Maintaining regular communications with customers in today's technologically advanced world is integral to a company's success. Email solutions allow businesses to maintain this contact with innovative and cutting edge promotional tools: email marketing and mobile marketing.

Why Utilize Email Marketing?

While you may want to put a lot of your time, money and energy towards drawing in new customers, your company also can not forget your existing ones. It's important to keep your clients aware of any changes within your company, or any new products you may be able to offer, and email is the perfect way to do so. You can also use email to solicit information that will better your business. For instance, if you're looking to improve your customer service systems, what better way to find out what needs changing than to ask those who actually utilize these systems? Emailing surveys is a great way to pick your customers' brains and alter your services to better meet their needs.

What if You Do not Have Time for Email Marketing?

While email marketing looks like an easy communication solution, it can be time consuming. That's why many businesses look to marketing services to help them with their email campaigns. An email marketing service allows companies to communicate with thousands of people in just seconds. These types of services are very popular because they are successful; more often than not, customers will respond (in fact, around 90% of people tend to open these emails). This may be attributed to several factors, including the fact that the marketing service may offer an "opt-in" option so that those receiving emails are people who want to hear from the company. According to studies, between 15% and 40% of those email recipients who open the advertisements end up purchasing what is being advertised in the emails they receive from their favorite companies.

Email Campaigns Provide Useful Feedback From Customers

Email campaigns allow for instant information gathering. How? By allowing businesses to quickly and efficiently contact many customers at once, providing information about new offers or asking for feedback. Customers may feel like, when being on the receiving end of these email campaigns, they are getting exclusive deals that allow them to save some money, and companies value their ability to target an audience and advertise certain products. Further, email marketing is one of the only ways that companies can reach out and receive prompt answers about what they are doing right or wrong so that they can tailor their behavior to the needs of their customers.

Email Solutions to Suit Your Company's Needs

There are many diverse email solutions that an email marketing service may provide you with. Because, today, technology is key (and newspaper and magazine advertising is becoming outmoded), many services will offer mobile email marketing. Emails that are optimized for mobile devices are important for keeping customers engaged and interested in your company's products and communications.

In this article I am going to address one of the most frequently asked questions about email marketing. How often should I send emails to my list? This is indeed a very important question because if you get it wrong you will either have a lot of people unsubscribing or you will have low conversion rates when it comes to promoting your products. When you get it right email marketing is a very effective way to sell your products, programmes and services. It allows you to build up a great relationship with your subscribers who will come to know and trust you as you drip feed them excellent content via your emails.

The actual frequency with which you send out emails may not be as important as the consistency with which you do it. Let me give you a couple of examples to explain what I mean. First example: if you have only sent out one or two emails a week to your list and then suddenly start to send out emails on a daily basis then you are likely to get a lot of unsubscribes. It will feel like you are suddenly really pestering them, even if the emails contain fantastic content, as they are just not used to getting emails that often from you.

Second example: sending out just one or two emails a week may be the right level for your particular niche but if you are not consistent about which days you send them out, and maybe even which times, then you are likely to find you have lower open rates and hence lower sales. Again it’s all about their expectations. You want your subscribers to be eagerly awaiting your next content-packed email. However it’s important not to make them wait too long or else they may forget you! So I wouldn’t send less than one email a week.

Before I suggest an email schedule to get you started, I’d like to say that the best way to decide on the frequency of your emails is to ask your subscribers. Ask them directly. You might do it in the form of a survey and give them a few options e.g. Is the number of emails I send you… ? About right. Too few. Too many.

So here’s a basic email campaign template to use, always remembering to tweak and adjust it to meet the needs of your particular niche. I would recommend that your autoresponder sequence of emails starts sending them out daily, or at least week days, within the first 2 – 4 weeks after which you might drop it down to every other day. This is because the majority of your subscribers will buy within the first month and once they do you need to move them on to a specific buyers’ list.

Boost Your Brand Visibility with this Simple Email Marketing Strategy

“I don’t want to annoy people.”

That’s one of many excuses I hear from clients when I ask them about sending out consistent email newsletters to their followers.

Are you guilty of thinking this way too? Well stop it!

