Email marketing

Recent trends have proven that the email marketing is the life blood of the modern business, every email with commercial message sends to potential or existing customers are considered as email marketing. It involves sending advertisements to the potential or existing customers to inform product details, to build brand image, and to create loyalty.
The ongoing popularity of e-mail says that email marketing is still alive and well. But during the exponential growth of the social networks, many marketers were in a belief that they had to leave email marketing, but nowadays the entire online retail marketing is successfully driven by the emails.
Emails are more personalised communication channels to facilitate the fastest communication, feedback from the existing customers, and for the quick decision making as per the market requirement.

Types of email marketing:

Confirmation or Transactional emails:

Transactional emails are specific email messages which accomplish an individual transaction. These are confirmation emails which conform that a transaction is being completed.
Confirmation or transactional emails are web based marketing strategies; in this case, email recipients without being redirected to the retailer’s website they can buy goods and services directly from an email message.

Direct emails:

Direct emails send to communicate day to day business updates; these are promotional emails messages which include special offers, discounts, and reminders.

Mobile email marketing:

It is very known that nowadays almost everybody is using their mobile phones to check emails. And, there is some analysis by the market surveyors that the majority of public using their mobile phones to check emails are increasing very drastically. If the firm still stuck with upholding their business by concentrating on the public using desktops, there is no much margin to see success in this competitive world. People are used to mobile phones for any activity. So, in this situation, the desktop users hardly open the marketing ads, campaigns or promotions of the product. It is highly recommended to design the mailing approaches to seem very attractive and beautiful to handle.

Tips to get success in email marketing:

• Send emails to those who are willing to receive.
• Include content relevant to the person has requested.
• Maintaining email sending frequency and stick to that schedule increases loyalty in the minds of customers.
• It is always recommended to send business to business emails one day after and one day before the weekends i.e. Tuesday to Thursday, between 9:30 to 4pm.
• Do not use all capital letters or multiple exclamations marks, spam filters may detect.

Email marketing process:

1. Build list of Email addresses:

Building potential customers’ list:
Marketers believe that growth in business is directly proportional to the number of customers, so maintaining a list of subscribers and prospective customers facilitates a decrease in bouncing rate. Email list management software helps you to build a list of target customers.

Potential customers list can be prepared through networking, trade shows, seminars, during sales, events, prospect calls, direct emails, post cards, catalogs, customer satisfaction surveys, invoices and through company publications.

2. Write your emails:

The first thing to concentrate while writing an email should be a pretty decent & professional subject line. This should include the intention of sending the email with possible less number of words. After the recipient reads the subject, the person should feel comfortable in reading further. In other words, it should not be confusing or with jargon words.
Big image with little content:
A big image with very little content is also spotted by the spam filters. So, for every image, at least two lines of text should be added. And, the text should be sensible and professional enough to read.

3. Choose your recipients:

Break the bulk:

To avoid being marked as spam, segment the big list of customers into small groups. People are worried seeing a large number of recipients in the mail which creates an insecure feeling on public’s mind. The best way to send email would be creating email groups and including individuals in that group makes it sweet and simple to see and read which also saves time to send to huge target customers. Moreover, it is a best practice to reduce the efforts and time of the sender.

4. Send emails:

Sending an email seems to be a simple task, however, that includes a great effort and concentration. As this mail is the first approach to reach the customer, it has to be very innovative, stylish and attractive enough to make the customer chose or feel to read. If the product or the service has to be demonstrated in an email, always project the words on benefits rather than features. The mail should not be lengthy or with too much information which makes the customer feel bored to read the entire content to understand. Highlight the things which need to be projected.

Permission-based emails:

Companies send emails to individuals those who sent a request to receive emails. Permission-based emails strengthen the customer relations, loyalty and maximise the value of the firm.

5. Process bounced emails:

Emails fail to reach recipients because of various reasons because of wrong destination addresses or the recipients’ in-boxes are full or due to the block list based filtering. Bounce email handlers identify the mailing addresses which are not valid or some might have set the blocks to receive emails. These handlers are not designed in every product.

6. Prevent emails from landing into junk boxes:

Spam words
Millions of spam messages are blocked every day on the basis of content only. The spam filters trigger the most common words and phrases that spam filters tend to trigger are mentioned below.

Using more than one of the above words or phrases may not trigger by the spam filters, instead of using these senders are suggested to use synonyms and unique words.

Sloppy HTML templates are also spotted by the spam filters resulting in an email sent to spam boxes. In order to reach the target customers, it is always recommended to approach professional email providers for well-formed default HTML.

7. Maintain White lists:

For major ISPs (internet service providers), spam is a real concern. They have many spam filters to identify various types of spam.
A list of IP addresses which maintains the reputation and built relationship then their emails has a better chance of being delivered, Such list of IP addresses are called white lists. White list status on all ISPs maximizes the chance of delivering emails.

8. Understand blacklists:

The list of internet protocol (IP) addresses is marked as sending unsolicited emails are called as black lists. If the sender has been identified in the black list, then it is recommended to approach blacklist administrators to ask further procedure to remove from the blacklist.

9. Setup Feedback loops:

Feedback loops act as self-defenders, once a feedback loop is setup then ISPs (Internet service providers) give a chance to rectify errors and contact you to deal with the complaint. Otherwise, ISPs blacklist the IP addresses without a prior intimation.

10. Avoid offensive content:

Remove content that may be offensive to others which threaten and abuses the public. That creates a very adverse impression on the firm at the first instance. It is always recommended to verify the spam guidelines before drafting any email.

11. Follow Provisions:

The message should not have false or misleading information and subject line. Emails must come from a functioning return email address, and must display the physical postal address.
The senders must unsubscribe requests within 10 business days.
The TCPA of 1991
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998

Child protection acts:

Without parental interference never post or disclose the information of individuals under 13.
Below mentioned are the child protection acts
Child On-line Protection Act
The Michigan Children’s Protection Registry Act of 2009
The Children’s On-line Privacy Protection Act
The Utah Child Protection Registry Act of 2009

12. Follow-up

Regular follow-ups on the emails are required to stay in touch with the customers or to better understand them to fulfill their requirements. As every business firm maintains a style or standard tag line for their emails, it is always recommended to remember the customers to be aware of the spam.