We are in the era of the boom of online marketing or Internet marketing. The Internet, as we all know, has brought media to the global audience. Its interactive nature as a communication channel makes up its unique quality as a popular medium.
As part of online marketing, email marketing has become an asset among business marketers worldwide. Email marketing, as the name suggests, is the use of email as a marketing strategy. It has been used as the electronic equivalent of direct mail, printed newsletters and advertisements seen in magazines and newspapers. The low cost, speed and ease it offers for both the marketer and the customer has made it very popular in the online business world. It has a “push” mechanism, allowing the customers to come to you by engaging them through the email content you send. However, email marketing can only offer optimum results for those who do it the right way.
Today, the challenge to email marketing is to drive direct customer response and develop customer loyalty and retention. The more customers you retain and continually satisfy give you a boost on your credentials.
In business terms, the leaky bucket is a metaphor used to describe a flooding of customers but not actually successfully converting them into loyal buyers. Email marketing is like filling up a bucket with many holes in it. In the old days, they would tackle the problem by pouring more water in and at a faster rate. The traffic fills the bucket but eventually leaks through the holes. The inefficiency just causes irrelevant costs and waste of time. In the end, only a few drops of water will remain inside, maybe even none. In short, the goal becomes volume-oriented.
The new trend, however, plugs the holes.
In the new email marketing, the focus is smart marketing and not merely sending in volumes. It is better to have more appeal to a few than to have some appeal to many people. For starters, attracting customers and establishing ongoing relationships with them are the two main objectives. Once the customers come reeling in, your goal then is to make them want to come back again. You can do this by encouraging engagements and responses from your customers, offering them updates like monthly newsletters about your products. It is also best that your mailing lists are always opt-in. Opt-in serves as a handshake protocol between the sender and the receiver, meaning you have permission to contact the person. This permission is very powerful and is not to be underestimated.
It would take risks to get a head on from other competitions in the market. The responses you get from your customers are important. The continuous interactions will help gain suggestions that will serve as your guide in improving the factors that can contribute more to your success.
At first, filling up the bucket would not be easy but a few pour a day will eventually fill it up to the rim and maybe will call for even more buckets. Happy filling!
