Is Targeted E-Mail Marketing the Solution for You?

By: Eric Durrand 

Spam, or Junk E-Mail, is a terrible thing. It clutters our inbox with irrelevant trivia (or worse), wastes time, and interferes with our ability to effectively focus on important messages. E-Mail marketing done properly, however, can be a major value to both your company and your subscribers! 

While spammers try to reach the greatest number of readers in hope of finding a few buyers, legitimate e-mail marketers care more about the quality of their contacts and their level of interest. While spammers send e-mails to the unwilling, e-mail marketing experts recommend sending only to opt-in clients, or clients with whom the company had previous contact. While spammers do not care about whether their victims wish to receive their ads or not, in effective e-mail marketing the right to opt-out is inviolate.

 In terms of effectiveness, targeted E-mail marketing usually comes ahead of other mediums. According to a study by the Winterberry Group, E-mail marketing brings in $15.50 per dollar spent. This is about 17% more than direct-mail campaigns and 73% more than telemarketing campaigns. Given that a successful E-mail marketing campaign can start with just a few dollars per month – the sky is truly the limit. 

But for an E-mail campaign to be successful, a company must differentiate itself in all possible ways from spammers. The name and contacts of the company must be clearly indicated (this is also the law), as well as clear unsubscribe instructions, usually at the bottom. The most important differentiator, however, is content. 

Content is the king of e-mail marketing. To be read in this age of spam filters and swamped inboxes, your message has to offer a value in and of itself! Let me repeat that: unless your marketing campaigns offer some value regardless whether the person chooses to buy the product, it will not be read. Worse, it will create a negative association with your company, and will cause more harm than good. 

This means that before you can approach your subscribers, you must have something unique to say, which they would want to hear. But don’t worry! By the very nature of your business, you must hold some information and knowledge that your potential clients don’t. If you sell surfboards, you must know a lot about surfing, and if you’re a business lawyer, you should know more than your clients about new business laws and regulations. 

If you offer some of your privileged information as free advice, in the form of a monthly newsletter, or a bi-weekly update, you have better chances of having subscribers actually anticipate your messages, and develop affection for your brand. 

If you are one of those writo-phobics who can’t even think about writing a short article without breaking out in sweat – there are two possible solutions. One is – get over yourself. Buy a book about writing, like the famous On Writing Well, or Elements of Style, and get down to business. 

Another option is – find someone else to write for you. Some new companies specialize today in providing affordable, tailored content for just such an occasion. Companies like CMP United Business Media can assist you in creating the type of content you need. Alternatively, you can identify a content provider in your field, and make an offer to buy articles from them! 

The last step is selecting a proper technology platform. Here, the market is full of serious, mature solutions that make it a pleasure to manage, distribute, and send your letters. Solutions providers like JangoMail, IntelliContact, and SubscribeMail provide you, for a few dollars a month (depending on the number of subscribers), with a sleuth of useful tools for your campaign, including:
 

• Contacts Management – Allows you to import, track, export, and manage multiple lists for different campaigns.
  
  
• Automatic Subscribe and Unsubscribe – Lets users subscribe and unsubscribe themselves reliably and automatically – so you don’t have to worry about it!
  
  
• Tracking – Allows you to see how many subscribers opened each E-mail, which links were clicked most often, how many unsubscribed, and how many bounced e-mails in each distribution.
  
  
•  Spam-Check – Allows you to estimate, prior to sending, how likely is your message to be blocked by spam filters. Suggests ways to improve message to avoid being blocked. (Changing certain words, removing certain features, etc.)
  
  
•  Personalization – Allows you to personalize each message to the specific subscriber, with fields like name, title, address, and more.

 Designing your letters is the last and perhaps most crucial step in a successful E-mail marketing campaign. Using HTML, or the friendly tools and templates that many of the above services offer, you should aim to keep your design simple and clean, but professional – with the content featured most prominently, and marketing ads and other materials set unobtrusively around it.