Wednesday 18 January 2012

How to Create Great Email Newsletters?

Email marketing is increasingly being used by the businesses of all sizes to keep the customers updated about the schemes, latest happenings, offers etc. of the company. The newsletters are the heart of email marketing and their creation demands creativity and command over the language of email writing.

The type of newsletter depends upon the objective of the email marketing campaign. The format of the newsletter depends upon the type of newsletter. Basically there are three different types of marketing email newsletters:
  1. Tips and Special Offers Newsletters: These types of newsletters should contain the information in a generalized style about the products or services. The company tries to convince the users by giving valuable tips which are both beneficial for the user as well as promotional for the company. After such tips, the company usually gives some special offer information which increases the chances of the user following the company’s link from the email. It is highly suggested that the information or content of the email should bit be shared anywhere else on the websites or blogs and it should remain exclusive to the mailing list otherwise it will lose its uniqueness and importance.
  2. Blog/Article Digest: The content of the blogs is an excellent way to promote the name and products of the company. If there is nothing special worth mentioning in the newsletter, than the blog content is a great idea. It is one of the best ways to share knowledge which is not very specific and always acts as a background for the marketing campaign. The email marketing programs can do this for the company in an automated way, all one needs is to specify the number of blog posts to be sent in the email and the frequency of the emails.
  3. Plain Text Newsletter: These type of newsletters are used to drive the user to the main website or webpage which contains the schemes, offers etc. The body of the newsletter does not contain any images, formatting or styling and the text provides the basic information in the simplest manner. The text holds the links to the main pages or website.

Email marketing is an area of stiff competition and for people who have not tried it earlier it would always be suggested that they try a free email marketing service to monitor whether it gives some return or not. Later on a paid and more efficient service can be opted for.

Wednesday 11 January 2012

All About Email Marketing Services and Are they Available for Free?

Email Marketing is one of the traditional online marketing methods and it has been enabling people around the world to achieve their marketing goals in an easy way. This fact also explains the competition in the email marketing sector. With a stiff competition in all the areas of business, every company tries to win more customers and well wishers through email marketing which results in the overloading of the accounts of the users with emails containing offers, schemes, lucky draws etc.

Most of the people get irritated from the large number of marketing emails that they receive and after some time they do not even bother to read them and simply put them in trash. This creates a challenge for the email marketing services as they need to create unique, attractive and personalized email marketing campaigns to draw the attention of the users.

There are two parts of the email marketing campaigns.

The first is the personalization. This requires a vast amount of research because the interests, age, preferences and other such basic information about the email user should to be collected so that the blueprint of the personalized email content can be created. For example, a shoe company would create different emails for a student, a retired professional and working man. Similarly, a person employed in the marketing sector would like different offers than the one involved in car manufacturing simply because of the nature of their work.

The second and the most important part is the creation of the marketing email. Email writing for marketing purposes is an art and technique.
  1. The message should not be lengthy
  2. The important information should be made bold
  3. The email should not be, i.e. it should not use too many colors and pictures
  4. The overall look of the message should be crisp and easily readable.
  5. The offers and services should be mentioned in the subject smartly. Most common subject lines find their way into the trash most quickly.
  6. The email should be customized to be easily viewed on different platforms such as desktop, laptop, tap, smart phones etc. and different email services such as gmail.com or yahoo.com.
  7. If possible, people should try that the email is sent at the right time and the company opting for email marketing should see that all the above features are provided by the company.

For new businesses who wish to try the email services, free email marketing services are also available which will be good to give an idea about the how the things work and whether they will be successful for a particular business setup or not.