Despite the ubiquitous nature of social media platforms, email advertising is still a hugely powerful method to reach a potential audience of thousands. Before you embark on an email marketing campaign it is important that you properly understand how to make the most of targeted emails.

The biggest barrier to entry with email marketing is the sheer volume of spam mails which pollute our inboxes on a daily basis. If your email doesn\’t convey anything meaningful towards the recipient then it will simply not be read. Even worse, your customers email program may identify it as being spam so that it doesn\’t even get noticed in the first place. Your email should be presented and well written enough so that it will appear in your customers\’ inbox and have a reasonable chance of being opened.

The foundation of your email campaign should stem from your mailing list. The whole point of a targeted campaign is that the only recipients are those who have shown, or are likely to show, an interest in your products or services. It is comfortable to fool yourself into thinking that if you have a substantial enough list of contacts then surely someone will be interested in what you are promoting. Whilst this statement may bear some truth, you are far more likely to waste your time and effort in gaining business which will unlikely be a good return on your investment. If you put the time and effort into acquiring email addresses from existing customers then you can be sure that your promotional material will only be received by people who may well give you some repeat business.

Your emails should consist of frequently sent (but not too frequently) communication which contains relevant, interesting and persuasive content. You may need to experiment a little to see what kind of content and promotional offers elicit the best response, however that is the beauty of email marketing – you have the opportunity to refine your campaign whilst incurring the minimum impact on your overheads.

In order to take your email marketing to the next level you must track how people are engaging with your emails. By using specialist email campaign software, you will be able to view not just how many people are receiving your emails but also how many are opening and then interacting with them. These statistics will be invaluable when it comes to planning future campaigns as you will be able to split your mailing list into separate demographics which you can then target individually. For example, if you notice that the same section of contacts in your mailing list is failing to engage with your emails it may be because they find your services a little expensive. In this case you could target a campaign at these users which features a limited discount offer as a way of tempting these customers to become active again.

If you are a little apprehensive about implementing such a campaign due to inexperience then you would be wise to employ the services of an email marketing agency that will be able to manage every aspect of the campaign for you.

Trevor Richards writes for Extravision (www.extravision.com), a leading UK email marketing company.

Trevor Richards writes for Extravision (http://www.extravision.com), a leading UK email marketing company.

Author Bio: Trevor Richards writes for Extravision (www.extravision.com), a leading UK email marketing company.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: email marketing, email campaign, ecommerce, internet marketing, e-commerce, sales, business