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A New Year, A New Approach

Written by: Greg Pipe

Article Overview: As Email marketing is set to develop in 2008, can companies really afford to ignore it anymore? With e-marketing set to become the second largest form of online advertising in 2008, companies really must look at how it can become part of their overall marketing strategies. Like most forms of advertising and marketing, email should not be considered the universal panacea to all a business ills. Instead it can be an incredibly useful tool to breath life back into a traditional marketing plan without having to cost the earth.

A New Year, A New Approach

We’ve all been exposed to email marketing over the years and in some cases rather over exposed. The trick, as with any form of advertising, is to make your message appealing and not annoying. This is probably even more the case with email so that we can avoid the dreaded word SPAM!

As companies look harder at their strategies, the one area that is becoming ever more important is targeting. Traditionally email has been seen as a very cheap simple way to reach a lot of people with a nice simple message. While this is still true, to avoid the ever-bulging mailboxes that people have, it’s important to make sure you are sending relevant information to the right customers. By making sure you are building a relationship with your customers rather than just selling them something every time you talk to them, they will feel more comfortable listening to what you have to say.

This is why the watchword for 2008 is ‘segmentation’. By putting your customers into groups, you can then create marketing messages that will appeal to them more specifically and as such improve the level of response. This can be an airline company sending details of cheap offers for European deals to those customers who have flown to Europe in the past, rather than those that only fly long haul. Or it could be a car dealership not sending details of their new luxury model to someone who has only ever bought a small used car.

This may sound obvious but the important thing to remember is are you tracking this information about your customers with your current CRM packages. Can you for instance tell when they last bought something from you and if so when will that customer be prime for replacing that product with the newer model?

Many companies are now also looking to add email to their CRM systems as a way of improving their relations with customers not simply to sell them a new product but also to ensure they retain their long-term custom. After all it’s always cheaper to keep a customer than it is to get a new one. One of the ways this is being done is by using well-written and informative newsletters.

By offering information to your customers that helps them, you are letting them know you are keen to build a relationship. News and advice related to yours and their business can show how you are really experts in your field and that you are there to help them. This relationship building allows companies to continue talking to their customers without them feeling pressured. It allows a business to talk about what they have achieved, how well they are doing and by implication, why a customer should continue to use them. Good content is key to this and finding the time to write it can be hard. If it’s not something you feel you can do then contact companies out there that can help. There are many email marketing companies around that can help you broadcast your email for you, we are one of few that can also provide the content as part of the package. However, content is good but not if it costs too much, so always ask how much it will be do.

At the end of the day though, it’s important that these messages are going out to the right person, which brings us back to segmentation. If your systems are unable to handle this level of detail it’s worth looking into what can, be that using outside sources or investing in new internal systems. Either way, 2008 promises to be a big year for online marketing, so are you going to be part of it?

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Article Tags: email, marketing plan, marketing strategies, new year, traditional marketing



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