For me, Marketing is a collection of activities and actions that make my target customers want to buy my product or hire my service. Those actions help you to create or strengthen your brand, position you and your company as experts in your market and generate leads that the sales team will convert into new clients. These general marketing concepts apply for your email marketing program as well. However, I receive calls and emails everyday from companies that want to use Pixelnews, and when I speak to them, they usually tell me that they don’t have a list or a value content generation strategy. They just want to send a blast of emails to let people know about their product or service. The exclusive use of promotional emails work for some companies in some markets, but it is not email marketing, it is just a promotional email, the same as if you run a newspaper add, television ad or a telemarketing campaign.
What is true email marketing?
The true email marketing includes branding, relationship building with your clients and subscribers, adding value, sales/lead generation today and in the future, and other efforts that are used to:
• Position your company as one that understand your prospects needs
• Keep your brand name top of mind so when prospects are ready to buy, they think of you.
• Establish a better relationship with your prospects, increasing their comfort level doing business with you
Why most of the companies don’t do true email marketing?
Most of the companies focus on short-term sales and lead generation. This is because they see how with a simple promotional email get some good sales. However the return will decrease every time you try it. If you send a promotional email and you get 100 leads, that doesn’t mean that a weekly send will give you 400 leads per month. These promotional emails have a limited audience: people that are ready to buy in the precise moment of the campaign, or people that are investigating to buy.
True email marketing has a wider audience because it is not strictly focused on direct sales and lead generation, and have a big influence in medium and long term sales. The conclusion is that commercial emails are just a small part of a global email marketing strategy.
Tags: difference, email marketing, marketing, promotional email
Excellent points. Too many seem to think spamming in boxes is ‘email marketing’. Marketing is basically the same using any platform whether it’s broadcast media or online communications. Marketing is finding a need, developing it and fulfilling that need in the client/customer’s opinion.
Nice, brief and to the point article.
Molly
I’m glad you liked the article Molly. You are absolutely right, Marketing is always the same, no matter the platform.
Couldn’t agree more, and wish more “marketers” (emphasis on quotes) would do the same.
The similarities of purpose parallel those of Content Marketing (not surprising, email marketing is a well-used tool in the Content Marketer’s belt, and to Molly’s point, good Marketing in general), and the credo is the same is well: customers don’t really care about you or your product; they care about themselves. Educate them, inform them, entertain them, inspire them — but not solely based around your product/service. Build the trust, and the sales will follow.
Thanks for your article!
You are completely Right Keith, customers just care about themselves. As Jason Fried of 37 Signals says, the best marketing is the “Education Marketing”. BTW thanks for your comment!
I would certainly agree to everyone’s point. Objective is the same but, platform varies. Remember to strike the potential/targeted audience with appropriate content and make it more self learning/self evaluation/informative so that audience will spend sometime to go thru the articels/Newsletters and when a need or interest arises eventually, sales would be triggered…