Introduction
The basic concepts of e-mail marketing are similar to postal mail marketing. You can successfully apply any experience you have with postal mail marketing to your e-mail marketing campaign or program.
Nevertheless, since e-mail is an electronic medium, there are important differences to consider. These differences will impact our list strategy and our creative development.
In this tutorial, we'll explore these differences to help you make the most of your e-mail marketing campaigns.
Advantages of E-mail Marketing
E-mail marketing offers several important advantages compared to postal mail marketing. The most important of these advantages are speed to market, real-time tracking and analysis, the ability to target opt-ins, and viral marketing.
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Speed to Market
When an e-mail blast goes out, your message is delivered to your audience within minutes or hours, vs. days or weeks for a postal mailing. This speed of delivery helps you track and analyze the results of a mailing faster.
This speed has obvious benefits for testing. The time it takes you to test your variables and analyze those that perform best for you is significantly shortened, allowing you to roll out a carefully tested campaign to a major market faster.
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Real-Time Tracking and Analysis
Once a campaign transmits, we will begin to see the results immediately through the use of clickthroughs and unique key identifiers embedded in our e-mail. We can then easily track the activity of each recipient all the way through the transaction cycle.
For example, if we have an e-commerce site, we can track whether or not a recipient traveled directly from a link in our e-mail to a page on our shopping cart and made a purchase. Or, we might find that the recipient clicked a link to another page on our site which resulted in traffic to a shopping cart page and a purchase. We can track if a recipient clicked on our shopping cart page and decided not to purchase. By tracking and analyzing traffic patterns from our original e-mail through the transaction, we can analyze and improve on what worked and what didn't work.
Tracking can be provided by your in-house IT department, or by the list manager of the rented e-mail list. Tracking offers a way of testing links in order to identify which unique URL worked best for which rented list.
You can also track by domain to see if certain domains performed better than others. For example if you’re doing a consumer mailing, you can analyze how AOL users responded to your offer vs. Hotmail or Yahoo users.
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Targeting Opt-ins
Opt-in lists are comprised of Internet users who have given their permission to receive your information (we'll further explore the concept of opt-ins later in this tutorial). Individuals on opt-in lists are more qualified and more likely to buy your products and services then those who have not granted permission to be contacted.
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Viral Marketing
We can also track if our message was forwarded to a friend of the recipient we originally e-mailed. If the list manager has the capability to implement special key codes on the backend, these key codes allow you to track any individual who was forwarded our original message.
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