It is usually suggested that businesses dedicate 15% of their annual turnover towards marketing their products or services, which can be a large portion of your business budget. This makes it vitally important to research and select the most effective methods to give you the best possible return on your investment. Sending out promotional information to prospective clients can dominate a large portion of your budget, especially if you decide to post it out. However, email marketing is not only more cost effective, but also more effective at reaching the right people and allowing you to see who’s responsive to you and your company.
Unlike direct mail, email marketing can be turned around very quickly. From design, to copy writing and coding, all can be done in just a couple of days, possibly less, whereas direct mail needs to be printed, loaded into envolopes, franked and posted. Emails can also be tracked, allowing you to see who opens them, whether they click on any links, and who unsubscribes. If you choose direct mail, obviously once you’ve sent the information out you have no possible method of tracking what people do with it. The industry standard for email open rates of high volume mailings is around 10%. The key to ensuring good open rates is in the strength of the data you use and the value of your content.
Capturing email addresses for your customers is a good way to find out more about the people using your products or services, and can be as easy as adding a sign up form to your website or social media pages. Once you have this information, you can use it to keep in contact with customers, informing them of promotions, industry news, announcements and special events. As long as your content is engaging and interesting people should be happy enough to stay on your data lists, as long as you aren’t bombarding them with information on too regular a basis. Corporate emails should be sent out no more than once a month, and the best time to send them is the beginning of the week when people are more likely to read them. Send your email out on a Friday and it’s almost guaranteed to end up straight in the trash folder.
Email marketing has a number of benefits over direct mail, primarily that’s it’s easier to put together, can be tracked and is much more cost effective than its snail mail counterpart. And in an age of recession, that is sure to help any business succeed.
