Email - marketing

Email system allows to connect people directly, one-to-one. Using email people can communicate any message and cheaply. Emails can be used to promote business of organizations. Organizations can send email containing information about the products and services and also about themselves to their customers. But there is one difficult part, the organizations must have some knowledge about the people or receivers of the email, that is if the receivers of the email will like to have email in their mail box or not. Just sending email to everybody is not a good idea. Organizations should do customer behavior analysis and understand the needs of the customers, then make email content accordingly and send it.

Most of the organizations may not have email ids of the customer. In that case the organizations can purchase or receive email ids from some other organizations. Doing marketing with email is email marketing. Email marketing is considered as an effective channel to send message, information to the customers and it is said that for every $1 spend on email marketing, you can expect a return of $51. But care must be taken while performing marketing with email, right strategy must be developed otherwise email marketing can backfire; if emails are sent to people who don't like them, or email are not visible to the customers, email went to spam or junk then there will be no point of sending email.

Strategies for email marketing

• Personalize email message: Use customer data like name, address, hobbies in the email message to create a customer experience. Write Dear Dineshjee, instead of Dear customer.
• Segment the subscribers: Make group or segment of subscribers according to some attributes like hobbies, age group etc. Then write and send message suitable for each group. Hobbies, interest, need, taste, communication style of people vary; people of one age group may have different kind of hobbies, communication style from people of other age groups. So, it is necessary for the email content writer to understand the nature of people. Segmentation of people will be of great value while writing email contents and increases the possibility of reading emails by the people.
• Emails must be mobile friendly: These days there are more users of mobile than laptops and desktops. People can immediately access email in their mobile phones. It is very necessary that the email contents are clearly readable in the mobile phone, the contents must fit in the best possible way in the mobile screen.
• Experiment with email contents: From Address, subject and email body are part of the email, email writer can experiment with subject, from address and email body, that is write these contents in different way and experiment which method of writing these contents have good impression over the customers. Writer can write subject to indicate nature of email, write name of the organization or person in the from address part of the email, decorate the email body etc. He/She can switch to different writing styles.
• Send auto replies: User triggered based email system to send immediate replies like thanks for your concern, we got your order and will be fulfilled soon etc. to the users.

Email list

For an organization an email list is a collection of email id of person or organization that the organization has right to send email to. Email list is used by the organization at the time of email campaigns. In email campaign, organization sends a sequence of emails to the individuals listed in the email list. Email campaign is a part of marketing campaign where organizations provide information about their products and services and try to convince people to purchase their product or service. The marketing campaign goes through several phases, several emails are created and send to the individuals.

Organizations can get or built an email list in a number of ways:

• Get email id from those customers who have purchased something from the organization.
• From those customers who have subscribed through the organization's website.
• From those customers who have signed up for the organization's product.
• Customers who have given their business cards at an event.

Organization's work hard to build an email list. There are benefits of building email list:

• more and more customers come to know about the products and services of the organization.
• more customers will come in contact.
• possibility of purchasing products by the customer will increase.

How to build an email list?

• create a simple subscribe form in the website, blog, in social media channels, in-store, collect business cards.
• offer a valuable incentive in returns: like discounts and offers. Provide early access to service of products, that is before products or services are available in retail stores.

During email campaign it is better to collect more information about the customers, not only email id Address, gender, hobbies, age group, educational status, marital status etc. are important features of customers for the organizations.

Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing campaign consists of email messages developed during specific period of time for a specific purpose. Email needs to be written with a great care with well-written subject line, focused content. The content must focus to convey overall concept of the email marketing campaign. The marketers can use dynamic email contents to target different segments of customers.

How to execute an email marketing campaign?

• Identify the goals of the campaign.
• Think like a customer.
• Build an email list and define enrollment criteria.
• Schedule the campaign.
• Schedule your email sequence.
• Write a suitable subject line.
• Create a brand asset.
• Include clear calls-to-action (CTA).
• provide a way to opt out.
• Monitor metrices.

Facebook Marketing

A Facebook page is tool or medium for the business organizations to put information and advertisements of their services and products free of cost. To create a Facebook business page, first business organization or individual has to create Facebook account and log into the system.

Steps to create a Facebook business page

Log into Facebook.

• Register for Facebook business page.
• Find pages link in the left side of the page seen after logging into the system.
• Click on the pages link.
• You will see a "Create New Page" button, click that button.
• Provide name of your page, select category of your page, write description for the page, then click "create Page" button.
• Then provide your profile picture and cover page.
• Invite friends to like your business page.
• Include Additional Business Details: Find About button, click it and provide information like contact info, website, opening hours, etc. about your business
• Add a Button to your page: you will find Add a button on the left-hand side of your page below the cover image. This button acts as call-to-act (CTA). It will help to generate more leads.
• Market Facebook business page by being active on Facebook.

Advantages and disadvantages of Facebook advertising

• Facebook helps to create network of people easily.
• Helps to maintain good relationship with others.
• Allows to establish partnerships.
• Helps to do video chatting.
• Allows to upload images and videos.
• Helps to create brand awareness.
• Drives website traffic.
• Helps to develop targeted advertisements.
• Easy to collect customers' feedbacks and comments.
• Easy to monitor effectiveness of advertisements.

Disadvantages

• Privacy of information.
• Time and resources required to create relevant and good contents, updating contents.
• Investment may be required to get paid-advertisements.
• Negative feedbacks of users.

Some of the Policies of Facebook

• Ads must not contain abusive contents or attacks on individuals, culture, religion, society.
• Ads must not contain adult contents.