Email Marketing Series

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It’s been a while since I published an e-newsletter. Back in the day, it was a good marketing tool for me and a relatively easy way to stay on my prospects’ radar screens. But, between writing for Creative Latitude, BoDo, client e-newsletters and my Inside the Marketing Mind blog,  the e-newsletter became a casualty. But the new year is upon us and it’s time for me to revisit e-newsletters and email marketing.

There’s some talk out there that e-newsletters are becoming a thing of the past, what with all this social media and networking stuff going on. I beg to differ. I believe they’re still a very viable marketing tool. Here’s why:

• E-newsletters are dirt cheap to produce.
• Email marketing has one of the highest return on investment (ROI) indexes of all marketing channels.
• Response cycles for email are pretty darn quick.
• Email is an effective and oh so handy way of driving people to your Website.
• Email is highly trackable. You can track who open your email, when they opened it, what links were clicked and more. That’s great to learn what’s important to your audience.
• Emails are forwardable. When was the last time you received a marketing piece in the mail and was so taken by it that you popped a label and stamp on it and mailed it to a friend?

That second bullet point is important and it’s a wee bit off. Email marketing doesn’t simply have one of the highest ROIs. It is the highest, according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). A recent DMA study shows email marketing’s average ROI to be and astounding $45.06 for every dollar spent. That’s more than double Internet marketing’s ROI of $19.94 for every dollar spent. That fact alone should motivate you to get into email marketing, if you haven’t done so already.

I’ll be launching another e-newsletter soon. You can subscribe to it using the handy signup form in the right sidebar. In the meantime, I’ll be writing a series here about how to develop a successful email marketing campaign.

Post a comment. I’d enjoy learning about your experiences with e-newsletters and email marketing in general. Have you had good experiences? Was it tough to be consistent sending them out? What about list-building? Was/is that a challenge for you?

Watch for my next post on Thursday January 6 – Choosing an email marketing topic.