Every company should have an email-marketing plan
Thursday, January 5th, 2012
Happy New Year to everyone! I hope all of you have a successful 2012!
I’m starting out the New Year writing about email marketing plans. Every company, no matter how small, should have an email-marketing plan. These allow you to directly reach out to your customers and convey your message. The cost per thousand impressions – in both dollars and time – is lower than anything else you can do.
There are many different email-marketing plans for a wide variety of price levels. Modern Media Answers offers a couple of different ones, but you should look at several and compare to be sure the one you pick is right for your circumstances. Be sure of three things:
First, there is an easy system to build and edit your list of email addresses. There is no reason this should be hard but different plans uses slightly different systems.
Second, there is an easy “opt-out” button that will automatically remove people who don’t want your email. Federal Law requires this and compliance is so easy with most system there are no reasons to even have a possibility of being in violation.
Third, make sure the system for editing is one with which you are comfortable. Different people are comfortable with different user interfaces – what seems intuitive to me might be unfathomable to others! To each his own and there are enough choices for everyone to find something that works best for him or her.
There are literally hundreds of resources for optimizing your email-marketing plan available from the web. I’ve found Email Marketing Reports to be a great resource. Another one is MailChimp.com. Here are a couple of surprising statistics I’ve found from Mail Chimp:
First, while you might think people have more time on weekends, Saturday and Sunday are the two worse days for people to open marketing emails. Thursday is the best.
Secondly, the more links you put in an email them more likely you are to have someone click on one of them. The chart shows lots of data points, but the overall trend is more links increases the click rate. The chart ends at 20 links so there probably is a point of diminishing returns. But the general rule is more is better.
Overall, an email-marketing plan is a very good way to use digital media to help you get your message out to the public. Now go communicate!