» Email Marketing + Lead Generation - Vancouver Web Marketing

♦ What Exactly Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a prospective or current customer could be considered email marketing. It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust and brand awareness. Email marketing efforts may be conducted using cold lists, current customer databases or a hybrid list filtered by groups.

Cold lists may include recipients who've double opted-in for information relative to your industry, product and/or service, but may never have had direct contact with your business. Actively reaching out to your existing client or customer base simply makes sense. Whether it be a regular newsletter, a weekly podcast alert or a brief for your latest blog posts, email marketing can make all the difference in generating traffic and further business.

There are three (3) basic types of email marketing:

• Sending direct promotional emails to acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again
• Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance your client relationship
• Placing your marketing message or advertisement in emails sent by third parties

Unfortunately, email marketing seems to have gained a bad reputation. Many companies think if people see an email which isn't from someone they know, they will immediately consider it spam and delete it. While this may be true in certain circumstances, we know how to help you make email marketing work for your company.

♦ Advantages of Email Marketing

• Inexpensive - communicating via email has many of the advantages of traditional direct mail but with much lower costs
• Quick + Fast - should the need arise, you can get a message out to your entire list very quickly
• Ease of Use + Simplicity - for your marketing to be successful, it has to be easy for the recipient as well as yourself - email is simple
• Personalization - the more information you collect, the more messages can be tailored and personalized to their recipients
• Virality - it's easy for people to forward your message on to others, spreading your message further than imagined
• Tracking - from how many emails were opened to each individual clicked link can be tracked
• Testing - you can test different subject lines, calls to action, image use, etc. to further improve your results
• Opt-In - most importantly, the best email lists are always opt-in - permission is powerful - never underestimate it

♦ Disadvantages of Email Marketing

• Burning Your List - too many messages, too often, or bad content to sales ratio and you could find your email list burned
• Breaking The Law - due to nasty spammers there are very strict laws around the world and it is quite easy to break them
• Branding Yourself As A Spammer - even the best lists will get marked as spam occasionally because, well... people are people
• Alienating Readers - remember your list is comprised of human beings - not every email requires an URGENT call to action
• Delivery Issues - as people become more and more spam sensitive, more and more innocent emails land in junk mail folders

Getting Started With Email Marketing

Despite its un-deserved status as spam, email marketing is a highly effective way to not only engage current customers, but help gain new ones as well. With email marketing, you are able to track all sorts of data that can help you not only run your business more effectively, but also determine how well your campaigns are doing.

The first thing to do is start thinking of what you feel is unique about your website and putting that in writing. Why would people want to visit your site and not any of the dozens of other sites your competitors have up? How is your website or your content so different? A web marketer would call this your unique value proposition.

You have a product or service to sell, a website to promote it, and a fantastic write-up.

The next half of your email marketing process is to find out where and how to publicize your site. Whether you need help with target market segmentation strategies, product or service positioning, email list acquisition or double opt-in process design and development for your website, let Digital Diamond Web Media help you with your email marketing campaign strategies.

♦ Choosing To Use Our Vancouver Email Marketing Services

With the help of our Vancouver email marketing team, we can develop an effective method to reach your target market as well as stay connected with your existing customer base. Through efficient use of email marketing, you can retain current clients while testing new markets. You can easily monitor how effective a marketing campaign is, and note your return on investment is substantially higher than with other, more traditional, marketing campaigns.

Let our Vancouver email marketing team help guide your customers to you again and again with an effective campaign - call 604.540.2348 or email us!