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The Benefits of E-Mail Marketing

No matter what kind of business you're in, success and profitability start with driving interest in your products and services. But it doesn't end there. Since it's roughly six to 12 times less expensive to sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one, the value of your existing customers is too compelling to ignore. You need to keep your customers engaged between sales. And statistics show that it takes six to seven contacts before you can turn a prospect into a customer. But all that contact can be expensive and time consuming, and that's where e-mail marketing becomes a critical part of any organization's marketing efforts.

E-mail marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools available today. It's easy, affordable, direct, actionable and highly effective. According to surveys, customers and prospects would prefer to hear from you via e-mail than any other way. And when you add e-mail to your marketing mix, you spend less time, money and resources than with traditional marketing vehicles (for example, direct mail or print advertising). Your time-sensitive information is sent in minutes, not days or weeks, and you can see the results of your efforts instantly.

E-mail marketing also enables you to proactively communicate with existing prospects and customers instead of passively waiting for them to return to your website, visit your store or office, or call you on the phone.

No matter how your prospects and customers found you--perhaps you paid for search engine placement, met someone at a networking event, collected contact information in your place of business, sponsored a newsletter, placed a banner ad, distributed a flier or sent a postcard--e-mail marketing adds to your bottom line because it allows you to maximize your investment and improve the return on investment (ROI) of every dollar you spend to obtain new business.

E-mail marketing allows you to communicate more information, more often. Your communications can include newsletters, preferred customer promotions, sale notifications, new service announcements, event invitations, greetings and much, much more. Communicating via e-mail is an affordable way to stretch a tight marketing budget--it can cost as little as fractions of a penny per e-mail. With a better response rate than direct mail, e-mail marketing is the most effective way to increase your visibility and ultimately drive sales.

With a well-planned-out e-mail campaign, you can educate your customers. Information that educates will make your customers and prospects more likely to buy because they can make an informed decision. Your e-mail communications can gently lead a prospect through the sales process, provide important data, and drive the prospect to your website for more details and/or a purchase.

E-mail is also an easy and inexpensive way of establishing early and long-lasting relationships with your prospects and customers. When you inform and educate prospects and customers, they perceive you as capable of addressing their needs. Even better, they may look to you as an expert. This develops trust and opens the door to two-way communication, allowing customers to share their pain points so that you can better serve their ongoing needs. In the process, you may discover hidden sales opportunities that you may not already be addressing.

Easily measure and improve your results

The benefits derived from most types of marketing and advertising are very difficult to measure. With e-mail marketing, however, you can easily measure the number of e-mails sent, e-mails opened, bounce backs, unsubscribes and click-through rates.

You can also tell who opened your e-mail, which links in your message motivated the most clicks and who clicked on each link. All of this useful information can help you send highly targeted campaigns to the individuals most likely to respond to your offer, thus improving your results going forward.

To make it easy for you to take advantage of the benefits of e-mail marketing, there are web-based e-mail services that are inexpensive and designed to make e-mail marketing easy for the nontechnical user. These services take care of the heavy lifting, allowing you to do what you do best--promote your own business, product or service. An e-mail marketing service delivers your e-mails with proper protocols, develops relationships with ISPs and has a full-time staff devoted to ensuring the highest deliverability rates for your email. Finally, a good e-mail marketing service is CAN-SPAM compliant and offers a complete solution including list management and real-time reporting.

E-mail marketing offers small businesses an opportunity to reach out to customers and prospects, and increase customer retention in ways that were simply not possible just a few short years ago. It's a big pond. And while you may not be a big fish, e-mail marketing can make you look--and swim--like one.