Guide to e-Marketing Part 2
Abramo Ienardo
There is no more cost effective easy to reach individual customers that with e-mail. While a response rate of 2 percent might be considered good for direct mail, some e-mail marketing campaigns are reporting response rates of up to 40 percent.
With e-mail marketing you can benefit from a level of selling that is unavailable in the direct mail world. The key is the opt-in approach, in which prospects give their permission for you to contact them with offers.
Here are 10 ways to leverage the power of e-mail:
Be wary that some opt-in lists are not what they seem to be:
E-mail Tidal Wave
The good news is e-Marketing can produce a huge response. And the bad news is e-marketing can produce a huge response.
Not answering e-mails for days is not only impolite, it's bad business. But hiring more staff doesn't have to be the answer. When you use technology to increase response rates, you should also use technology to increase response productivity.
Before you launch your e-Marketing campaign, you need to have the right strategy in place to promptly respond to inquiries and fulfill requests for more information. Again, the answer is automation.
Digging in the Data Mine
There's more to e-Marketing than streamlining sales processes.
As more and more commerce moves to the internet, the volume of data collected and the opportunities for analysis have increased substantially. One author has noted that many companies have as much data on when and where its customers are shipping packages as is contained in all of the 17 million books in the Library of Congress.
Entered the need for data mining, the extracting of meaningful patterns from large quantities of information. Unless you mine data to determine the profiles of your best customers, you are missing out on lucrative marketing opportunities.
While there is no scientific way to precisely predict who will buy a product or service, data mining increases revenues by spotting the prospects most likely to buy. Data mining is also used to cut marketing costs by eliminating e-mails, direct mail and telemarketing to people who are highly unlikely to respond an offer.
How to measure your return on investment
Simply put, the goal of e-Marketing is to increase marketing efficiency. Thanks to improvements in technology, you can now mine more data about the profitability of customers than ever before.
All customers are not created equally when it comes to profit. Learning where your customers rank in terms of profitability, and doing something with the information, is the future of business.
Seven ways to measure ROI for e-Marketing:
1. Higher response rates
2. Better quality leads
3. Increased conversions into sales
4. Lower marketing costs per lead
5. Increased customer retention
6. Increased customer satisfaction
7. Customer profitability
There is no doubt that technology can improve the way companies sell and market to customers. But the investment in time, resources, and energy are considerable. Should you invest in CRM systems that you own and operate, or should you work with a vendor to provide the services on an outsourced basis? The following are some points to weight:
Advantages of In-house CRM Solutions:
If You Must Ask...
10 questions to ask when evaluating e-Marketing services.
There is no more cost effective easy to reach individual customers that with e-mail. While a response rate of 2 percent might be considered good for direct mail, some e-mail marketing campaigns are reporting response rates of up to 40 percent.
With e-mail marketing you can benefit from a level of selling that is unavailable in the direct mail world. The key is the opt-in approach, in which prospects give their permission for you to contact them with offers.
Here are 10 ways to leverage the power of e-mail:
- Build a permissible e-mail list of prospects who would like to receive more information about your product or service.
- Diligently collect e-mail addresses during all your lead-gathering efforts, including trade shows and telemarketing.
- Embed links to a merchandising Web site your e-mails, giving you an instantaneous fulfilment package online.
- Avoid e-mail clutter by customising. By extracting specific information from your customer database, you have the ability to construct personalised messages for each reader.
- Test, test, test your e-mails. You can test headlines, offers and lists in a fraction of the time it takes to test traditional direct mail.
- Research the best resources for e-Marketing outsourcing support.
- Reinforce customer purchase behaviour by communicating after the sale via e-mails.
- Conduct market research using your e-mail audience of prospects.
- Remember the golden rule of marketing: communicate to prospects in the way they want to be communicated to. For best results, combine e-mail with traditional direct mail.
Be wary that some opt-in lists are not what they seem to be:
- The wonders of technology do not replace the basics of direct marketing: you need a great offer that is sent to the right people. When you purchase e-mail address lists, you need to be clear on how the names were compiled.
- What's the difference between an opt-in list and an opt-out list? Opt-in means you gave your permission to be contacted; Opt-out means you will be contacted unless you say don't do it.
- With the opt-in list the people gave their permission to be contacted with offers, while opt-out lists assume that the secondary uses of data are acceptable unless a person registers an objection to them. Many people consider sending e-mail to people on an opt-out list to be unsavory practice of spamming.
- The most effective way to obtain an opt-in list is to grow your own using advertisements on your website.
E-mail Tidal Wave
The good news is e-Marketing can produce a huge response. And the bad news is e-marketing can produce a huge response.
Not answering e-mails for days is not only impolite, it's bad business. But hiring more staff doesn't have to be the answer. When you use technology to increase response rates, you should also use technology to increase response productivity.
Before you launch your e-Marketing campaign, you need to have the right strategy in place to promptly respond to inquiries and fulfill requests for more information. Again, the answer is automation.
Digging in the Data Mine
There's more to e-Marketing than streamlining sales processes.
As more and more commerce moves to the internet, the volume of data collected and the opportunities for analysis have increased substantially. One author has noted that many companies have as much data on when and where its customers are shipping packages as is contained in all of the 17 million books in the Library of Congress.
Entered the need for data mining, the extracting of meaningful patterns from large quantities of information. Unless you mine data to determine the profiles of your best customers, you are missing out on lucrative marketing opportunities.
While there is no scientific way to precisely predict who will buy a product or service, data mining increases revenues by spotting the prospects most likely to buy. Data mining is also used to cut marketing costs by eliminating e-mails, direct mail and telemarketing to people who are highly unlikely to respond an offer.
ROI, e-Marketing Style
How to measure your return on investment
Simply put, the goal of e-Marketing is to increase marketing efficiency. Thanks to improvements in technology, you can now mine more data about the profitability of customers than ever before.
All customers are not created equally when it comes to profit. Learning where your customers rank in terms of profitability, and doing something with the information, is the future of business.
Seven ways to measure ROI for e-Marketing:
1. Higher response rates
2. Better quality leads
3. Increased conversions into sales
4. Lower marketing costs per lead
5. Increased customer retention
6. Increased customer satisfaction
7. Customer profitability
In or Out?
In-house vs. OutsourceThere is no doubt that technology can improve the way companies sell and market to customers. But the investment in time, resources, and energy are considerable. Should you invest in CRM systems that you own and operate, or should you work with a vendor to provide the services on an outsourced basis? The following are some points to weight:
Advantages of In-house CRM Solutions:
- Control of entire process
- You command 100% of group's attention
- No external access to corporate data
- Technology costs spread among a variety of enterprises.
- Technology infrastructure in place and operational
- Hard-to-recruit technical staff ready to deploy
- Web-enabled call centre experience
- Direct mail and e-mail marketing experience
- Reduces organisational head count and HR concerns
- Vendor responsible for replacing outdated software
- Technology costs spread among a variety of enterprises.
If You Must Ask...
10 questions to ask when evaluating e-Marketing services.
- How long has the vendor had e-marketing technology in place?
- How many clients do they have?
- What industries are they serving?
- Is the e-mail technology able to "sniff" a recipient's e-mail package to determine the optimal format for the message?
- Can the e-mail technology create personalised, one-to-one messages that build your brand?
- Will you have instant, up-to-the-minute access to sales and market data over the Internet 24-hours-a-day, 7 days-a-week?
- Can the system identify the most appropriate communications vehicle for each prospect e-mail or direct mail?
- Are testing and tracking procedures available to systematically improve your results and future campaigns?
- How much concurrent volume can the automated e-mail response system handle?
- What service and support are included in the price?