Today, email marketing is perceived as a key marketing and CRM strategy for most companies. Targeted email is vital to the growth of a business today. But there remains a thin line between email marketing and spamming. The next generation of email marketing is permission-based, and companies need to work harder to make their bulk emails distinct from spam.
There are a variety of email marketing software solutions, like Lyris, available on the Web today, which can help create the ultimate email marketing strategy for your business needs.
Per Email Labs, here are some guidelines for pumping up your email marketing strategy: develop a comprehensive email-marketing plan that demonstrates the value of the marketing program to the company. Work on your emails, laying emphasis on personalized subject lines, offers, products promoted and follow-up emails to responses. Send pre-campaign test messages to smoke out delivery glitches before you actually send your messages to your prospect base, and watch out for ISP blocking, filtering and anti-spam lists. Test different email clients (Outlook, Lotus Notes, AOL, and Web clients like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo) and platforms (PC and Macintosh).
It is important to build on the email relationship with the potential customer right at the beginning. The key is to engage the consumer almost immediately, as there is a significant drop in email performance after two months of recipients subscribing to a list.
Permission-based email is the standard that most companies adhere to, to minimize the damage to their brand and loss of customers which unsolicited bulk emailing can cause. It is important to tap dormant subscribers with the right tactics. Email Labs estimates that 30-50 percent of a company’s email list may be inactive. Engaging long-term subscribers in a consistent manner can make all the difference in a marketing strategy.