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Advanced Email Marketing Made Simple  

Email systems... from Direct Broadcast messages to Autoresponders where an email message sequence is sent over a period of several days.   Email marketing has become a fast, easy, and affordable way to build your business.

It is a tactic by which you can capture prospects from your target market and keep customers.  You can send targeted messages, newsletters, and product information to both prospects and customers.  By using analytic capabilities of email marketing systems, you can quickly determine the effectiveness of your message to grow your business by monitoring which leads and customers open your emails, forward them to friends, and click on links.

Let's spend a minute to understand how email systems have evolved.  Many of us have experience with popular email systems like Outlook in Microsoft Office, or ccmail in IBM's Lotus Notes, or various webmail services like Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo!Mail.  We use these tools to enter contact information of a friend, family member, business associate, prospect, or customer onto a list; we author email messages; and we send the message to one or more members on our list.

Over the past few years, several new providers of email systems and services have appeared in the marketplace.  They provide the capability to develop, manage, and deliver, online, emails to a list of subscribers in broadcast mode, just like the previous email systems.  However, in addition to this broadcast capability, these email systems, offer a simple way to build a list and automatically respond by sending a sequence of pre-defined email messages.

Here is how they work.

Once a prospect completes an opt-in form, several simple pieces of information such as name, email address, and mobile phone number, the autoresponder capability begins.  This functionality places the prospect's contact information into the list and begins automatically sending a sequence of pre-defined email messages such as letters, notices about events or activities, product information, or sales materials, to the prospect.

The key difference between the broadcast and autoresponder capabilities is summarized below.

Broadcasts emails are sent once, at a scheduled date and time. They can be written as far in advance as you would like, and you won't need to log into your account to send them; they'll be sent at the saved time you have requested

Autoresponder emails are messages sent automatically, in a sequence. The first message in the sequence is sent immediately when someone subscribes to your list. That message is followed by a series of messages, each scheduled with a set amount of days in between.  For instance, the first follow up message could be an email sent welcoming subscribers; this way, a subscriber will receive a message, right away, acknowledging their addition to the list.

A second message could be sent two days later with a more detailed introduction about you and the product sold on your website.  Three days later an email message giving more information on that product could be sent, and so on.  This feature is sometimes referred to as drip mail as a series of pre-defined email messages are dripped on the new subscriber to your list at some regular interval.

These messages help to build a relationship and trust over time with people who may have otherwise just visited your website once, never to be seen or heard from again. They are helpful for such things as marketing materials, training sequences, and answers to frequently asked questions.  This technology is very useful to dramatically scale and leverage your marketing and sales time and efforts because the average sale comes after 7 email contacts.

Since email marketing channels have no printing costs, no postage costs, no envelopes to stuff, and no paper costs, this channel can lower the costs to develop and market your business.  Plus, email marketing systems are permission-based.  This means that by opting into your list, a prospect is giving you permission to send email messages to them; anyone not interested in receiving your email messages can opt-out of your list at any time.  This means that the leads and customers remaining on your list are qualified prospects and the best targets for your business.  They are truly interested in your message and what you have to offer them.

An email marketing system with both broadcast and autoresponder capability offers the lowest cost, most effective and targeted channel for small businesses around the world.  Several popular providers of these email systems offeri both broadcast and autoresponder capabilities include Constant Contact, which was used to deliver this newsletter.  Next month, we will explore another advanced marketing concept.