When someone comes to your website and enters their name and email address to sign up for your newsletter, they are literally putting their hand up and saying, “yes, I want to hear more from you!”

You are actually doing them a disservice by not keeping that relationship going with them.

Sending consistent email newsletters to your followers gives you the ability to develop a “Know, Like and Trust”

relationship with them that will dramatically increase your brand visibility and market reach.

Yet many business owners and entrepreneurs pass up this golden opportunity to build relationships and increase sales.

Are you one of them?

Let’s say you are a nutrition coach and offer valuable services on helping women balance their hormones, lose weight or simply have a better quality of life. A regular newsletter is a prime opportunity for you to keep in touch with your followers until they are ready to make that move and work with you.

As you know, people buy from people they trust, and a newsletter is a perfect way to develop the trust needed to take that next step with you.

So if you don’t already send out a weekly newsletter, here are 5 compelling reasons every business should start one now:

1. Tells customers what you do. No one wants to be sold to, but everyone wants to buy if what is being offered meets their needs. Writing a regular newsletter gives you an opportunity to educate potential customers about your offerings and more importantly, share your expertise so that they can get to know, like and trust you over time.

Sending quality, value-filled articles allows you to talk about the challenges your clients face and share your expert advice that will help them. When your followers truly understand what you do and that you understand their struggles, they are much more likely to click and buy your products and services.

2. Builds relationships and trust. When you first connect with a new prospective client, it takes time to build a relationship and email is a direct, personal and casual way to connect. Reaching out regularly with an email newsletter gives you the opportunity to build a one-on-one relationship with potential customers. As they develop trust in your brand, they are more likely to buy and spread the word about what you do.

3. Expands your market coverage. When you mail a newsletter to your list, not only does it go to their inbox, but your newsletter can also be leveraged in multiple ways for your business. It’s a genius way to instantly expand your visibility on multiple channels and reach new prospects through content marketing.

For instance, you can publish the article on your blog and post links to the article on social media and various article directories. Moreover, posting the article on your website can also drive organic search engine traffic to your website and boost your search engine rankings.

4. Creates a 24/7 sales force on your behalf. In addition to sending your newsletter on a weekly basis, you can also setup autoresponders with a series of emails through your newsletter service provider as follow-ups to the free giveaway that first got them into your list.

Imagine having an automated messaging system that sends helpful tips to your target market! Best of all, you can automate the process using services like aWeber, Constant Contact, MailChimp or even 1ShoppingCart.

5. Develops a “ready-to-buy” market list. When you take the time to nurture a relationship with your subscribers, your mailing list becomes the perfect means to announce new products and services you are launching.

Now when you create a new service, product, or have a special promotion, you’ll have a group of eager-to-buy prospects that are excited to hear what you have to offer.

So what are you waiting for?

Hands down, email marketing and sending out consistent newsletters is one of the most effective marketing tools for your business. If you are busy, delegate this task to a professional marketing team who can take care of the writing, marketing, and technical aspects needed.

I invite you to take the plunge, start a newsletter, and watch your sales and brand visibility grow!

Did you ever think about starting an email marketing campaign in order to promote a product or service? Maybe you’ve tried one or more email outreach efforts and learned that there’s a lot more to it than just sending these messages to your marketing audience. It is important to learn how to write emails that convert in order to maximize the time and money spent on your promotion.

When we plan and start our campaigns it’s important to send out our messages to a list of readers that actually want to hear from us. Many times our emails get sorted or lost in the spam folder or many inbox messages. Even when someone does click on the message and open the email they might not click on the link to the next step but move on to their other email messages. That’s why it’s so vital to our efforts to learn how to write emails that convert.

In this article we’ll discuss the following:

• Finding your own writing voice and style
• Who are you writing to?
• One thing to increase conversions
• Email templates save time
• Writing emails that convert video

Finding your own writing voice

Once an author discovers and uses their own writing voice they are putting their personality on the page by the way that they use their vocabulary and word phrases. We should write like we are talking to a respected friend or family member, with a certain emotion that the reader can feel as they read the article. The most successful authors develop a distinct writing voice that their readers like and look forward to reading. Our writing voice and emotion should be the same within the emails sent and the article content written in our posts. Most will agree that a cheery, passive type of voice and emotion is the most well received by their viewers and will lead to the best results.

