Max out on your email marketing – and you may lose your market! PART ONE

Too little, too much ? How do you know if every email marketing campaign is getting it right just because one mailout was effective?

Email marketing continues to be the most cost-effective strategy for building and maintaining relationships with customers, but ramping up the frequency of emails may be the wrong way to go! If the return on traffic is noticeably less each time then you may have to rethink your online marketing campaigns.

There are a number of actions that can be looked at :

• Sending irrelevant content and/or mailing too frequently.
• Targeting too broad an audience.
• Opt-in ‘permission’ to receive notifications isn’t fixed and forever.
• Analysing at what point traffic drops off.

It goes without saying that you need to work closely with your web design agency. Their industry experience and knowledge will be invaluable to focus on key details often missed and advise on the right course of remedial action.

It may not take too long for an original customer who visited or purchased, and opted-in to subscribe, then lost interest after the initial weekly or monthly emails. Email may be easy and cheap, but if subsequent frequent mailings contain little of new interest they become ignored then deleted, and very soon, will be unsubscribed and another supplier found!

Opt-in permission is not permanent and should be refreshed to keep in tune with the ever-changing needs of customer preferences. Build in an interactive prompt to gain a response from the customer, which continually fine-tunes your messaging just for them.

Check the results of any particular campaign by looking at deliverability rates, click-throughs, and actual sales. Pay special attention to these analytics and act upon them instantly.

Email should always be viewed as a key channel to help build long-term, brand-loyal customer relationships!