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E-Mail Marketing

E-MAIL MARKETING is an active form of marketing. It gives you a unique opportunity to contact people who are not yet familiar with your products or services, or who haven’t placed your products or services in their consideration set. If you send the right e-mail to potential clients at the right time, it may prompt them to make a transaction, or to request more information from you. Or it may simply give them a new awareness that your products or services exist. This may pay off for you in the future, when potential clients realize you can provide a solution they need.

Other forms of online marketing are more passive. With SEM, social media advertising, and display advertising, the customer has to be actively in the market for your products or services. You must wait for the customer to contact you. (In SEM, they must be actively looking for your product or service in order to find you.) With e-mail marketing, you are reaching out to the customer.

Also, e-mail marketing gives you more control as a marketer over the experience your customers receive. You can control the brand, the e-mail’s look and feel, and the amount of text your recipient has to read. You can control the day and time when they receive the e-mail in their inbox, the subject header, what happens when they open the e-mail, and what happens when they click through and take action.

E-mail marketing is also a persistent form of marketing. The target customer can save the e-mail and refer back to it at a later time, or easily pass it on to a friend or colleague.

With social advertising or SEM, the website or search engine controls the customer’s experience, and your ad must fit within a restricted framework that the medium provides for you. For example, in posting a PPC ad on a search engine like Google, you are limited to using a set number of characters (25 for the headline, 70 for the description), and you can’t use images or company logos for ads that appear in the right-hand margin of the user’s search results.