Styles

There are generally 4 basic writing styles:

1. Expository – The author tries to explain a concept, sharing information with their audience. The writer doesn’t share their own beliefs or opinions on the subject but focuses on accepted facts and includes evidence and statistics. An effective expository writing should contain a main idea, supporting details, and a conclusion. Examples: textbooks, how to books, recipes, business, technical and scientific articles or books.
2. Descriptive – The author focuses on describing a certain product, character, or place in detail. The writer uses more of the sensory perceptions in their descriptions as opposed to only facts and information. Examples: journals or diaries, poetry, play writing and fictional novels.
3. Persuasive – The writer presents reasons and examples to influence the reader’s actions or thought. This style requires the writer to clearly point out their position on a subject and supply reasonings and examples that support their position. The writer gives reasons and takes a stance to convince their reader to see the issue from the writers viewpoint. Examples: advertisements, cover letters, letters of recommendations or complaints, and product reviews.
4. Narrative – The author narrates a story whether it is a short story, biography, novel, poetry, etc. Defined as a report of connected events real or imaginary presented in a sequence of written or spoken words or images. The author isn’t just trying to impart information but is trying to construct and communicate a story including characters, trials, and scene settings.

Who are you writing to?

Usually we’re writing to people in a particular niche but we should take a minute or three to define exactly who our audience is and what are the needs of our readers before we start collecting content for the article. We might not interest everyone on our list with every email that we send out but once we learn how to write emails that convert, we can send out content to our specific target group that will appeal to a much higher percentage of viewers.

Create a reader representative.

Can you picture your readers as you write? Actually the best thing to do is to create one person, or avatar, that represents the target audience and write to that person instead of writing to the group. Picture that person in mind as you type the message to them and give them the information or instruction that they are looking for.

When you have this image of the receiver of your email it’s much easier to stay on course with your article and not wander into areas that aren’t relative to your niche. An example would be that if you’re writing an article for training your dog, you won’t go off on a side note about something that has nothing to do with dog training. The reader can easily click away from the post when it appears to wander off course and loses the reader’s attention.

By mentally creating the email message for one particular person instead of an “audience” it changes the way that you look at writing the issue that your niche group wants to hear about. This is the most viewer friendly way of conversing with your list.

One thing to increase conversions

There is something very basic that can be done with each email which can have a very positive effect on the success of an email marketing campaign. A nice campaign boosting suggestion is to add a nice self-portrait either at the top or bottom of the emails, or at least the first “welcome” message. Let your viewers see who is sending them those email messages and suggestions to purchase a product or click on a link.

Those that do this say that it really does help with conversions as the portrait helps build confidence and also makes you appear as more of an authoritative figure in your niche. Most autoresponders will provide a way to do this and contacting them with any questions will shed light on your situation.

Email templates save time

Writing templates are great tools for every writer and using them regularly will help with article production as they can guide you from start to finishing the post. An email template is an HTML file. Hypertext markup language (HTML) is a code that explains the content and structure of the campaign and lets us style the campaign to reflect our business or personal style.

The best thing about templates is that you can use them over and over again with each article or email campaign. This gives a design to your content and increases article production, and there are hundreds or thousands of templates to choose from depending on your own needs.

You can simply add content, images and links to a template that you’re using before testing and sending it out to your viewers.

Marketing is all about integration. It generates better results when integrated with other marketing channels, than when a single platform is used. SMS and email marketing is an excellent illustration of this idea.

Email marketing has become a specialized niche. Relevant email content strengthens your relationship with your customers. Interestingly, 53% of email messages are opened on mobile devices like tablets and cell phones.

Text messages, on the other hand, have 98% open rate. While there each method provides unique benefits, they share a few things in common that will help you create cohesive and high-performing marketing campaigns.

Listed below are some email campaigns that can greatly benefit when supported by text messaging.

Text-to-Join campaigns

After sending an email, use SMS to remind customers to join or opt-in to your subscription list. Ninety percent of text messages are read within three minutes. A follow-up text message sent at the right time increases the chances of getting a positive response from your subscribers. SMS marketing allows you to segment your list and makes it easier for you to send targeted messages.

