Over the last 5-6 years I have been doing email marketing. Although I love all the stats and measurements of things like:
- Open Rate
- Bounce Rate
- Click Through Rate
in the early days it was hard to have this great marketing tool make the cash register ring, have people give us a call due to our email or interact with us in any way.
So we continued to do our email marketing campaigns for a few years, but always kind of sporadically. This is partially due to nothing more then the email marketing stats.
I worked with the marketing research guy, Andrey Osiatynski a few years ago and we were able to do a pre-show marketing campaign to set up meetings for a trade show we were going to be attending. Andrey is really smart and enjoys working with email marketing.
Overall this worked great at setting up appointments and getting to speak to prospects, however again we got no business from it. Basically this stepped up the email marketing efforts to the next level however it is a lot of work and you need to be cautious not to be spamming people with tactics like this.
So now we fast-forward to 2009. This is when I feel we have actually been able to make email marketing an effective tool. You see email marketing can me a powerful tool when combined with a blog and the social media. Over the last year we have pretty much been able to put out a monthly newsletter (we may have missed a month or two, but mostly sent something out every month).
What we have learned is that it is more important to send email when you have really valuable information to share. I personally do not like weekly emails, I find them overwhelming and sign-off after about 4-6 weeks. Weekly might work if the email was short and sweet and offered a tip I could apply quickly (maybe not every week, but often enough I will not mind getting the email).
So how do you develop this remarkable content on a regular basis for your email? Well, we write blog articles several times a month, 4-15 articles a month typically. Within these article we can usually find some gem that we think will be good to share to our email list audience. Only a small few of our email list subscribes to our blog so this is not usually overkill of the same message. If you decide to do this, add a few extra tips on this topic to your email in order to offer value to the email readers that are also subscribed to your blog.
The key here is not to copy the whole blog article into the email, but rather hit on a few high-points to pique their interest about the topic then provide a link back to your blog article for all the details. This builds interest and drive a lot of interested traffic back to your site.
Here is another email marketing tip. Continue to grow your list by asking people to sign up. This is an area that we have neglected for the last year or so. Well, now is the time to change if you found any of the tips in this article interesting…
Please sign up for our e-Brand newsletter where you will find more great tips.
We typically mail something out about once a month.
