What is email marketing?
Email marketing is the practice of using email to promote your business. It is used to cultivate relationships with potential customers, keep current customers informed and updated on your brand, offer coupons to encourage customer loyalty, and more!
It is a direct form of marketing, similar to marketing through snail mail, but email marketing is much more efficient for your wallet and for the environment since it’s totally paperless!
Some people think email marketing is outdated, but they couldn’t be more wrong. Email marketing has been utilized since shortly after the birth of the Internet. It has evolved considerably since then and is still an incredibly useful marketing tool. In fact, many entrepreneurs argue that email marketing is more important now than ever before. There’s a good reason 85% of U.S. retailers consider email marketing one of the most effective customer acquisition tactics!
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:
- Sending emails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.
- Sending emails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.
- Adding advertisements to emails sent by other companies to their customers.
In its most basic sense, email marketing is the use of email to promote products or services. But a better email marketing definition is the use of email to develop relationships with potential customers or clients. Email marketing is one segment of internet marketing, which encompasses online marketing via websites, social media, blogs, and more. It is essentially direct mail done electronically instead of through the postal service.
This kind of marketing can be used to build relationships with customers or drive them away.
Email marketing has several key advantages over traditional mail marketing, including the following:
- An exact return on investment can be tracked and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
- Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them.
- Over half of all Internet users check or send email on a typical day.
- Email allows marketers to reach out to consumers with personalized, relevant, dynamic messages.
- Transactional emails allow businesses to respond automatically to important consumer events like purchases or shop-cart abandonment.
Email Marketing Can Be Personalized
Email marketing allows you to target particular groups of customers or even specific individuals. Offering individual customers special birthday deals on merchandise or services is one way to do this. A restaurant might send an email to customers on their birthdays offering 50% off an entree, for instance. This kind of personalization helps a business gradually develop and maintain a relationship with a customer that can lead to increased sales and customer loyalty.
The disadvantages of email marketing surround the rejection/spam rate of the emails by the consumers’ email program, negatively affecting the delivery rate of the emails. This has somewhat been eliminated with the idea of “Opt-in” emailing, where the consumer consents to receiving the emails and therefore eliminates the idea of receiving unsolicited emails – Ideally maintaining emails that are relevant and appropriate to each individual recipient.
So what is email marketing used for?
Email marketing can be used to build trust with customers over time to turn them into repeat customers. It is also an effective way to keep your customers informed about new sales or promotions you are running. People want to stay informed about your brand, and email marketing is one of the best ways to stay engaged with that audience. In fact, 28% of US online shoppers report subscribing to store or product emails in order to stay informed on brands they care about.
Email Marketing Tips:
Effective email marketing takes effort though. Here are a few strategies for making the most of your email marketing campaigns.
- Build your own list. All you’re going to do by sending unsolicited email is turn off most of the people you’re hoping to turn into customers. Whether through your website, in your store, or at an event, make it clear when customers are opting in to receiving your emails.
- Adhere to the rules of the CAM-SPAM Act. These rules include having a non-deceptive subject line, a method of unsubscribing, and your name and address at the end of the emails.5
- Don’t just send out ads to buy all the time. Use your emails to build rapport with customers by sharing your expertise or that of others, giving them tips and insights they can value. Share information that lets them know more about you and your company.
- Treat your list well. Remember that the people you’re communicating with over email have trusted you with their information; they deserve your respect. If you want a chance to convert them from customers to fans and even evangelists for your brand, then make them feel special.
- Stick to a schedule if you’re doing a newsletter. Sending email on a regular day or days can help your subscribers know what to expect from you and when.
What are forums?
Forum is an online discussion forum where youth or even the experienced professionals discuss their queries related to and get answers for their questions from other talented individuals. An online discussion can be started by asking questions, helping others with answers. The best part is that it is very simple and is free of cost.
Benefits of forums:
While using forum your main task is just to be extremely helpful and friendly in order to be noticed. Build your way up to recognition, traffic and link building.
- Recognition – if you help others with insightful answers, people will take you as pro, will want to know more about you and will visit your blog, Twitter
- Traffic – people tend to follow people they trust, share their links and become fans granting you with well-earned traffic.
- Link building – while answering on forum questions, you can link to your own blog posts if they are actually helping to answer to the question.
List of best email marketing forums:
WARRIORFORUM
WarriorForum is the most popular internet marketing forum you’ll find here! However because of its popularity this forum attracts also a lot of newbies, which can be a good thing if you plan on sharing your experience, building trash or to help promote your own blog. You can start here if you’re beginner, people over there are very friendly. Maybe I am still beginner, but I like this forum the most for now… maybe it’s because I found a lot of great marketing tools, reviews about them and great feedback from people who actually tested those tools.
