Importance of Email Marketing | Mirum India | Digital solution

Email Marketing 

Why is Email Marketing Important 

Of all the channels of digital marketing, email is the oldest channel and interesting, continues to be the most effective, if done correctly. Even while lot of communication is now shifting to chat or social channels or collaboration platforms, we all continue to have email IDs and pretty much access our mailboxes every day. 

How To Go About Generating a Email Database 

Generating an email database is obviously time consuming and a long term process. Do not EVER “buy” email databases that are being sold over the internet at some throwaway prices. Using such databases could get your website domain name black–listed and also cause damage to your brand in the eyes of your customer.  

Here are some ideas on how you can generate a database using legitimate means 

• You and your sales team would be meeting number of clients and prospects on a regular basis. Get all their business cards into a database, tag each piece of data correctly (what was the specific prospect interested in, what is the likely timeframe when the prospect may want to buy your product and so on). And then nurture this database. It is amazing to see how much email data is hidden in our rolodexes and we are not using it. 

• You would be having tons of people visiting your website. But all that Google Analytics will tell you is the count of visitors. There is no other footprint that is available to you. What if you could motivate each visitor to leave his email ID behind when they visit your site? Create a “Subscribe” button on your website. And give the visitor a compelling reason to share his email ID with you. These compelling reasons could be some kind of research report that may be of interest to the visitor; or a newsletter that creates value for the visitor or in some cases just an opportunity to participate in a lucky draw 

• If your website has a “Contact Us” fill in form, already lots of people would be filling those forms in on a regular basis. Ensure that what ever forms get filled, besides being responded to by the appropriate person, also go and sit in your email database, properly tagged. 

• If you run a lead gen campaign on any platform,  you will end up collecting email IDs of prospects. Some of these may convert and some may not convert immediately. Whatever leads don’t convert, add those email IDs to your database. 

How to Make Use of the Email Database 

A email database, generated using opt-in means (like the ones mentioned above) is a very valuable commodity. It is important that you use it carefully and nurture it well. Don’t start spamming the database, else people will start unsubscribing from your email list. 

• Create a email marketing calendar and plan out the frequency at which you need to reach out to your database by sending an email. The frequency will depend on the nature of your business and the kind of content that you have available to send as email. 

• Relevancy of email communication is very important. Thus for every email ID, you should have an understanding of the profile of that person, either basis past transaction that that customer has done with you or basis what content on your website (or on your social channel) has been consumed by that person, or the lead source for that email ID 

• Once you have planned a calendar, and also have some context around that specific customer, it is also important to plan the content that goes in the mail. If you have different kind of customers who look for different services or products from you, you need to send them different pieces of content, instead of following the one size fits all approach. Also while product messaging may work for a B2C type of business, for B2B business when has to plan for thought leadership type content. 

Do’s and Don’ts for a Good Mail

• Keep the subject line short, crisp and meaninful 
• Don’t use  all capitals in the subject line 
• Avoid words like “Free” in the subject line 
• From and To address should be an email ID that reflects the company domain (and not just a gmail ID) 
• Personalise the mail instead of generic salutation like “Dear Customer” 
• Don’t a mail that is one large image. Keep a balanced ratio of images to text content in the mail 
• Test your mail on different kinds of browsers and devices (phone / laptop etc) to be sure that the message renders correctly on maximum possible devices. There are standard off the shelf software that do this testing for you. 
• Emails must always have a facility for the receipt to op-out (unsubscribe) should the recipient not be inclined to receive any further communication from your business. And honor these opt out requests. 
• Email must be CAN-SPAM compliant 
• Avoid sending attachments