How Online Marketing Services Use Email to Help Clients
Have you heard marketing experts say that email is dead? If so, stop reading this for just one minute and go check your inbox. Check your spam folder while you’re at it. You will probably find that your email app provides plenty of evidence that the platform is not dead. It is only misused.
Online marketing services that know what they are doing make use of email marketing to help their clients. They know that email can increase engagement and drive traffic. They know it can be utilized to build brand loyalty and increase conversion optimization. It just has to be used the right way.
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The Black Eye of Spam
If you are old enough to remember when AOL dominated email you might also remember that you could easily go days without getting a single message in your inbox. Back then, spammers hadn’t yet figured out how to exploit the email ecosystem to harass people with endless streams of digital junk. Things have certainly changed since the early days.
Unfortunately, spam has given a black eye to the email concept. Companies avoid email marketing because they are convinced their customers hate it. They avoid it because they do not want their domains being flagged by spam filters and web hosting companies as sources of spam.
The good news is that email can be used successfully without running into spam issues. Online marketing services know how to avoid problems by using mailing lists, voluntary subscriptions, etc.
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Building a Mailing List
The key to successful email marketing is building a mailing list of people who voluntarily subscribe. For example, you can start with a company blog. Attached to every post is either a form or a separate pop-up that invites readers to subscribe to your blog. Over many months of doing this, a company can build a very impressive mailing list.
Everyone who subscribes receives an email notification with every new blog post published. This drives traffic to the company’s website on a regular basis. And when combined with well-written blogs offering relevant content, email organically increases conversion optimization.
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Providing Valuable Information
At the core of email marketing is the information provided. Simply put, the information presented in an email needs to be valuable to recipients. If it is not, the email will end up in the trash folder. Too many trashed messages ultimately lead to customers unsubscribing or marking the sender as a spammer. Neither helps online marketing.
Webtek, a Salt Lake City company that provides expert digital marketing services, says that a lot of companies successfully using email marketing do so mainly with regular newsletters. Those newsletters contain all sorts of information ranging from new blog posts to updated company news.
A newsletter email might contain all of the contents of the newsletter within its text. Alternatively, some marketers prefer to put headlines and snippets in the email, complemented by links that direct recipients to the company website. The latter strategy is more effective for increasing traffic.
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Engaging with Email
Tying everything together is the concept of engaging with customers. Most people think of business email as a way to sell. That is why they send business emails to the trash or spam folder. Online marketing services seek to overcome that by guaranteeing the emails they send actually engage with recipients.
This is why newsletters work so well. It is also why inviting people to subscribe to a company blog increases blog traffic. Email that offers valuable information is also capable of engaging with customers. Engage with customers and you organically increase site traffic and conversion optimization.