eMail Marketing - Email marketing helps you keep customers and prospects coming back—by using attractive, professional-looking email communications to stay in regular touch with them and build strong customer relationships.

• What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing offers a number of benefits to online businesses and provides a cheap and effective way for vendors to increase their sales conversions, up-sell and cross-sell products and services and generally boost profits. Email marketing services can also provide you with an easy way to source valuable feedback from both your customers and general visitors to your website and is a useful tool for increasing your brand name exposure.

Email marketing is basic a way of sending out information about your website electronically, and it is a legal requirement for your contacts to have ‘opted in’ to your email correspondence, otherwise this will be classed as spam mail. Contacts can opt in by signing up for a newsletter, or providing their email address voluntarily when checking out and paying for goods, and every time you send an email you should provide an ‘opt out’ section as well, just in case they have changed their minds and no longer wish to be contacted by you.

Email marketing is a useful way of getting your message across to your customers and can take many formats and, and you can use newsletters, customer surveys, coupons, discount codes and new product line alerts to keep your brand name fresh in the minds of your customers, and encourage them to visit your website again in the future.

The Main Benefits of Email Marketing Services

Online research has shown that the majority of online shoppers visit a website at least seven times before they decide to buy anything, so it is essential that you have some way of following up website visits to ensure that potential customers return to you to complete a purchase rather than going through one of your competitors.

Research has also shown and that the highest percentage of profits on most eCommerce websites is through repeat sales, so once your customers have purchased goods or services make sure you follow these up as well and stay in contact, as it is much time and cost effective to sell products to existing customers then it is to try and bring in new customers.

The effectiveness of email marketing has been proven time and time again by online market research and it is widely used by big businesses all around the world to boost both online and offline sales such as Amazon, Microsoft, Wallmart, Sony, eBay and many more. Here are just 5 of the main benefits of online marketing:

1. Global Contacts – emails are one of the most cost effective ways of targeting global contacts, so no matter where your customers and members are you can reach them at just the click of a button, providing them with information about your website and following up on sales.

2. Time and Cost Effective – is costs almost 80% less to set up and manage an email marketing campaign as it does to run the equivalent direct mail, paper based campaign, and it is also much quicker and less time intensive than direct mail or print advertising when it comes to designing and executing a professional looking marketing campaign. You can also schedule email campaigns to be sent out at specific times, so even when you are away from the office you can still run your marketing strategies round the clock.

3. Interactive – unlike paper based advertising, email campaigns offer the opportunity to add interactive features such as music, graphics, videos, links and even mini games, and this all helps you to develop innovative, interesting marketing strategies that can grab the attention of your contacts and encourage them to visit your website again in the future.

4. Personalization – it is quick and very easy to personalize each and every email with the tools provided by email marketing services, and this means you can build and strengthen your customer relationships and help to create a solid, loyal base to support your business into the future.

5. Results – email marketing services make it easy for you to collect meaningful results from your campaigns, which you can compare side by side so that you can work on developing and improving your strategies for future send outs.