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In Conclusion - Give Some Steroids to Your Email Campaigns

Combining the targeting and reporting capabilities of email with the reach of social networks enables companies to build marketing programs that change their relationships with customers in very real and dramatic ways. To help ensure effective outreach, take a customer-centric approach to your messaging. Begin by listening to your customers and monitoring the way they currently interact with your messaging. Start with those recipients most connected to your brand as indicated by their behavior. Those who open your messages most and click on links frequently are already in line to serve as brand ambassadors. Give them a good reason to share your promotional emails with their friends, and make it easy for them to connect by including links within the email and landing pages to their social site.

Utilizing brand enthusiasts to post your emails onto their social sites signifies their endorsement—they posted them for others to see. But better yet, social emails can even result in the poster adding an influential comment or two, such as, “This is a cool watch, and it’s on sale. Did I mention my birthday is coming up soon?”

Such postings add strong word-of-mouth marketing that helps sell products. Studies by Bazaarvoice found that customer accolades can make Web site visitors who browse for highest-rated products 49 percent more likely to make a purchase. And sharing opinions is at the very essence of social networking, where consumers are frequently influenced by the thoughts of peers.

Conclusion

Email marketing continues to prove itself to be a low cost retention and conversion tool that yields high response from consumers. However, using segmentation and personalization techniques to target emails is essential to prevent campaign failures. Remember, relevancy is king. By diligently studying the extensive reports that can be gathered from an email marketing campaign, a feature many other types of media lack, you will be able to apply the 5 email strategies and provide information about your products/services to the people that are truly interested in it. Lastly, keep up with the times! Social media is becoming huge and these two strategies (email marketing + social media) promise to skyrocket the ROI of your campaigns.

Some useful References

• eMarketer
• Silverpop – “Beyond opens and clicks” – “Engagement Marketing”
• Forester Research
• GotMarketing
• Listrak
• Wunderman

This concludes the last Email Marketing article from a set of Email Marketing articles. I hope they will help you either in  your business or research. Stay tuned for the next set of articles.