What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a more 'traditional' form of online marketing and involves the process of sending large numbers of emails to people within your target market segment. Generally email marketing is conducted from web-based email services. These services cater specifically to the email marketing industry and offer various tools that make it easier for a business or person to send high volumes of emails easily. The benefits of email marketing is that whilst social media and other emerging platforms for marketing online have gained popularity, this more traditional form of marketing often appeals more to the business owner

How does Email Marketing work?

Quite simply trying to send bulk email from your normal email account using Outlook or Gmail would be a difficult process. Having to individually send emails, or in batches, can be a tiresome task. Added to this, if a high number of your emails are marked as spam there is a possibility you may be blacklisted, which would cause future issues with your emails being automatically directed to Spam folders, as opposed to arriving in the Inbox.

Web-based bulk email services combat this problem by sending all the emails for you. An email address list must be added to your account, and then mails can be sent to these addresses, usually being paid for with credits you have purchased. This solves the isssue of possible blacklisting of your own email, as well as reduces the time required to send high volumes of emails. Generally these mass email services will offer other tools such as HTML templates, or an online WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that allows novice users to easily create their own template to their requirements. Setting up custom templates allows businesses to better brand their emails to reflect their company logo and colour scheme. These templates can also be saved, further reducing the time required to send emails in the future, though some knowledge of HTML coding would be considered useful in this regard.

Sourcing email addresses for your bulk emails can be difficult as having a large number of emails being returned as spam or 'bouncing' (not being delivered due to the mailbox being full or not existing) could cause issues with your mass email marketing service provider. Email addresses can be 'scraped' (gathered from the text) of other websites on the internet by various processes and if done properly could be a good source of targetted addresses to market to, however this can also be a time consuming process. The other alternative would be to buy email addresses though it must be remembered there are no guarantees when doing this and many of the email addresses probably will not fall into your target market segment.

In terms of distributing your message to an individual or business as opposed to posting in the online world where people must first find it, email marketing offers a direct communication channel straight to the individual. If done correctly, to the right audience, marketing using bulk email can achieve good results for any business or person needing to promote themselves online.

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Interested? We'll do our best to help you get the most out of your new website, internet marketing campaign or any other ideas you may have! Just fill out the form below, email us at talk2us@gethits.co.za or you can call (+27) 0860 103 674 or 021 671 2170 during office hours.


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