Every small business owner is constantly challenged by the need to find new methods of generating revenue. This means tapping into new customers and convincing existing customers to purchase more products and services for many businesses. To do this, many companies employ staff or marketing teams to create and send out email marketing campaigns, which help remind customers of the company’s offerings and nurture relationships. However, creating and tracking these campaigns through normal channels is incredibly difficult and time-consuming, which is why every business should consider investing in an email marketing service.
Every email campaign contains several elements. These elements include the initial message used to reach out to a large segment of the customer base or the entire marketing list, follow-up messages that may only be sent to a select group of recipients, and response tracking. Every email must be tailored to appeal to the market segment, sent out at the appropriate time, and optimized to ensure its delivery to each recipient’s inbox, rather than being flagged as spam, to increase the business’s earning potential.
Constructing an email campaign from scratch using a general email client, such as Outlook, is very difficult and time-consuming. The staff members who construct the email must have some HTML coding knowledge and an understanding of current email best practices. They’ll also need to know what methods current spam filters are utilizing when determining which messages should be flagged as spam and current laws that pertain to sending marketing emails. The process becomes even more complicated when you consider the effort it takes to create a list of message recipients using the typical email service, timing those messages for delivery, tracking message responses, and manually updating opt-out lists promptly, which is required by law, which is why lawyers seek secure email hosting services.
Using an email marketing service streamlines and speeds up the entire marketing process. A great benefit of using such a service is that nearly anyone can construct a visually pleasing message with the provided marketing tools. Many services offer a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) email editor that makes constructing a message almost as easy as creating a word processing document. There will also be some professional email templates to choose from to help you create your messages.
Certain marketing services provide you with a spam checking tool. This tool will assess each of your messages for common spam flags and will alert you when any of those flags are present within your content. By removing the offending content from your emails, you can greatly increase your deliverable, leading to increased customer retention and sales.
One of the most difficult things for marketers to do when using normal email methods for constructing a list of message recipients is to whittle down that list to a specific segment based on a wide range of criteria. Typically, marketers may look through various address books or spreadsheets to come up with the list, which is very time-consuming. When using email marketing software, the process becomes much easier. Once the database has been uploaded into the application, you can use the provided search engine to segment your database according to a wide range of criteria, including location, revenue, product interests, and much more. Each segment can be named and saved for future reference and updated at any time.
Scheduling your messages and creating drip campaigns can be done within minutes when using an email marketing service. Some services even provide you with a step by step wizard to help you through the entire process, including creating or choosing a message template, selecting the message audience, scheduling the initial send date, and specifying an auto-response email for anyone who opens the message or clicks on a link within the message. It is even possible to set up an automated drip campaign. For example, if you want to hit all of the message recipients who did not view your initial message with a new message at a later date, you can schedule this without having to worry about returning to the software at the right time to schedule the message manually. Some email marketing services will also allow you to create unlimited multistage drip campaigns based on specific rules.
To be CAN-SPAM compliant, every business must not send any emails to anyone who has opted out from their emails. Opting out people manually is far from foolproof and takes constant dedication. If not all, email marketing applications will automatically remove message recipients from your mailing lists if they click the opt-out link included with each of your messages. These applications will also prevent opted-out email addresses from being added back into your marketing lists and prevent them from receiving any future messages.
Every marketing team will benefit from the reporting features of email marketing services. Most services provide several standard reporting templates and the ability to create custom templates that display a wide range of data, including the number of delivered emails, opened messages, bounces, and opt-outs. You can also easily compile statistics on message response rates, which is vital to understanding which types of content appeal to your customer base and which types fall flat.
By choosing the appropriate email marketing service for your business, you can speed up each of your campaigns’ development and deployment. It will be much easier for you to keep in constant contact with your customer base. You may even be able to save money on marketing expenses by having a smaller marketing team and increase sales by reaching out to the right people at the right time.
We have been using Email Marketing from HostOtter.com for about two years now and have been extremely happy with the results. We send out campaigns once per week and get complete tracking on who opened the email and who didn’t. Their service is Spam compliant, so no need to worry about getting blocked by the big email providers.