Event Invites

Send a text reminder a day or two prior to the event to remind subscribers to attend. They may or may not have forgotten, but in any case, text reminders tell customers that you value their presence and you’re eager for them to come. In addition, you can utilize SMS to check on people who haven’t redeemed the discount codes you’ve sent through email. In addition, text messages do not go through spam filters.

Connect with Inactive Subscribers

If you have already sent five emails to a recipient and he hasn’t replied or interacted with you in any way, why not send a text message? People can receive numerous emails in a day, that it’s sometimes hard to identify those they really want to read. In this situation, text messaging is an excellent way of getting your prospects’ attention.

Use Texting as a Call to Action

Texting is a powerful call to action in many marketing campaigns. For instance, at the end of your email, inform customers that they can get additional discount if they text a certain code. Since most people always carry a cell phone, they can take action immediately. This also allows you to collect the phone numbers of prospective customers for future campaigns.

Include Links in Both

By integrating your SMS and Email marketing campaigns, you enhance your business image, introduce better branding objectives, and get prospects to visit your websites.

Have you tried complimenting you Email Marketing with SMS? If not, try it now and learn how text messaging can help your business grow.

In today’s fast paced high tech, online marketplace there are many different types of bulk email software to choose from. Traditionally email marketers downloaded software to his or her computer, installed it and operated the program from that desktop system. This method has now proven not as effective and you can quite easily get your IP blocked, or even have your internet connection disconnected by your internet provider altogether. Today new age bulk email marketers are now relying more on web-based software platforms to manage and maintain email marketing campaigns so it’s done 100% can-spam compliant and represents their company in a responsible manner.

The benefits of a web-based, bulk email software system are abundantly clear and the core benefits providing a can-spam compliant sending experience and the added ability to have your IP’s monitored, maintained, and switched out throughout the entire duration of the email campaign when needed this ensures your IP’s and domains start rotating while sending for extremely good deliverability and provides the ability to send more email at a much faster rate. More established email systems will update more frequently with the latest programming edits and developments and thus providing a more accurate delivery of your email newsletter campaign. In reality it is not so difficult to start international marketing. Today, communication with your markets is only an email connection away. So all forms of web marketing are popular places to start but email marketing has been proven to be one of the best methods no matter which country you are targeting. Simply because it is cheap and easy to do.

Email marketing can open up a whole new opportunity for most online email marketers and it can offer an almost instantaneous sales strategy in many cases. Email marketing with is one of the most cost effective ways to send your corporate message out to potential customers online. A good quality targeted email list can allow you to pinpoint only specific consumers that have an active interest in your product or service. Even if you need to invest in specialized bulk email software to support your efforts, you’ll still be saving large amounts of marketing dollars compared to the cost of advertising through traditional media.

Email marketing is the only type of marketing that allows you to keep your marketing tools and build growing database of customers. This adds tremendous value to your marketing capabilities and your company.

Email can offer new products and services and with each new campaign sent, and it will assist in building your company’s contact databases for future use. Only email marketing lets you keep your marketing tools, and build stronger databases and email lists as you develop your corporate brand.

Many internet marketers who have gotten over the critical hump of reaching their threshold in income through their email lists often slide back into failure because they overlook a few key factors in email marketing. Take a look and see if you are ignoring these issues.

Let’s say you’ve reached critical mass and your niche calls for 6,000 subscribers to get you the necessary ongoing income to sustain your lifestyle. now that you’ve reached that level where do you go from here?

In many instances the effort to get to the goal causes burnout

If you’ve reached your goal number and haven’t prepared adequate follow-through for your subscribers, you will not be able to sustain your growth level. Opt in email marketing is like building and maintaining a large dam. You have to keep the water in but on any given day there is water going out. the same is true of email marketing. you must develop and maintain your system to keep more people in the system than those leaving. many new IM’s have taken so much energy to get to the goal that they slack off once the money is good. pay attention to these factors.

The most popular days to send email to your subscribers.

The research is still showing that Tuesday (25.4%) is still the most popular day for sending messages with Wednesday coming up a close second at 23.3%. Thursday follows at 18.3% Sunday at 1.4% and Saturday at 0.9%. You can monitor your auto-responder for the most effective times of the day as well.

