research into your email marketing campaign.
Quality of the data
You would be wrong to think that every B2B data company provides high quality, up to date contact information for you to work from. As in most areas of business there are good and bad suppliers of such data and it is important that you are working from data that is relevant and up to date. After all, there is no point in sending out emails to johnsmith @ abc.com if he left the company twelve months ago. Select a data company provider that comes highly recommended and provides a guarantee of a certain level of accuracy.
Relevant content
So often, businesses send out emails without any prior research into whether the content has any relevance to the recipient. After all, what is the point in sending out an email about the benefits of pet grooming equipment to one hundred nursing homes when it is quite likely that the residents are not allowed to keep a pet on the premises?
Personalisation
You have no doubt received a number of emails that are addressed to “Dear Sir, “To Whom It May Concern or “Good Afternoon”. What do you do with them? You probably don’t even bother to open them merely transferring them into your “Bin” folder. What a waste of your time in sending them out!
If you had taken the time to use the decision maker’s name in the email you would have had more chance of that email being opened and then read which means that you are part of the way their in achieving that sale.
Analyse the results
There is a misconception that once those emails have been sent there is little more that you can do other than to wait for the replies to come into your inbox or for your phone to ring. That would be fine if the number of positive responses you received meant that you were so busy dealing with orders that you had no time to monitor the performance of your email marketing campaign.
The reality, especially in the early days, is that it is unlikely you will get the level of responses you were hoping to, so it is important to analyse the results of the campaign(s) to avoid making the same mistakes. You should try different approaches with future campaigns until you are meeting your sales targets generated by email marketing. Even when you are, continue to look for ways to improve your results by making small changes to how you approach things.
The above are just a few examples of how not to do email marketing together with some thoughts on how best to do so. Feel free to leave your comments below highlighting any others.