By definition, email marketing, also referred to as mass email campaign, refers to the act of sending an email to many people in one single operation.
This promotional tool, which is used in the context of marketing campaigns, offers the advantage of being inexpensive.
However, this needs to be carefully implemented: customers and prospects are overloaded with promotional messages, and certain best practices should be observed to ensure the success of your operation.
We summarise these here.
Before sending a mass email, you need to target the audience, i.e. the people who will receive your email. To that end, you need a targeting tool. This lets you select recipients based on either a range of simple criteria (town, age, profession, etc.), or on more complex criteria (date of last purchase, number of open requests, etc.).
Once you have identified the target recipients of your email, you can start drafting and formatting your message. Formatting – a specialised job in and of itself – is often entrusted to a web agency. As far as the content goes, it is important to personalise the message. Readers are more receptive to messages which start with their name and a friendly salutation. This will boost your open rate!
After testing your mass email, you can send your mass email. This step is crucial. Some applications do not have a good e-reputation. This means that emails sent via these tools will automatically end up as spam. Therefore, make sure you work on the deliverability of your mass email.
When two mass emails are sent one after the other following a logical order, we talk about marketing automation. When the recipient clicks on mass email A, the system automatically sends mass email B.
As for any marketing operation, it is important you measure the performance of your email campaign, the ROI which can be expected. This is when open rates and click rates come into play.
For a sales representative, it can be very useful to know that a prospect clicked on a reference in his/her sector in a newsletter. Therefore, it is important that they can access the results of the email marketing operation.
Why not centralise all these data in the CRM solution?