by: Lawrence Tam

The benefits of email marketing cannot be understated.

Mess it up and you might as well torch your email leads coming through your capture pages and opt in forms.

Normally, a person who subscribes to your list has found your website or follows you on social media, or is interested in a promotion you are running.

They have trusted you with their email address and have given you permission to contact them on a regular basis. That means they like what you have to say and want to hear more from you.

Think about that for a moment.

They WANT to hear from you. If not, they wouldn’t have asked for MORE information to be send to them by email.

If you have a captive audience within your target market who is giving you permission to contact them on a regular basis, wouldn’t you agree that email marketing is one of the best ways to market?

Absolutely!

Check out the below image courtesy of FlipTop

It shows a rise in Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing, with Permission Marketing declining.

Content Marketing Definition by ContentMarketingInstitute.com:

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Check out the below image from fusionmex.i-scoop.eu

Inbound Marketing

Check out the below image from Marketing-Schools.org

Permission Marketing

Marketing firms and companies choosing to pursue a comprehensive email campaign will increase spending to $2.468 billion by two years from now.

The nearly $1 billion dollar increase in this method of marketing over a five year span from 2011 to 2016 shows that email marketing is an effective way of promoting your business.

That is still way less than how much a company traditionally spends on advertising.

This is one of the biggest benefits of email marketing.

No one says it better than Dan Forootan, President of EZ Publishing via Streamsend.com:

Email marketing occurs when a company sends a commercial message to a group of people by use of electronic email. Most commonly through advertisements, requests for business, or sales or donation solicitation, any email communication is considered email marketing if it helps to build customer loyalty, trust in a product or company or brand recognition.

What is Email Marketing?

Basically, you use an email list management system, or autoresponder, to collect email addresses from people visiting your website, blog, social media page, promotion or other sources and send them email .

You want to connect with them by sending them useful email that educates, inspires, entertains, informs and finally, promotes.

There are tons of benefits of email marketing.

From Midwest Marketing Blog

1. According to the Harvard Business review, U.S. companies are spending $64 billion per year on TV ads, $34 billion on print ads, and $39 billion on Internet advertising. But they are only spending about $1.5 billion. Composing an email (even a fancy newsletter) is faster than sending promotions off to the printer.

Not only is it more cost-effective, it is faster.

From Midwest Marketing Blog

2. An internet-based call to action campaign in an email marketing message can drive more traffic by: ● Sending your readers to your website, blog or offer. ● Drive people to social media, which in turn sends

them to your website. ● Bounce traffic back and forth between social media

and your site with comments and likes.

From Midwest Marketing Blog

3. Though email marketing provides companies, especially small businesses, with tight advertising budgets more leverage, there is also more room for creativity.

You also have the added benefit of inserting links to past and present blog posts or promotions. People can click right then and there. That is impossible to do in print or on the radio.

Benefits of Email Marketing and What They are NOT – It’s Not For Spam

Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated.

Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:

This is the FTC Compliance Guide and Email Marketing is not about “spamming”

Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.

Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.

Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.

Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.

Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand.

Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request.

Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.

The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law.

I’ve seen a lot of newer marketing learning adcopy mess up on #1. They see the spike in opens but it is AGAINST the CAN-SPAM act to have headlines like that.

One of the reasons I use Aweber and iContact is they FORCE #3. This is important. Many people starting out use a free email service which doesn’t require you add a physical address in each email.

The newbie indicator is #6, many do NOT have an autoresponder and can’t remove people off the list easily. That’s just asking for your account to be shut down.

Long-Term Benefits of Email Marketing

We have just gone over some of the benefits of email marketing. With an auto responder, email marketing benefits increase, because you have a system that allows you to use those benefits of email marketing more efficiently.

Beyond just cost-effectiveness, there are long-term benefits over traditional media that can really help your business.

1. Can scale up promotions easily – Email autoresponders (management lists) often archive each email written. These can be shared on social media, forwarded, or even found through search engines.

2. A nice way to inquire into what clients want – As the world is constantly changing, your business needs to focus on changing with it.

Mass mailing to your clients can provide your company with instantaneous feedback (generally within 48 hours) and the benefits of this email marketing’s turnaround time will help you to make quick changes to your marketing campaign, contest or blog content or provide exclusive deals to your most passionate customers.

3. Email marketing allows businesses the benefit of staying inside of your client’s mind –

With email marketing, your messages reach clients that have already opted in for the information they receive. Deeper relationships with clients lead to greater profits for your business, as statistics from Exact Target show that 53% of online users completed a purchase as a direct result of an email marketing campaign.

4. Send extremely targeted messages – Sometimes, your list can grow so large that you get subsets of people. When that happens, it is best to target those people. Sending targeted messages does two things: 1. It connects with them even more, at their level. 2. It increases the likelihood of converting them to

customers.

5. Good for the environment – The benefits of email marketing, taken a step further as eco-marketing, is the practice of improving the ecology and the economy through sustainable, paperless and interactive marketing techniques. If you are a green business or serve a lot of green customers, they will be happy to be reminded how kind electronic correspondence is to the earth.

I’m not the biggest tree hugger… but DANG… that’s a LOT of freaking trash in the landfills… Emails are a better way to communicate with potential buyers, and current customers.

6. More direct communication – Who is the best marketer a business can have? The owner. If you are a small business it is easier for you to directly communicate with your fans and prospects. The more involved you are, the more likely your company will find success.

7. Fast, Easy Traffic and Feedback – Posting an email message to a new blog post can boost your traffic to your blog.

8. Easy to Track – Finally, you can track your campaign effectively through your autoresponder. You can track

● Traffic sources ● Which email drives more traffic ● How many people open your

messages ● What percentage open your

messages ● How many people leave your list

(unsubscribe) and why

All this data tells you how well your email campaigns are working. This information is important if you want to reach certain goals and keep increasing your fan base and customers.

Benefits of email marketing – Things to keep in mind

● First of all, it is not a way to spam people.

● It should not be used to push products or services excessively.

● It should be used to help your client base, prospects and fans.

● It should be updated regularly.

● It should be used sparingly.

With an ROI of around 4300%, according to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing provides the benefit of practically paying for itself.

To see the full article on email marketing and learn more about growing a business using Email

by: Lawrence Tam