How to Build the Foundation of a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

What Is Email Marketing?
Any email sent to a new or potential customer or client falls under the heading of email marketing. Email marketing uses electronic mail (email) as its method of delivery to send messages that are commercial in nature to a specific or targeted audience.

Email marketing is an industry with an amazing growth rate. Experts estimate that US firms alone, spent over $400 million in 2006 on email marketing. It’s quickly becoming the most used device for showing advertisements. Email marketing has come a long way over the years. Specialized marketing methods now allow targeting of specific demographics with an ease unheard of a few years ago.

Why Email Marketing?
While email is not necessarily the only means of communication between the seller and the buyer, it’s by far the most widely customary. Even though it’s been the practice of including a phone number and physical address in emails and on the web sites of national and international companies, it’s only now becoming popular practice for the majority of Internet businesses to do so.

Internet users have become accustomed to corresponding through email. It’s snappily, it’s easy and it’s free. Email marketing was objective a natural progression in email evolution. People are reading emails, so marketers can use that to their advantage. That was figured out shortly after email came into existence, I’m sure.

What’s An Email Marketing Campaign?
Many Internet marketers think an email marketing campaign is just mailing out advertisements. Others think they’re using email marketing to is full potential because they’re sending out newsletters and ezines.

But a complete and successful email marketing campaign is much more than just newsletters and attempts to sell. The steps in a successful email marketing campaign chain are:
get new potential customers
create and improve relationships with those customers
increase the loyalty and trust of the customer
make new or additional sales.

It’s a natural progression. From one step to the next. Doing one successfully will bring you to the next. The email marketing campaign falls short of your goals when you try to go from the first step straight to the last one. Leaving out the two most important steps.

I agree that getting new customers and making sales is the reason all companies are in business. Sales mean money, and money keeps businesses open. And sometimes it happens that a reader will jump straight from your first email to a purchase. I wouldn’t count on that happening very often. That would be too easy, and life fair isn’t that diagram. Trying to make a sale with every email should not be the primary focus of your email marketing campaign.

Email marketing’s fat potential lies in the relationship building that it allows. Internet sales depend on customer trust and familiarity more than any thing else. On the Internet there’s puny contact. So the only way for online businesses to build familiarity is through repeated communication. And that communication takes the form of email marketing. Reading repeated emails over time builds feelings of familiarity. Not quite friendship, but close. The reader gets comfortable with the sender. And the comfort and the familiarity grows with more communication. Building a solid relationship. Making it easier to give their loyalty and trust.

The customer has to trust that the seller will be available if there’s a problem. They certainly can’t just go assist to the store for problem solving. At least in the real world, it’s reasonable to assume the store will still be there tomorrow. But on the Internet, there’s no guarantee the web page will still be there. Even if it is, you can’t just walk in and demand to see the manager. The customer has to trust the seller will be available at the email address supplied. The buyer must trust that the seller will back up his word. On on the Internet, it should be said “Trust = Sales = Money = Business Success“.

So concentrate your email marketing campaign efforts on building relationships. Then focus on improving those relationships. Then you can employ the comfort of those relationships to effect loyalty and trust. When you do, the sales will come with the natural progression of the email marketing campaign chain.

Provided, of course, you have a quality product. And that you’ve been focusing your email marketing campaign on a targeted audience with interest in your product or service. But thats another article.