NGR's Blog

A business cannot live by one outbound communication per year.  Chances are good you have probably wondered about your own communications strategy. Are you communicating enough?

Think about how many times during the year/quarter/month a customer needs you, or your products or services, and let that be your guide to determining how often to reach out and touch your audience. Think of this number as a minimum, then build from there.

Your business could be a marketing consulting firm, a software company, a nonprofit, an educational institution, a car dealership, a florist, a restaurant, a vineyard, a rock and roll band--you name it! Success and profitability is all about creating loyal customers (e.g. clients, users, donors, buyers, diners, drinkers, and fans) and driving interest, repeat business, and referrals.

Since it is roughly six to 12 times less expensive to sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one, the value of customer loyalty and repeat business is just too compelling to ignore.

Whether you are new to email marketing or a savvy veteran, working for a company that sends 500 emails a week or 500,000, there are certain policies you should follow to optimize your campaigns. Call them the commandments of email marketing or call them best practices; here are 18 ideas to improve your delivery, open, and response rates.

Email marketing is an extremely effective marketing medium in B2B business scenarios. Unlike consumer marketing where customers are innumerable, customers are easily identified and limited in any B2B. Since the number of people to be addressed is limited, and contact details obtained relatively easily, Email marketing can be leveraged with potent benefits to the organization.

In B2B Email marketing the fundamental principles of marketing continue to be relevant. It definitely pays off to spend some time thinking,formulating and documenting a email marketing strategy prior to initiating any customer communication.

An opt-in list can be defined as a list or database that contains email addresses of people who consented to receive the advertiser's email messages. The messages come in various forms, such as product and web site updates, or ezines. Opt-in lists are regarded as the most powerful marketing tool available on the world wide web, because opt-in lists can provide marketers with direct means of communication with potential customers, and gives a chance to promote products and services, plus building a continuing relationship with them.

Marketing through email has become the primary means of many advertisers to reach out to its customers. They are immensely attracted by the fact that email marketing allows them to communicate with their customers directly, with very minimal cost, compared to direct mail marketing.

Broadly speaking, B2C is the activity of a business servicing end consumers with a product and/or service, a consumer being defined as a buyer of products that are not business related. These products include food, clothes, houses, phone services etc. An easy example of a B2C transaction would be a person buying shoes from a retailer. The transaction that leads to the shoes being available for purchase, that is the buying of the leather, rubber and laces as well as the sale of the shoe from the shoemaker to the retailer, would be considered a B2B transaction.

When it comes down to it, a B2C email marketing campaign is most likely to be assessed by sales, which means it’s successful if it results in a purchase.

Some of the most effective B2C email marketing best practices include identifying the most opportune time to send messages, aiming to increase customer loyalty, using promotional offers in transactional emails and using surveys to gather data about customers.

B2C email marketing is the most common form of email marketing used today. Business to consumer (B2C) email marketing differs from Business to business (B2B) marketing in many ways. The primary difference is the time between the point of contact and sale. When creating B2C email marketing messages, most marketer’s objective is to get a customer to click through and buy a product or service as quickly as possible. While relationship building is important, it is not as important as it is in a B2B email marketing situation.

Everyday Internet users receive tons of emails telling them to buy certain products or visit particular websites. While these emails arrive in the inboxes of unsuspecting Internet users each day, most of them pay very little attention to these emails. That is because emails which are blatant advertisements are often viewed as spam. Most Internet users have very little tolerance for spam.Reactions to spam tend to range from simply ignoring the emails and having the email addresses blocked from sending future emails to reporting the emails to their Internet service provider for further investigation. We realize many Internet marketers have difficulty keeping their email marketing subtle. Therefore this article will provide some useful information on how email marketing can be kept subtle so it is not viewed as spam.

One of the most important criteria for ensuring your email marketing is subtle and will not be viewed as spam is to provide something of quality to the recipients. This may include insightful articles, interesting quizzes or other useful facts which members of the target audience are likely to find useful. When email recipients realize an email they received is offering them something worthwhile such as knowledge or information about a particular niche subject they are much more likely to spend some time reviewing the email because they will not consider the email to be spam. In addition to using the creation of this copy to convince recipients that the email is not spam, the business owners can also take advantage of this copy by providing subtle advertising. This may include product references in the articles or links to your website throughout the email.

Just before revealing the secrets of the trades, here are myths and fallacies that have to be cleared before one indulges into building an opt-in list. These advertising misconceptions could pose so much of an obstacle towards your profiting well from your enterprise.

Not a whole lot of people use email

Email marketing is one of the most effective advertising strategies nowadays basically because virtually practically all people use email. Check on those email fields or blanks required to be filled up on various forms required in processing distinct transactions. An individual without an email address is tantamount to an individual with out an on the internet home, which is one big shameful truth for this generation.

Email marketing campaigns can offend a lot of folks

The not-so secret way to surmount this dilemma is through permission-based advertising. There’s no harm in trying after asking for permission.

It is stupid to send email to all of the individuals

The key to this predicament would be to have a quite discerning eye on who to email and who to not email. Much better look for some metrics on the best way to know which group of folks would give you high ROI or return on investment.

The Real Deal with Building Opt-in List

After clearing the fog regarding email advertising myths, here’s how one can benefit from employing the power of email advertising campaigns – building an opt-in list.

Even so, building an opt-in list isn’t a piece of cake especially for the uninitiated. Here is really a roundown of tips on the way to succeed in this type of marketing endeavor.