Email Marketing – A Beginner’s Guide

Many businesses, big and small don’t appreciate the benefits of email marketing. Our beginner’s guide will give you a broad overview of how you can use email marketing to target new and existing customers in a cost effective way.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is the process of sending out promotional emails from your company to your list of client email addresses. Email marketing could take the form of letting people know about a sale you’re having in your online shop or to inform them you’re launching a new service they may be interested in.

How do I get people’s email addresses?

This is the part where many businesses go wrong. Just because someone emails you at some point, doesn’t mean you can add them to your email marketing list.

The best way to gather email addresses is to have a sign up box on your website where you get the client’s permission to send them your email newsletters.

Why should I use email marketing?

There are a number of good reasons to use email marketing as a tool for your small business, including;

• Email marketing is cost effective
• Email marketing allows you to keep in touch with previous clients
• Email marketing is very quick
• You can use email marketing to increase your online sales
• Email marketing can be used to get invaluable feedback from your customers

Can I do it myself?

Yes you can, but we highly recommend you use a professional email application such as ConstantContact or MailChimp.

If you try designing an email newsletter yourself and sending it out to clients, it can do more harm than good if the appearance of it is sub-standard.

You also won’t get access to a whole host of useful information such as open rates and the number of click throughs if you send your emails yourself, so you won’t know how effective your email marketing has been.

How much does email marketing cost?

This will depend on the email marketing platform you choose and many offer a free trial period so you can get to grips with it first.

There are pay as you go options available as well as pay monthly subscriptions and you can typically send each email for just a few pence, which is why it’s such a popular method of online promotion, particularly for small businesses.

To learn more, read my top 10 email marketing tips

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Email Marketing, Guides for Beginners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.