As part of an integrated marketing strategy, it is highly effective to ensure you have a plan to make regular contact with your target audience.
Regular contact with your target audience
Digital newsletters are an excellent, non-intrusive way to provide useful information to your customers whilst acting as a constant reminder of your brand and what you have to offer.
This starts with your own customers, as regular contact helps with retention, and also with up-selling new products and services.
Sending digital newsletters, or promotional campaigns, is also an effective way to connect with anyone else that you have been able to capture basic contact details for.
By carefully tracking campaign performance, it is possible over time to determine metrics, such as:
- Best day to send a campaign
- Best time to send
- Who engages with you and who doesn’t
- Which topics people like to read about, when linking to your blog
- What Calls to Action encourage people to make contact
- What causes people to unsubscribe
Benefits of email marketing
It’s cost effective.
Once set up, templates make it easy to just populate with news each month, or week, press a button and send.
It can be targeted.
With a good database system it is possible to target specific segments of your network. This can increase the engagement statistics, as your messaging can be more specific to the niche market.
It is non-intrusive.
Phone calls can be intrusive and time consuming, whereas newsletters are a way to make gentle contact with people. As long as you don’t send them too frequently!
It saves duplication.
Newsletters are a great way to inform all your customers, or your entire network, of useful information, deadlines, special offers and more. Imagine having to write, or call, each individual on your database to tell him or her the same thing?
Good data is a powerful marketing tool
Information has always been key, but more so now in marketing than ever before.
Email marketing relies heavily on data and the more knowledge you have about the individuals and the groups within your database, the more effective you can make your marketing campaigns.
Sure, it is possible to function a campaign with just an email address, but even capturing details like first name can add the personal touch to your emails.
Knowing their profession, job title, postcode, age, gender, and so on, means you can use this information to your advantage in selecting what to send them and when.
The more relevant to the individual the more likely they will engage with your brand.
Data management tasks include:
Data cleansing – taking your existing data and making it “clean” and useful
Imports and exports to various marketing systems
Designing a system to maintain the data across various platforms
Automating the data management process for efficiency.
Improving data capture and growth
Database segmentation and niche marketing