Also I should mention this forum has a premium section called War Room, for 37$ You’ll get access to their private section, where you’ll get very useful advice from administrators and replies to your questions from experienced marketers, like personal mentorship. I just bought their subscription myself and will leave my feedback about it real soon.
Forum topics I found very valuable:
- Top 10 Internet Marketing Products of 2010 – this is one of the rare places where I trust to product reviews. Because they sound and are real, maybe exceptions would be some trusted marketing blogs, but I find this forum post super valuable for myself, for promotions.
- Amazon Affiliates – Are You Seriously Making Money? – Yes, people are making money with Amazon, but how to do it? You might read a while here…but along the way you’ll get a lot of smart points helping you to earn and sell more through Amazon, interesting reading!
WICKEDFIRE
This is more advanced forum than WarriorForum, don’t try to ask there newbie questions, people may not enjoy that. But if you’re not beginner, you’ll feel here like home! More advanced stuff here, I like to follow WarriorForum and WickedFire together.
Forum topics I found very valuable (you will need to register to view their forum):
- Tools. (from WF members) Ever. – One more tools list but from WickedFire, never gets old.
- Free Ebook Download Section – many bloggers release their free reports for email exchange, people here are sharing the most useful free e-book guides.
PPVPLAYBOOK (PAID SUBSCRIPTION – 67$)
Oh man, I really would be much happier if I would know about this forum earlier! This forum subscription easily would have been my most valuable investment! If you want to see what this blog can give to you, go to their coaching page and watch their tour video.
For me the most useful section there definitely is Case studies where you can read detailed, documented guides with success stories and understand how site was built and monetized. Currently there are 24 case studies, but of course that’s not it, there are a lot of lessons, tips, webinar replays and much, much more.
In case you decide to buy this subscription, consider saying thanks and using my affiliate link. Soon however I will do more in depth review about this forum, sharing my experience using this forum! I hope you’ll enjoy it and remember I won’t suggest you anything I have not bought myself.
Forum threads I particularly enjoyed (I cannot give links since its private forum):
- Are you up for the 30 day campaign challenge? – Funny, I am doing this currently with 3 friends of mine to keep up competition, cool inspiration!
- Success Stories – loving all 24 of them, stories how to build first profitable campaign, how one (Froknowsphoto: Go Above And Beyond Auto) has earned 300$/day or another person 500$/day. Gold mine.
SEOCHAT FORUM
This is a very active forum for SEO addicts with very detailed sections and big community. From my findings this seemed to be one of the best forums about SEO, correct me if I am wrong, but I am going back there to learn more.
Forum topics I found very valuable:
- The Sticky for Meta Description, keywords, keyword density, and title tags – some good SEO basics and interesting discussion about particular topic.
- Email Marketing for SEO – I didn’t know anything about it, was pretty good discovery for me.
HIGH RANKINGS
Most active section here is SEO Tips & Techniques, link building, SEM/SEO resources and advice… Well, basically one more hardcore SEO related forum. I don’t know if that’s just me, but I really enjoyed overall design here and helpful answers to forum topics. Questions there are answered really detailed and impression is very well, even if I am first time visitor.
My thoughts? – I am coming here back for more to share knowledge and receive it, I only disliked that I cannot sort posts after the most views or most replies.
BLACKHATWORLD
This is the most popular forum for different SEO techniques – black hat SEO, white Hat SEO, cloaking, blogging, making money. While black hat SEO may seem too dangerous to use sometimes, still you’ll find many interesting tips and probably gain many new ideas about what’s possible. Don’t draw any lines and learn what’s possible!
This list was brought to you by Adstuck which itself is an email forum provider. So let us know about Adstuck.
Adstuck: Adstuck is a digital marketing practice agency working from all over the world with four locations India, Singapore, Estonia and US. Its mission is to provide instant access to a talented workforce to enterprise. They have 491 clients and worked over 700 projects, with 30 fortunes 500 firms.
Adstuck provide services in:
- Improving marketing results
- Creating social media marketing strategy
- Proper assessments of current trends
- Market research
- Campaign creation
- Email marketing
- Email marketing campaign
- Growing market share
- Launching new product or enter new market.
It is a strong and leading digital media marketing service provider which can help you with cost cutting, plan execution, perfect reporting, strategy making, data collecting, and response collection from consumers. It handles all the aspects of your business. They don’t focus only on new on emerging brands who wants entail success and distribution in the market but also on brands that have successfully established the customer retail space, and need some assistance in managing their business.
