Email Marketing and Email Marketing Services

Email marketing is essentially the use of emails as a direct mail marketing tool for prospective and past customers. However, email marketing services are not to be confused with unsolicited email distribution. Unsolicited bulk emails (also known as spam) is sent indiscriminately to internet users. Direct emails and retention emails are sent via email marketing services to email addresses collected in an authentic manner (known as an opt in) and contain information that is useful to the recipient and for which they requested for at the time of contact.

The two primary purposes of utilizing email marketing services are:

1. To send advertisements or promotional messages. These are sent to email addresses collected by the sender or from rented lists.
2. To retain and build customer relationships via regular email contact. These are similar to newsletters and are generally information based and often include promotional messages within the email.

Pros of email marketing and email marketing services

• Cost effective technique of retaining contact with customer base and to provide opportunity to up sell and resell products or services to existing customer base.
• Cheapest form of communication.
• Saves time and offers a great way to track engagement.
• Faster deployment of campaign often with instant delivery time.
• Easy segmentation opportunities to target specific groups and send relevant information.
• Greater personalisation improves response rates.
• Increasing sales as regular newsletters double as opportunities to include promotional messages.
• Effective feedback mechansism for customer to provide information through.
• Diversification away from more dominant customer sources such as search engines helping to create a more defensible online business.
• Wider marketing reach that’s not limited by geography.
• Enhances relationship with client base which builds loyalty and better facilitates longer sales cycles.

Cons of using email marketing services:

• Often difficult for recipients to differentiate between legitimate marketing emails and unsolicited mails.
• Highly sensitive email filters sometimes catch legitimate commercial emails as well.
• Renderability issues with different recipients email display systems rendering the mail differently.
• Email response decay and difficulty in keeping clients engaged after initial email
• Additional resources, manpower and use of sophisticated email marketing software may be required for massive email campaigns.

With more and more people growing increasingly wary of SPAM emails creating an effective email marketing campaign has become increasing more difficult. However despite the threat of even your legitimate emails being blocked by spam filters and overlooked by recipients as junk mail, the effectiveness of this internet marketing tool cannot be denied. For years it has proven to yield one of the highest ROI of all internet marketing strategies. So it’s vital that any online business invest in a good email marketing service provider who can effectively help businesses to navigate the many pitfalls of email marketing such as making sure your emails reach the recipients rather than being filters by spam filters.

Email Marketing Services

Hiring a reliable email marketing service provider is the best bet to ensure success in your email campaign. With a dependable service, you can enjoy access to a database of potential clients, get assistance on setting up and managing email directories, creating templates and launching the email campaign.

What to Look for in an Email Marketing Service?

• Feature Set - your email marketing service should be able to offer useful features such as creating emails, developing contact lists and monitoring results.
• Ease of Use – their website should be easy to navigate and user-friendly, especially when it comes to setting up an email list.
• Email Campaign Templates – email newsletter design is an important aspect of email campaigns.
• Reports and Tracking – tracking the effectiveness of your email campaigns is critical. So your email marketing service should offer a range of tracking features and reports.
• Good Support – this includes the availability of tutorials, live chat supports, online knowledgebase and email support.

Top 3 Email Marketing Service Providers

1. Aweber – very popular among internet marketers because of its ease of use and superb features such as email newsletter designs, website sign-up forms, email web analytics, follow up auto responders and a world class delivery rate. Highly recommended.
2. Get Response – definitely one of the leading email marketing service providers with over 300 HTML templates, social media integration, great tracking, testing and analytics.
3. Benchmark Email – this email service has everything you’d expect; templates, sign up forms, email personalization options, tracking, scheduling. Not a good the two above, but definitely good value.

These providers have monthly pricing options and their software can import mailing lists, remove unsubscribed contacts, group email contacts, automatically detect duplicate emails, require opt-in, add hyperlinks, add images and have many other features. Companies like Aweber communications can create newsletters and sign up forms for a business along with providing follow up autoresponders and email web analytics.

If there is only one thing you do today it should be commit to starting your email marketing campaign. It’s totally inexpensive, low maintenance, offers high ROI and will be a launching pad for greater online success.