The stats on send times are interesting as well

The study shows that half of all email messages were sent between 8 a.m. and noon. It seems that 17.8% went out in the 9 a.m. hour. About three quarters of all messages were sent out between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m.

People seem to like opening their email before noon.

The 11 o’clock hour was the highest time for opening email. More than half of all messages were opened during the period of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. It seems that the U.S. West Coast email recipients checked their emails before noon and the East Coast recipients caught up on their email reading right after lunch.

When tracking your results look for the often neglected Click-to-open rate.

The great thing about working with a strong email marketing service is the ability to thoroughly track your email campaigns. many email marketers look for two things that determine whether they’ve succeeded or not in a targeted email campaign; Click-through rates and Open rates. You can also combine Open rates and click-through rates to find the Click-to-open rate or (CTOR). This is the calculation of unique open and unique clicks. This number tells you how effectively your message was in getting the people who opened your email to click on a link in response to your message. What it tells you is how many people were motivated to take action on your message.

For maximum effectiveness, ditch the graphics

A Jupiter Research poll showed that more consumers responded more favorably to text based emails. A whopping 54% responded to product or service descriptions, 40% responded to the message in the body copy. The subject line captured the attention and persuaded 35% of the consumers to take action and 33% responded to the compelling offer to take action.

Only 12% responded favorably to a large single image while 9% responded to multiple smaller images. When a search box was included in the email, 6% used the search box. If you usually send out HTML emails, be aware that 6% of the public still uses text only emails.

Keep your subject line short

The studies conducted by EmailLabs shows that subject lines of 50 characters or less in length pulled the best responses. Another interesting statistic shows that an increased number of hyperlinks in an email led to greater click-through rates. While the size of the message was not a determining factor, email messages of 20 to 79 kb range did slightly better than messages of smaller size.

Keep these findings in mind when reviewing your email marketing system. keep your subject line short, add lots of links in your email body and avoid images in your email whenever possible. Give the reader plenty of opportunity to take action. Above all, give the reader something useful and appropriate to their interests. That will definitely keep your base secure and cut down on the un-subscribers. You’ve worked hard to get to critical mass; this is not the time to take that hard work for granted.

To construct a prosperous online business you need to build a list of targeted opt in email prospects. List building is the precursor to email marketing. Without a list you have no one to send emails to. The type and frequency of the emails you send to your list comprise email marketing and it is best to learn how to build a list first then how to market to that list. The back-end portion of consumer email marketing is just as important as the list itself.

In this article you will learn the basic tools needed produce and administer to a responsive email list.

There are those that will offer to sell you targeted email lists. For instance, if you are selling something tangible or not, buying a list of eBay email addresses might not be a bad idea.

STOP, it is a very bad idea simply because they were not given to you by the owner; but you already knew that. I’m sure you also knew that emailing people from a list you purchased could violate the CAN-spam act of 2003.

Yes…it is considered spamming when you solicited someone through an email address that has not been willingly given to you by its owner.

List building is going to take planning, research and patience on your part because the type of list you build will prove to be either a waste of your time or a big payoff for the products or services you are marketing. The essential aspect of your email marketing campaign needs to be your Landing page.

Sometimes called a capture page, squeeze page or sales page; a landing page is the first page your prospects come to when they click on your link. Your landing page will make or break the start and/or progression of your email list. A landing page can be a squeeze page with brief to the point adcopy that drives prospects to do your bidding. It can also be a sales page that promotes a product and asks the prospect to “purchase now”.

I suggest you start with the use of a landing page with a no cost offer to entice prospects to opt-in to your mailing list.

Make sure the content on your landing page not only encourages visitors to signup but that it also is directly related to what your selling or offering.

Before finding a market to build your list around you need to ensure you have reliable email marketing software that is well known and respected in the Internet marketing community. Also known as a follow up autoresponder; if you do not have a list I suggest using Aweber.com. On the other hand, if you have an existing list an convert to Aweber, Aweber requires the entire list to opt-in again. As a result, you could lose some of your existing opt-ins in the process.

If you currently have a list I suggest using ListBuildPro.com. ListBuilderPro allows you to place their code on your website and integrate it with your current subscriber list.

