Sending email IS NOT marketing!

posted by Edward Phelps on 2009.06.16, under Blogs, Email Marketing, Marketing
06.16

It really hurts businesses seriously interested in leveraging new marketing technologies to market and promote more effectively when email marketing services sell themselves as “Marketing” solutions. They are email marketing services, period. An email marketing system or service is one component of and email marketing campaign.

But let’s digress for a moment, I am defining marketing as “the activities that a business undertakes to prompt customers and prospects to take a desired action.” That action might be to make a purchase or attend an event. Whatever, the point of any marketing effort is to get people to do something you want them to do.

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Popularity: 70% [?]

3 Tactics For More Effective Email Marketing

posted by Edward Phelps on 2009.06.16, under Blogs, Email Marketing, Marketing
06.16

Here are 3 crucial items that are typically overlooked in the discussion and planning of email campaigns. They focus on what I feel is the bottom line reason businesses use email marketing at all – to generate sales or some other specific action.

1. Track Conversions
Design and implement conversion tracking processes for your campaigns. If your objective is to attract attendees to an event then be sure to require people to check-in so you can know who came and which of them participated in your email campaigns. If the goal is sales then devise a way to know if the sale came from one of your campaigns.

2. Follow-Up Consistently
Do do you remember the the last place you shopped that sent you a timely and relevant email thanking you for your business and/or extending you an offer? Thought so. So be sure to put all that wondrous email marketing technology to work enabling you to send relevant follow-up communications consistently. And take care to follow-up based on each persons interests and preferences, not generically. See item 3 for more on personalization and segmentation.

3. Personalize and Segment
At a minimum capture the name and email address of anyone in your mail lists. Then personalize all emails with the persons name appropriately. And don’t send the same email to everyone. Segment your list. Group list members by different products or services you offer and by characteristics that make them most and least likely to buy what you offer. This most often means collecting more data. Do that.

Popularity: 66% [?]

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