What is Direct Email Marketing
Direct email marketing is a form advertising that sends the product promotions straight to the people who might be interested in checking them out. By definition, direct marketing refers to the way an advertisement can travel right from the business owner directly to the targeted prospective client. Offline and traditional ways to do this has proven very effective to businesses. Examples of such are flyers, catalogs, and post cards directly received in the mailbox.
The online way (direct email marketing) is, however, much better. Not only is it cheaper, but it's also more effortless than the first given examples. The following discusses what direct email marketing is as pertains to business. Its uses, purposes, and various ways on how business owners can take advantage of the opportunity are also described.
A closer look at direct email marketing
The opposite of direct email marketing is using intermediary services for delivering the advertisement. For example, the use of publisher advertising requires that you, the business owner, contact a publisher to post your promotions on billboards, newspapers, television, radio, and so forth. This method is very expensive at best and difficult at worst. The effectiveness of intermediary email marketing is also impossible to track.
Direct email marketing makes it easy by eliminating all those cumbersome undertakings. In direct email marketing, there is no arbitrator involved in delivering the adverts, and the success rate is often higher. Since the emails are delivered only to people who already have the inclination to buy the product being promoted, the chances that a purchase will be made is even higher. In indirect email marketing, you simply depend on your luck. You basically rely on that one person out of many who sees your advertisement and is vaguely interested in it. This means that with indirect marketing, you are unlikely to make as much profit. In email marketing, you make your own game plan.
Making effective direct email marketing campaigns
Email marketing efforts can be bundled up in campaigns to save time and money. It's more cost-effective this way because you will be working with a multitude of targeted prospective customers at the same time. This also makes it possible to track user interaction to the emails. You can track, for example, if the email is dumped to the trash can, got caught in the spam filter, or opened by the reader. If it is opened, you can then track actions such as click-throughs, registrations, purchases, and so many more.
In a campaign, there are also tools you can use to improve the content and the headers of the emails sent, as well as for managing the list of email addresses. The following are some of the benefits included in a direct email marketing campaign:
- Easy to use and centralized control panels
- Email list management tools for organizing your list of email addresses
- Online editors for composing rich content for your emails
- Optimization tools, so that the mail won't get caught by the spam filters
- Tracking of click-throughs, registrations, feedbacks, and various other user interaction
- Several tutorials and how-to's for beginner email marketers
- Campaign analytics, which tracks the fiscal effectivity of the campaign