Understanding the benefits of email marketing for enterprise campaigns
Email marketing can be a very convenient and pragmatic tool for enterprise marketing, however the channel is often misused and even abused as a form of marketing communications. The cost-effectiveness, scalability and immediacy of email marketing has been the reason for it's widespread adoption by spammers. It's role in spam requires that marketers wishing to use email must exercise caution and focus on quality and personalization. Spam does not work. It hurts brand reputations, email servers and creates ill-will.
Following email best-practices, on the other hand, can have real and measurable benefits for enterprise marketing campaigns. As mentioned above, cost and scalability combined with the medium's immediacy makes the channel a powerful tool for enterprises.
Email Marketing Benefits For Enterprises
- Cost - Compared with direct mail and advertising, email marketing can be highly cost-effective
- Immediacy - Email marketing is perhaps one of the most immediate forms of communications on a large scale.
- Scalability - As an organization grows and if the right technology is in place, costs can actually go down with scale. Additionally, with regularity,and iteration, the results of email marketing can be increased over time.
Why use email marketing
- Stay in touch with customers and clients on a regular basis to keep your brand on "top-of-mind"
- Generating awareness of new products, promotions, company growth, resources or offerings
- Asking for immediate action from customers, which can also be trackable using Analytics software. Embedding a link in an email to an offer or promotion can drive engagement and sales. This can happen without the lead time of traditional advertising as well.
- Gathering feedback - Email is a two way form of communication. It is important for enterprises to realize that there are opportunities beyond "do-not-reply@gmail.com" send-off addresses. By gathering feedback, your organization can be at the pulse of your clients and customers perceptions, concerns and happiness index. This can help stave off problems before they occur.
- Testing messages - Email can be a great tool for testing new ideas, messages and promotions. Create a small segment and give your new campaign a test run before rolling out the concept across all channels.
- Measuring the impact of campaigns - Email can be used for "test flight" marketing campaigns. Make sure you have the right Analytics tool to measure the desired effect.
- Marketing automation can be a powerful tool to personalize communications and nurture leads or prospects towards a state of buying-readiness. This powerful set of marketing technologies that comprise the concept of "marketing automation" can help improve ROI and close the loop between marketing and sales.
- Lead scoring - With marketing automation, lead scoring can help determine your best customers, leads and prospects. Email marketing can be a powerful and central tool for gathering performance and engagement data from your audiences.
- Education - Email marketing can help leads become buyers through an education program that soft-sells a desired product or service. Education emails should be entirely useful, interesting and helpful. If done correctly, education emails can build trust and help move inactive leads into a readiness state.
- Segmented communications - Easily segment marketing messages to appropriate groups based on customer life-cycle, interests, behaviors and actions, geography, time zone or other important differentiators. This will make your engagement rates increase and decrease un-subscribes.
