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Email Marketing Strategy
The email marketing strategy should have a
very specific purpose and goal. One goal of an email marketing strategy is
to keep the products at the top of a potential customer's mind, and begin
to brand the products. By sending an email to someone on a regular basis,
you can tell them about your products and remind them to visit the website
or contact you for additional information.
You can also purchase email addresses of people who told other companies
that they would like to hear about offers from "third parties". Sometimes
these are available from partners. This would typically be a one-time
email message, telling them about a specific product offer, perhaps
including promotional pricing.
Opt-in email newsletters are another way to keep your name in front of our
potential customers. However, to be effective, the information presented
in the newsletter should be valuable enough to make people sign up to
receive the newsletter. And it should provide enough valuable information
so that they want to continue to receive it on a regular basis. Simply
telling them about your products isn't enough; it should include news or
commentary. Email newsletters don't come without a cost, as someone must
write it and be responsible for sending it out on a regular basis.
Before a decision is made to start an email newsletter, many questions
should be answered first:
- Who is going to write it?
- Can we produce enough unique material
about a subject to warrant calling it a newsletter?
- How will we get them to opt-in?
- How many people do we expect to reach
each time it is sent?
- What should we expect as the
subscription level (how many subscribers at one time)? At what
subscription level does it make sense to publish the newsletter and at
what level does it not make sense to publish the newsletter? In other
words, if we only have 10 subscribers, then would it make sense to
continue publishing the newsletter? What about 50 subscribers? 100? 200?
- Do we need to outsource the technical
aspects of publishing the newsletter or can we handle it in-house?
If a decision is made to outsource the
technical aspects of the newsletter (such as emailing it and handling the
subscriptions (subscribing and unsubscribing), then a specific set of
requirements must be put together. Then, once those requirements are
approved, an RFP should be made available to a few vendors.
Options other than writing and hosting a newsletter of your own, is
advertising with a text-based ad on
other email newsletters and/or mailing lists. Many industry trade
publications currently send out an email newsletters or email editions
(some are daily), as well as various other industry-related websites.
Also, there are mailing lists (subscribers send an email to a server and
it is then automatically re-sent to all subscribers of the mailing list).
If any advertising like this is done, then you need to have a strong
handle on what happens when someone clicks on an ad (or visits a specific
web page). They need to find exactly the information they're looking for
and then be presented with a call for action and an incentive to contact
you.
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