Email marketing can be used for several purposes:

Brand Awareness

Newsletters are a great way of creating and maintaining brand awareness. A well designed and easy to read newsletter will firstly make your logo jump out from the screen and communicate your company vibe or culture every time.

See the Apple Newsletter that comes out every time they have something to tell us about, it is similar every time and it maintains the subtle Apple logo with and the clean lines they use to portray their products.

Every time you send a newsletter or an update you are getting your brand out there.

Top of Mind Marketing

Top of mind marketing like brand awareness can be achieved through regular and informative communication with your customers. By setting yourself up as the expert in your field you will give yourself the best possible chance that you can of being the first person that they think of when they need your service.

Your newsletters or updates again will be very noticeable by your logo and vibe, but they will also continually let people know what you are good at or what you can provide them to help satisfy a need.

You should look at providing a solution to a specific and topical issue every newsletter so that your readers start to know where they can turn for help.

Every newsletter or update that you send puts you one step ahead of your competition.

Product Reinforcement/Updates

The most common mistake that all us make when we are developing a new product or service is that we assume that everyone knows about it already. We developed a new version of InhaleSuite and while we were adding new customers to it every week we were forgetting to let our current clients know about it and the benefits of changing over to it.

Email Marketing is a quick and easy way for you to let 200 – 20,000 people know about your new product or service with the click of a mouse. It doesn’t even have to look pretty (though we think it helps) you just need to let them know that it exists and the benefits of buying or swapping to this product or service.

Get together some photos and the content of your email and you have successfully got the product awareness underway.

Selling

Selling is the first thing that springs to people’s minds when you think email marketing. Let’s face it we have all been offered Viagra and other pharmaceuticals via “email marketing” so it is easy to see how we get to this conclusion.

Unfortunately SPAM has soured the taste of email marketing for many legitimate email marketing campaigns that have something specific to offer that could be of benefit to the receiver of the email. We get so many offers now that we don’t know which ones are good offers!

That aside if you are marketing legitimately to your own database of clients then you will still increase your chances of selling via email marketing. It is about being consistent, if you have a weekly special then let people know about it weekly, but don’t expect 100% of readers to take you up on your offer weekly or in fact to read your email weekly.

What you are looking for is reaching a percentage of people every week and then of that percentage a smaller percentage of people who will take up your offer. The industry “read rate” of email marketing is about 25-30% which is a good place to start. Of that 25-30% if you have even 5% of people take up your offer you are using email marketing successfully.

Let take for example a database of 10,000 email addresses. 3,000 people read the email and 150 people click through and buy your new product. Even of that product cost the person $10 you have made $1500 and it has cost you about $200 to send the email. That’s not too bad.

One of the best email marketing campaigns that I have seen runs about 350 days of the year. I get an email just about every day with a specific product on sale. Do I buy every day... no, but I think about it. Do I buy every week... no but I could. About once per month they send me an email with something that I could really really use and on average every second month I will actually purchase something. Now if you think about that email going to 10,000 people every day, then the chances of selling something every day increase dramatically.

So if you have a product that you need to get out there then start planning a legitimate email marketing campaign.