Email marketing gets a bad rap. The controversy about email marketing is a quagmire that leaves many business owners in confusion in its wake.
According to a new study by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing delivers the highest return on investment of all media available to marketers. The study also projects that
email driven sales in the United States will show a compound annual growth rate of 14.9% between 2006 and 2011. But, statistics like that only bring about real understanding when the outcome of email marketing impacting long term customer-relationship-based revenue streams is fully known.
Patrick Valtin*, sales & marketing expert, president of M2-TEC USA, INC. and founder of one of the largest consulting company in Europe called U-MAN BELGIUM claims email marketing is highly profitable if done correctly. The main mistake is trying to convert a prospect when embarking on email marketing, he says. The direction one should take is instead is trying to attract a qualified prospect.
Attract first, don’t try to convert. It’s actually common sense if you think about it. What if some one came up to you and said BUY THIS with no enticement as to what it was and what it could do for you? Would you buy (convert)? Probably not. But say a girl scout comes to your door with a tray of cookies for you to pick one to sample. Did she entice you, attract your attention first? Yep, mostly likely. And how many boxes did you buy? And moreover, how many will you buy year after year after year on a regular basis?
Those emails that do attract your attention and entice you by putting that cookie in front of you to nibble on – those are the successful approaches.
That begs the question if they already are opt-in prospects, do you still have to attract – aren’t they already qualified prospects if they are in your database?
Not always, according to Patrick. Patrick points out the best ROI approach to email marketing is to promote to inactive prospects and sleeping customers in your data base with the purpose to get them active – to turn them into (entice them to be) regular, loyal customers. Sleeping customers should also be treated as prospects. Old, inactive prospects were curious enough to inquire into your company to begin with. That is the crucial point as Valtin explains. “The biggest false data out there is the saying ‘they were just curious’ as to the reason a prospect didn’t close. Look up curious in the dictionary – it is interest.” So curiosity IS interest. It is up to you to entice them even further so they become “sold”. Sold equates to being a repeat customer.
Valtin goes on to say that the ways to first attract prospects are done with classical marketing techniques before email marketing comes into the picture: pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization with your website, direct mail marketing – the “more traditional” forms are the channels used to attract. Then once you get a prospect or even a first-time customer you can start email marketing to them.
Once your prospects are on your opt-in list, you have to entice. Just on a different level. You have their interest – now hook them.
Three common mistakes in email marketing are: