Posts tagged Technology

Introduction

Many organizations are utilizing email marketing as part of their internet marketing strategy.  There are numerous email marketing services provided that support all types of businesses such as: Emma, ConstantContact, Aweber, etc.  In today’s environment, businesses are sending emails to promote products & services, cross-sell additional services, inform customers, and provide discount coupons.  The question is: Are businesses leveraging email marketing to support multi-tactical internet marketing campaigns?

In most cases, businesses are not leveraging email marketing to drive successful campaigns.  Marketers continue to see email marketing as a single tactic that has a limited impact on the goals of their campaigns.  The biggest example of this is the lack of integration between databases, website, and email marketing campaigns.   A local business owner has a limited amount of hours in a day and a limited amount of resources.  However, most of them do not streamline the lead acquisition process to work together.  If the systems were integrated, a similar scenario can be applied to large corporations that employ or utilize 3 different employees to do the job of a single email marketing professional. Simply put, the website form does populate to the database, and neither of these automatically feed to the email marketing system.  In general, this is a manual process that costs businesses time, resource, and money. 

How can effective Email Marketing Help Your Business and Drive Results?

How you ask?  Well, let’s start with efficiency.  The ability to integrate your website with your business’s database, website forms, and email marketing services tools may cost additional money upfront; however, in the long-run you will not need to use manual processes that require more resources.  At DaBrian Marketing Group, we provide businesses will the tools to connect website forms to an email marketing system and eliminate the database itself.  In our client’s case, the email marketing system or email marketing service is the database.  In addition, you can use event or email triggers to confirm opt-in email addresses after receiving a contact submission form.  In less than 30 seconds, you have populated your form into a specific list with the email marketing tool, confirmed an opt-in email, and responded to a prospect with relevant content.

 Email triggers can be a useful and impactful tool for customer acquisition & lead generation.  We live in a society of instant gratification so being able to deliver relevant information or set the expectation to receive a response to a question is critical.  This can help to separate your business from the competition.

The ability to reduce the resources used for an email marketing campaign will reduce the campaign cost.  If implemented effectively, email marketing can position your business to be on your customers’ minds and reduce your overall acquisition cost. The bottom-line is Return-on-Investment. 

 Testing to Drive Results & Revenue?

Once you have become proficient with your automated process, it is time to start testing your email campaigns.  There are a number of different tests you can do with a single email campaign.  These tests include A/B, A/B/C, and multivariate testing of headers, subject lines, layouts, landing pages or calls-to-action.  The more successful your business is at getting customers to open emails, the greater the probability that the customer will respond to your call-to-action. Usually, better open rates and click through rates translate to better ROI. 

Conclusion

The truth is that just about every business uses email marketing to communicate with customers.  Unfortunately, not every business takes the time to evaluate opportunities to integrate technologies, test, or measure their results.  These are simple fundamental businesses practices that should be gone.  The ability to establish internal processes and best practices are critical to every business’s success. 

 The fact that you have an email marketing tool does not mean that what you are communicating is relevant to customers, or even driving results.   It is our recommendation that businesses start to take a holistic approach to all internet marketing strategies & tactics.  Continue to push the envelope for maximum results that will lead to maximum returns.