Successful E-mail Marketing Strategies—For Hunting to Farming

Email marketing began as a serious marketing discipline in the late 1990s. Since then, there has been a major seismatic shift in the entire email marketing industry. The standard approach to email marketing—""batch and blast""-- is serious trouble. It simply no longer performs. Subscriber inboxes are overflowing with irrelevant permission-based emails that only annoy. Research shows that 60% of subscribers simply ignore the emails. There are two basic ways to approach email marketing today. First is the traditional way—""fishing"": massive numbers of identical emails—and dozens of campaigns handled the same way--are sent to relatively unknown subscribers…and analyzed by opens, clicks, conversions, and unsubscribes. Second is ""farming"": personalized, relevant email communications to individual subscribers based on a database of demographic and behavioral information. It is possible today to send a different promotional email to every single customer tailored to customer’s preferences, behavior and lifestyle. Furthermore, marketing emails can be interactive. This book goes deeply into the entire business of email marketing based on farming of subscribers. It covers triggered messages, interactivity, retention and loyalty building, relevance, lifetime value, segmentation, viral marketing and testing. It shows how you can combine offline and online purchasing history into a single database to create a 360-degree picture of each individual subscriber in order to speak to him or her with personal knowledge. The methods present here are both very old and very new. Email marketing based on farming brings to today’s electronic age marketing methods that worked when the world was much smaller, and personal loyalty was important in marketing. Email marketing based on farming makes it possible to build and maintain one-on-one relationships with thousands of customers that create bonds of loyalty that keep customers buying for a lifetime. This book shows how to do it profitably.