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.