I do not suggest using a free email autoresponder. There are many low cost autoresponders available however you need to be sure that you compare features and do not underestimate the features you may need in the future.

Email marketing software allows you to:

• …have prewritten your marketing newsletter ready to go when someone signs up.
• You can also set the time when you want each letter to be sent.
• It has anti-spamming filters that allow you to see if most spam blockers will consider words and phrases of your email to be spammy.
• It shows you where your users opted-in from.
• Obtain information from their f.a.q.’s and contents that help you to get the most out of their many features.
• Set up sales channels where you can track your conversions.
• Segment your incoming opt-in list.

For instance, if you have a Golf niche, you may have men’s and women’s Golf apparel. Your opt-in can be setup to have customers specify via a checkbox what they prefer. Based of that information the software puts their email information in the appropriate category which has your prewritten emails on auto pilot.

For web hosting I use Midphase.com but there are other hosting services that are just as reliable for around the same price.

Remember, your landing page and no cost offer is used to entice targeted prospects to sign up to your marketing newsletter. You will make your marketing campaign easier to administer if you have the email marketing software and at least 5 newsletters set up and ready to go when your market signs up.

Building a responsive opt in direct email lists can boost your businesses exposure. Also, building lists can be your core business in multiple markets. Email marketing in multiple markets has the potential to earn you thousands of dollars per website per month.

The advertisement of a brand, product, or service through the electronic mail is called email marketing. This type of internet marketing can be used to gain new customers or improve the relationship between the current customers and the business. Email marketing is sent to one customer. A business can also use a subscription service, rely on customers giving the business referrals, or paying a small fee to an email broker. When reaching out to new customers a company will generally use a combination of all of these methods. The question is why have the emails of potential customers and sending them out one at a time. The answer is to use bulk emailing. This is when the company sends the same or almost the same message to many email recipients.

To do bulk email the company will need special software. This software will take each single e-mail address from the list and send a single message to each one. The number of recipients of these emails can range from hundreds to thousands. It depends on the size of the company and its customer base or how many potential new customers they want to reach. Although bulk emailing is thought of as a direct marketing tool used by a large company it can also be used by individuals and small businesses. For individuals, bulk emailing could be used to share family photos, send out invitations to an even such as a family reunion, or to spread the news on a special event. The information would only be sent to family and friends the individual would know.

A business, large or small, often launches an email marketing campaign as a method of promoting services or products to customers. This type of campaign can be used to reach existing or prospective customers. Some companies will create different versions of their bulk email and create unique messages that are targeted at certain groups of customers or individuals. Bulk emailing is a technique that lets the marketer communicate easily with a bigger number of recipients at the same time it can also permit them to do it in a personalized way. For example, it will allow the company the management of the mailing lists so they can target communications to a diverse number of subscribers. It will also let the marketer segregate the recipients based on their requirements and interests.

If a company wants to use the email system as their promotional means, bulk emailing can be a valuable too. It does not necessarily constitute bulk emailing as spam but many times spam campaigns are launched using this type of mailing. If you are using bulk email marketing some potential customers may think it is spam and delete it.

Introduction:

One of the biggest mistakes most marketers do nowadays, is think email marketing is dead. Many marketers today drop the email marketing scheme to go with social media. Come to think of it, social media look much more sexy than email. But, is a social media post really as effective as an email? Before we answer that question, lets state a well known fact. It is easier to send a friend request on Facebook than to collect an email online. But believe me, email marketing is thrice as worth it as social media marketing. So, what is email marketing?

Email marketing is the targeting of customers through emails. Every emails sent to a potential customers can be considered as email marketing. Email marketing involves sending a promotional email or an ad to a subscriber. Via his email address. A great deal of organisations today use email marketing. Even more bloggers do use email marketing today than ever before. For example, have you ever been browsing on a website, and you see some field where you are asked to submit your name and email to get a free eBook or update? That is the front part of email marketing.

Most bloggers use email marketing because it enhances the customer experience. With a well targeted email list, you can reach established customers and prospective ones too. Any given subscriber will be informed better and more easily via email. The email will have a greater visibility than a Facebook post. The Facebook post will be drowned in a stream of content in the minutes following its posting.

