Thread: Email Marketing to Stay in Touch with Customers

Today's internet business world is very competitive. New websites are emerging often making the business more competitive. In majority of businesses return customers comprises a major portion of the business. And that makes it very important stay in touch with customers informing them about upcoming products, promotions etc. Email Marketing could help you stay in touch with your customers.

Advantages of email marketing

- The advantage of a mailing list is clearly the ability to distribute information to a wide range of specific, potential customers at a relatively low cost.

- Compared to other media investments such as direct mail or printed newsletters, it is less expensive.

- An exact Return on investment can be tracked and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.

- It is instant, as opposed to a mailed advertisement, an email arrives in a few seconds or minutes.

- It lets the advertiser "push" the message to its audience, as opposed to a website that waits for customers to come in.

- It is easy to track. An advertiser can track users via web bugs, read-receipts etc.

- Advertisers generate repeat business affordably and automatically

- Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them

- Over half of Internet users check or send email on a typical day.

CAN-SPAM compliance

Because the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 authorizes a USD 11,000 penalty per violation for spamming each individual recipient, many commercial email marketers within the United States utilize a service or special software that helps ensure compliance with the Act. A variety of older systems exist which do not ensure compliance with the Act.

To comply with the Act's regulation of commercial email:

- services typically require users to authenticate their return address and include a valid physical address

- provide a one-click unsubscribe feature

- does not use imported lists of purchased addresses which may not have given valid permission.


Help is there

In addition to satisfying legal requirements, service providers stepped in to help customers to set up and manage their own email marketing campaigns. The services provide email templates, automatically handle subscriptions and removals, and generate statistics on how many messages were received and opened, and whether the recipients clicked on any links within the messages.

Conclusion

Although email campaign can bring good results to your business, it may also ruin your business if not handled right.

Few point to note for a successful email marketing:

- Build your own list. On your website ask customers to sign in for your email newsletter.

- Do not use purchased email list. You may end up paying too much in penalty.

- Don't send emails too often. From my experience 2 to 3 times per month is enough. People get annoyed with frequent emails.

- Use a nice professional looking HTML email templates.

very nice post webdigo...once again.