One of the most overlooked marketing tools has to be the simple email; it's fast and cheap to deploy, it's instant and easily absorbed by the consumer. Just as email has developed over the last 10 years from a novelty to something that we can't live without, over the last 5 years marketers have moved to include email marketing as part of their budgets.
There are a number of different ways you can deploy email marketing, from a simple offer based execution to a very complex segmented campaign. The beauty is you can start with an easy basic program and develop it overtime to make it more efficient. There are a surprisingly large amount of businesses that still don't take full advantage of this tool, but the good thing is it's easy to get going.
One of the biggest drivers to email marketing is it's return on investment. DoubleClick's Touchpoints III survey, underlines the importance of email and online marketing in general as part of the marketing mix. The influence your website has on sales is becoming increasingly recognised. In eight out of ten industry sectors the company website was in the top four resources used for research before an eventual purchase. Email of course is the link for your customer to find your website.
However email is more than just a delivery device to bring people to your website. It offers the chance to keep in touch, to interact, to tell a story, to introduce an idea; you can use it to build loyalty for your brand. Coupled with a good database you have the potential to segment you customers down to an audience of one, creating emails that are not only personalised, but deliver content specifically tailored to their needs and preferences.
Email, unlike most marketing activities, can be completely trackable so you know what's working and what isn't. You can test different subject lines, different headlines, different offers. Test on a small subset, see what works best and then roll it out to the whole target market. So you can fine tune your messages and work to increase your response rates and sales results.
The other great thing is that every company has an existing database of customers it can use to build an email database. Now you have to be careful and treat your customers with respect, but done the right way you can build a very valuable database that can be used to drive loyalty and business. Another great thing about email is it's very transmittable, that is it can be passed on very easily, assisting with your word of mouth viral buzz. Think about it, how easy is it to forward an email to 10 friends that you know will be interested in a new idea or offer?
What other marketing media can you deploy at a cost of about 2c per person? What else can be spread so easily? What else can be measured and tracked right through to a sale? What else allows you to personalise the content right down to an audience of one? What else gives such a fast response? Now other marketing tools can do one or other of these items, but email is truly unique in it's combination.
However, the reality is that you can't deploy email in isolation. You have to have the other elements of your marketing in place. You have to have a great brand and a great proposition. You have to have a great offer, you have to have a well designed website and a great database to send your email to. Email may be a great tool but there are other tools you need to use for other specific jobs as well.
One thing you need to be careful about is over using it, because email is so cheap and easy to use, you may fall into the trap of using it too often. Send out too many emails, not carefully segmented, without a clear purpose, with too strong a sales focus and you will burn your list. So be sure you manage your email database as an asset, respect it and nurture it.
So is email the perfect marketing tool? In many respects you could make a very strong argument that it is. However like marketing in general you have to manage the whole process. Email may be the best tool in your toolbox but there are other tools as well, so make sure you use the right tool for the job. You need to use all the tools at your disposal to build a great brand.
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