What Email Marketing Can Do For You
Posted by Michael Herman
>Build Brand Consistency – When sending email campaigns, it is important to stay consistent without overwhelming your contacts. Take this opportunity to build brand loyalty by sending out a campaign once a week, twice a month, or whenever you think would best suit your brands needs without being overbearing. Your consumers will begin to look forward to your email campaigns once you set the pace for when to send out campaigns. This will also lead to less chances of someone unsubscribing because they are too bombarded with your emails and don’t want to receive them anymore.
>Engage your Contacts – Believe it or not, your customers want to talk to you. It is even better when you reach out to them. With a platform such as Digital Street, you can personalize your emails by simply including someone’s first name. It makes you look like you are going the extra mile to interact with that individual. Don’t forget to give your contacts a “call-to-action”. Remember, the whole point of sending an email is to potentially bring more business to your company. Whether you are promoting a sale or just talking about something new happening within your company, you should have links going back to your company’s website. This will lead to your customers feeling more engaged, and you will be getting the most out of your email marketing.
>Catch Them Quickly – With people around the world being extremely busy, you usually don’t have much time to catch the attention of your customers. Emails allow you to get straight to the point with what you are promoting. Make sure your subject line is strong enough to make the consumer want to see what’s inside your email! However, the subject line MUST be relevant to the message you are telling. Once your email has been opened, you still only have limited time to keep the reader’s attention, so make sure your email is direct and to-the-point. Short and sweet is better than long and lengthy. The beauty of using email marketing is being able to connect with your customers in a time efficient manner.
Take a look at our Email Marketing Platform!
Posted by Michael Herman
Here is a quick video to give you an idea of what our email marketing platform looks like!
Why Choose Digital Street For Your Email Marketing Program?
Posted by Michael Herman
If you are considering Email Marketing for your business, we are committed at Digital Street to getting you directly connected with your customers and prospective customers alike. Our services will help you create email campaigns that are targeted, optimized, and measurable.
Email Marketing is a low cost, high impact solution, and Digital Street does not require a long-term contract. Our pricing is based on a month-to-month service agreement with affordable plans that start at as little as $50.00 a month with a full-service approach on every level of account. Each customer we have, large or small, receives the same level of service.
To get you started, your dedicated account manager will set up an initial training session on how to use our Email Marketing platform. You will learn how to create contact lists, import contacts, and how to use other email editing features such as auto responders and triggers. We also offer complementary data entry services. The Digital Street Email Platform can enable you to capture emails from your web site by generating an e-newsletter signup form for your website. Sign up forms are a great way to begin harvesting emails for your contact lists. Additionally, we will offer tips and best practices to ensure delivery and increased open rates.
Once you have your contact lists created and uploaded, you will begin training on how to build customized email campaigns using a variety of easy-to-use templates, or you can request a custom designed template from our art department. While creating a campaign, you will be able to instantly preview it on multiple email programs such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, and Outlook in order to ensure your email campaign is compatible with all of the major internet service providers and email programs.
Another great feature included in our service is the ability to receive customer feedback via surveys. You can create surveys with as many options as you wish and you will have the ability to track all of your survey results located conveniently within your reporting section.
We advocate personalizing your emails as much as possible in order to really stand out and create that one to one communication style. One way to personalize your emails in our system is with the use of Dynamic Content tags. Dynamic Content tags allow recipients to receive images in their emails based on the type of mail they have requested. For example, if a golf course has a combination of women and men golfers and they want to promote merchandise from their pro-shop, they could select a dynamic content tag to display women's apparel for women recipients and men's apparel for the men golfers. Also, you can add text personalization to the subject line and beginning of the email. For example, a subject line like: Subject: An email for "John Doe: from your favorite golf course." can really stand out and get opened without hesitation.
Tracking emails is important to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns and if email marketing is viable for your business. After you have sent an email campaign, you can instantly view response data including open rates, links clicked, bounced emails, unsubscribed emails, and forwarded emails.
Additionally, our email marketing services include unlimited image hosting, multiple split testing, free built-in SPAM checking, and tons more. Find out how to get started with Digital Street’s email marketing services here.
7 Reasons To Use Email Marketing
Posted by Michael Herman
There are so many businesses that fear the unknown and are frightened of starting email marketing. Although many are still hesitant to move away from their tried-and-true snail-mail methods, others are rapidly discovering that email marketing is one of the most effective means of generating sales.
When Shop.org surveyed retailers for its State of Retailing Online 2009 report, it found that email was the most-mentioned successful tactic overall.
The Ad Effectiveness Survey commissioned by Forbes Media in February/March 2009 placed email marketing second only to search engine optimization for generating conversions.
And research conducted in 2009 by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) found that email outperforms all other forms of direct marketing. The bigger question, of course, is why? Of all the hundreds or even thousands of messages consumers are exposed to each day, why is email marketing so effective?
1. Email Marketing Reaches Many!
It's hard to find someone that doesn't have at least one email address! What this means for your business is that you can reach out to your entire customer and prospect base.
2. Email Marketing Is Proactive!
Email marketing goes directly into your customer's email inbox! They don't have to search through a phone directory or newspaper to find your services! With one click of a mouse, they can contact you directly to get a quote or more information about your services!
3. Email Marketing is Targeted
Most forms of advertising are based on the idea that if you hit thousands of people with your message, even though it may mean nothing to most of them, a few are likely to respond.
Email marketing is based on the idea of sending the right message directly to the right people based on their preferences, local market conditions, and other factors.
You can build a master list and then segment it by geographic location, marital status, gender, age, income, time of year, etc. Doing so eliminates a lot of the guesswork that makes other forms of marketing so inefficient.
4. Email Marketing Provides Data
We at Digital Street provide you with reports to show which emails or messages went through and which didn't, so you can improve your next campaign. You are able to run split tests, sending one offer or message to half your list and a different one to the other half, so you can get a better feel for what your customers want and what your prospects buy from you!
5. Email Marketing Allows You to Engage
It's nice to get the immediate reaction from a customer who sees your ad just before going shopping. But your real goal is to build a relationship with a broader base of prospects so they think of you whenever it's time to hit the stores.
Email marketing allows you to do that by bringing them shopping tips, updates on trends, seasonal items, and special loyalty-program deals on a regular basis. It's a great way to engage them—and keep them engaged.
6. Email Marketing is Less Intrusive
Unlike telemarketing calls, email marketing doesn't interrupt a prior activity to deliver a message. Opening email is the activity your customers and prospects are engaged in when they see your message. If you've done a good job of building that relationship, they'll look forward to seeing what you have to say.
7. Email Marketing Works
According to the DMA's (Direct Marketing Association) research, email marketing generated a return on investment (ROI) of $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009. You're unlikely to find that kind of ROI from any other form of marketing or advertising—the best reason of all to launch an email-marketing campaign.
When done correctly, email marketing allows you to become (and remain) visible to your customers and prospects with highly targeted messages at a minimal cost, all while delivering outstanding, measurable results that will ripple far beyond your pond of current customers.
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