One of the things a specialised online marketing consultant hired to help companies maximise their ability to sell to their website’s visitors will suggest is a targeted and focused multi-level email marketing campaign. There are right ways and wrong ways to do email marketing. The right way can enhance your sales figures and strengthen your relationship with your customers and the wrong ways result in your company’s emails getting ignored — or worse: resulting in your business appearing to be “spammers”. Read on for reasons to do email marketing and for suggestions to help you do it well.

Target New Customers with Email Marketing

While there are many ways that you can market to your existing and potential customers, doing it by email can be very effective. If your customer comes to expect emails from you via a newsletter, subscription to news, updates, and product promotions, or via an online-course you can use this as an opportunity to sell to them.

Permission-based marketing is effective because you are getting someone’s attention with their permission. When people arrive on your website, giving them an opportunity to opt-in to receiving communications from you gives you an opportunity to build a mailing list for various purposes. The info you can gather from these campaigns will enable you to strategise on future marketing campaigns for repeat success or increased success.

Tip: Get your marketing consultant to help you put the process on autopilot with tools that can help you not just sell to people automatically but the tools can help you measure the success of your email marketing campaigns as well.

A lot of people will visit an optimised website without buying something on their first visit. By capturing e-mail addresses and by obtaining permission to contact them in the future, you can increase the chances of making the sale and getting repeat business as well.

Use Emails to Strengthen Existing Client Relationships

Above and beyond targeting visitors that didn’t buy something on their first visit to your site, use email marketing to continue to foster relationships with existing clients, too. A lot of your customers who buy once from your website would be willing to do it again. Email marketing also caters to nurturing a relationship with existing customers because you can provide information to them while helping to build brand loyalty. It can be like assigning them an account manager to regularly work with them without your having to hire (or pay for) that sales person.

Not all email marketing campaigns will work. Read some helpful tips to increase the success of your campaign(s):

Never add a customer’s email address to a mailing list without their permission. Just because they placed an order with you does not mean they agree to your emailing them. Use a software or web-based programme that helps you automate the process including cancelling subscriptions for people who no longer want to receive messages. Consider doing multi-part e-mails to get people interested and keep them reading future messages. An e-mail course, for instance, can follow a sales cycle and help you lead people to buy. Get help from someone (such as a marketing consultant), with learning how to increase the chances of emails being read. There are tips and tricks that can increase the read rate of messages. Try to strike a balance between regularly communicating and not inundating people. Daily is probably too often for emails and annually would (of course) not be often enough.

Best of luck with your email marketing campaign! This can be a great way to continually sell more products and maximise on the potential of each website visitor your business site gets. If you need help making the most of your email marketing, hiring a marketing consultant can improve your chances of success.

By: Chris Jenkinson

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