One of my client (an advertising agency) wants to do an email marketing campaign and is willing to spend decent money on it. I've never been convinced that it works effectively. Whats everyone elses views on it and are there any good websites that contain information/statistics etc so that i can do some research.
Email marketing can and DOES work very very well. Email marketing is not spamming, that is the first thing you need to get straight. SO don't bother going out and pillaging/harvesting emails all over the place and then sending them emails, because that is NOT email marketing - its spamming. For email marketing to be successful you need to obtain legitimate emails from prospective clients/customers. A good way to do this is to offer them a newsletter subscritption. Have them signup for a contest etc. Go and create an email account of GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo. Always test you emails by sending them to those accounts first. If they get to those accounts chances are you will have a good delivery rate. What I have found successful is that when email marketing alternate between a plain advertising/promotional type email blast and informational type email blast. If at all possible for every 3 informational type blasts you send, send out 1 promotional type blast. Once you get that strategy down pack you can combine both promotional and informational emails in all your blasts, but always use a 75% information to 25% promotion content on each mailing. BTW ALWAYS include an way for your users to opt-out from recieving your emails in all you mailings. Always remove undeliverable emails from your lists and GET a decent mailing program. What i have given you here is a very simple illustration of what you can do. There is much much more you can do. PM for additional info. Hope this helps! Frank
Well, this will depend on the way the marketing is done. Where will the e-mail addresses come from. If it's from people that have opted in to a mailing list on the company site, then marketing can be very effective. If it's from some list bought somewhere, I doubt if you'll see much success. Just remember, most people hate spam! Except for 4% of them that actually go out and buy products advertised in spam mail. Some people...
Unsolicited e-mail is generally ineffective unless it is very, very, targeted, and/or giving away something of very significant value to the customer. Though it does work to some extent, otherwise we wouldn't receive so much of it. Just be sure that you don't use any harvested lists or you're risking being blacklisted and/or fined via CAN-SPAM lawsuits. Building a companies internal e-mail list via newsletters etc... is generally a very valuable thing, but then you need to offer easy unsubscription, unique content and/or good promotions to keep people from flagging this as spam. The other option is to advertise inside other people's legitimate newsletters, and just be sure to be very careful that the list is not spam and that you are 110% confident that the people being e-mailed want to recieve it and that it is relevant to your project.
Thanks for the replies everyone. Very useful and confirms most of what i think. If anyone knows of any websites that go into this in more detail i'd appreciate it.
Hey, you might want to try autoresponder. It does work with me, if you are interested you can PM me..^_^..