Marketing to people who have already visited your site is one of the fastest, easiest and least expensive ways to increase your sales.

Studies show that when customers return to your website, their conversion rates improve by more than 13%!

Increase your sales by taking advantage of the consumers who have already shown an interest in your site.

Email Marketing is:

• Effective – You can reach your existing customer base as well as prospective customers.  You will be communicating with people who have already demonstrated their interest by joining your mailing list. It increases the lifetime value of your customers.
• Affordable – the cost of an email marketing campaign is quite low, especially when compared with more traditional advertising methods.  In addition, studies have consistently demonstrated that it is much cheaper to retain a customer than to gain a new one.
• Fast – your message is delivered almost instantaneously to the people you want to reach. From concept to implementation, email campaigns can be put into action very quickly. You receive a quick response too, usually in a day or two.
• Targeted – emails can be customized for specific purposes and be tailored for defined recipient groups based on the attributes of your choosing.
• Measurable – it’s easy to track how many of your emails were delivered, how many were opened, how many people clicked through to your site and how many of the individuals who “clicked through” actually completed a transaction.  You can find out what’s working by comparing different campaigns as well as different versions of the same campaign.
• Easy – from being able to compile a detailed database of customer information to the creation of custom, branded emails, there are tools available that make it possible to create and manage sophisticated email marketing campaigns.

If you aren’t collecting email addresses from your visitors, it’s time to start. By collecting contact information, it’s possible to better serve your visitors while increasing sales.

Use a permission-based subscriber collection tool so you deliver your message to a receptive audience (this also assures compliance with industry standards for anti-spam best practices).

Important tips about email capture:

• Place an email capture screen on every page of your website in order to reach all visitors to your site.
• Invest time in finding the best place for your email capture field. Smart placement dramatically increases your email capture rates.
• Promote the benefits of becoming a subscriber and offer special opt-in bonuses.
• Make it simple. Don’t ask for too much information up front.
• Protect their privacy. Post a link to your company’s privacy policy.

Effective email marketing boosts your bottom line. In these challenging economic times, can any of us really afford to overlook it?

Our next installment will focus on the techniques needed for a successful email marketing campaign.

If you would like help implementing an email marketing campaign, we can help. Check out our Email Marketing Services in our store.

Does email markeing work for you?  Leave a comment below?

Tags: e-commerce, email marketing, increase return customers

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Email Marketing, General E-commerce, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.