Understanding Email Marketing (EDM)

Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of online marketing. Yet, it is still proven to be very effective nowadays. Today, the most effective form of online marketing is no doubt search engine marketing. But email marketing proves to be very low cost and useful for retaining old customers.

To successfully implement an email marketing campaign, one needs to know about how email marketing actually works. Information about our email marketing service can be found here. Essentially, there are 2 kinds of emails that you can send to your customers:

1) Text only emails - These are often serious announcements that you send to customers, instead of promotional materials since there are no images.

2) HTML emails - Also known as html e-newsletters, the emails that are sent out are actually html format emails. If there are no ready made email templates, you will need a designer to design a html newsletter before you can send to your customers. Such emails may contain text and images as well. While its easy to send out text emails, sending out a html newsletters need more work.

Steps to create html newsletters: 

1) Create and manage an email list -  Before sending any emails, you need to build up an email list. This should be done legally and correctly by various means:

a) Capture email addresses via website frontend: "Subscribe newsletter" 

b) Allow your customers to subscribe via a registration form offline.

c) Activate forward to a friend link to expand your reach

d) Import your customers from your oulook address book 

2) Creating/Choosing email templates - Once you have a substantial number of email addresses in your list, you need to prepare content and any images to be incorporated to the newsletter. When the materials are compiled,  your designer will proceed to design a newsletter template for you. When the design is done, you may stil edit the content - text or images via a backend web administration panel. Please also note that some email marketing solution providers offer a wide variety of ready made templates for you to choose from, at a low cost. However, these are not customized fully to suit your business.

3) Preview and testing - When the template is done with all content included, you may preview and send a test email to your own account first. This allows you to see the actual email that will be sent to your customers.

4) Email delivery - HTML emails may look differently on various email environments. Hence, we should also ensure that these emails are not distorted in any way. Many email programs block images as well and this should be taken into consideration as well. In recent years, many emails are also not delivered due to tigher rules and regulations concerning email spamming. Make sure that your providers are aware of anti-spamming policies. If not, your recipients may report your campaign to SpamCop. If so, you may get into serious trouble with your website with all sorts of blocking from the authority sites.

5) Tracking and reporting - One of the main reasons why email marketing is popular is because an email marketing campaign can be tracked and measured. With statistics, you may track:

a) Who and what percentage of recipients actually viewed the newsletter that you sent

b) How many emais were sent and delivered successfully

c) Number of bounced emails

d) Generation of successful leads through tracking of hyperlinks

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There are many resources on email marketing. Benefits of email marketing can be found at Wikipedia as well. 

Leaders in email marketing include Constant Contact Inc, Contact Pro and more..