Do You Really Need Email Marketing?

If you want to improve your customers’ or readers’ experience, then you need email marketing. Forget about the glamour and the flashy of social media marketing. We are talking efficiency here. We are talking greater engagement. Greater reach. Greater click through rate and more. As many experienced marketers say, ” the money is in the list”. Some even say “your net worth depends on your network”. In the following lines, I will explain the advantages of email marketing. In these explanations, I will use statistics. The sites which produced those stats will be mentioned at the end of this article. So, let’s get into the advantages of using email marketing.:

Potential Reach:

Did you know that in 2013, there were about 3.2 billion email accounts created in the world? 95% of online consumers use an email address. The most interesting fact is; 91% of those consumers check their email accounts at least once a day. Today, we browse more with our phones than our computers. As a result, we are more easily notified when we receive emails. Our phones place the notifications right in front of our eyes.

Today, it is easier to check to an email than a Facebook or Twitter post. This is because when we post content, so does a million other people. As a result, finding one particular post you liked 3 weeks ago can be the most daunting task.

Actual Reach:

Before I explain this part in more detail, let’s get some interesting numbers. In the first half of 2013, a research conducted using emails as a marketing channel revealed some staggering facts. The one that stands out the most is this; 18% of the emails sent during a campaign never reach their destinations. 4% of the sent emails are sent into the spam folder. That makes 22% of the sent emails that do not actually reach the intended receiver.

On the other hand, 78% of the emails sent during an email campaign actually reach their destination. Think of it this way, If you send 1000 emails, 780 emails will reach their destination. In addition to that, 91% of the receivers check their emails daily. This means, about 709 receivers will actually see your email. This is great efficiency, as less than 30% of the emails sent are lost.

Now, let’s compare these numbers with those of a Facebook campaign carried out in the same way. This revealed that 74% of the Facebook posts are actually lost within the big stream of content. That is a problem. That means, per thousand Facebook posts, 740 are lost in the stream of content. That leaves us with 260 posts seen by our target readers. Another bad thing is, everyone who sees your content will not actually click through. Less than half will actually do. That leaves us with less than 130 people who are actually interested in our offers.

Click Through Rates:

In the previous point, we talked about what percentage of people who see and may like your posts and mails. Now let’s talk about people who actually complete the actions and do what you want them to do. Let’s say clicking on a link. This link may take them to a landing page or a website.

Click through rate is the percentage of people that receive your message and actually click on it. The click through rate of a tweet is 0.5 percent as opposed to 3% for an email. These numbers look small at first. But, this means that people click 6 times more on an email link than on a tweeted link.

Let’s keep on using our example of 1000 emails and 1000 social media posts. A 0.5% click through rate means per thousand, 5 people will actually click on your link. This is for social media. Sometimes the click through rates are higher, but those are particular cases. The numbers we use here are average ones.

A 3% click through rate with emails means 30 clicks per thousand. That is the best click through rate you will obtain on average. The numbers are not astounding, but efficient numbers are not always astounding. The difference is such because, when people give you their email addresses they actually want to hear more form you.

Your Readers Want It This Way:

Most people use social media to communicate with friends first. Seldom are they used to receive business news and reviews. There are specialized websites for that. 77% of the users during a survey online said they prefer to receive promotional messages in their emails. 4% said they prefer these messages on social media. This speaks to the fact that by submitting an email, people are literally giving you a business meeting location.

Emails Are Private:

It is easier for a reader to express his problems in private than in the open. Everybody is not comfortable when it comes to expressing their shortcomings in the open. When a user wishes to express his struggles and he can’t meet with you, what does he do? He writes you an email. This way, he can tell you everything. You can answer specifically to him.

I will soon create a page where I post user requested content. Every weekend.

Email Marketing and newsletters

Conclusion:

You want to use emails if you want to boast your online presence. Also, this is for you if you want to enhance reader experience. Setting up an email marketing campaign is not really expensive. We are talking about 6$ to 20$. Per month. Some services like MailChimp even offer free services for your first 2000 subscribers.

Email marketing is not dead. If anything, it kills that silence between your subscribers and you. In an upcoming post, I will talk about building an email list. Thanks for reading. Talk to you guys soon.