Strategize Your Email Marketing on Customer Relations
Any good marketer knows the importance of having an in-depth understanding of his/her target audience. They use the knowledge about their potential customer base to create targeted messages and to appeal to what is important to their unique market. If you are starting, or planning to start, sending bulk email, you have to become a marketer as well. Whether or not you have formal marketing education or experience is irrelevant, you and you alone are the expert on your business and your customers. Use that expertise to build real relationships with the individuals on your list. The better the relationship, the more successful your efforts will be.
Your relationship with your customer should start at the gathering or list building stage. However you plan on collecting your list members, through a shopping cart, a simple signup form, or any other method, it is important that you take this initial opportunity to start your relationship out on the right foot.
There are several things you should do to ensure a positive first experience with a list member. Primarily, honesty and clarity in signup terms will let potential list members know what their email address will be used for if they decide to opt-in. This is very important. Transparency in your mailing strategy will let your list members know what to expect and will prevent uninterested parties from signing up. Some companies even allow list members to choose how often they want to receive mail. If you try to trick people into signing up with vague or hidden opt-in policies, you're doing the opposite of what you intend and sending the message that you can't be trusted. Take this opportunity to do things right, make a good first impression and you'll have less significantly less complaints and better ROI.
The second way to help build a relationship immediately at signup, is to collect important and relevant user information. If you allow the customer to tell you what they are interested in, you can create a well organized list to which you can send targeted email that will resonate with the recipient and their specific interests and desires.
There are many ways to use customer relationship to your benefit after you have solidified your list. An important part of email marketing is learning from past results. By using the information that you've gathered from your previous campaigns, you can craft emails that are more interesting to your actual customers. With detailed statistics tracking information, there is so much you can learn about the users who interact with your email.
Pay attention to which links are the most popular and when you have a particularly successful headline or incentive, examine these results and apply the knowledge gained to the next email effort. If this is done correctly, you can organize your list in highly specialized way. Some marketers will have many groups representing the interest levels of the members as well as their particular fields of interest. All of this will allow you to craft and send out better and more successful emails.
The closer the relationship you have with your list members, the better. It's an often overlooked part of email marketing. In a field where the words "blast" and "spam" are used even by legitimate marketers to describe their OWN email marketing efforts, it's no surprised that many don't take their relationships with their customers seriously. Don't fall into this trap. Pay attention to what your list members actually want, care about them, and do things right. If you do, you'll have the kind of success that is well worth your time and an ROI to match!