Email & SMS Marketing

What is Email Marketing?
Email Marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. Every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It usually involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Marketing emails can be sent to a purchased lead list or a current customer database. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant’s relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.

 

What is SMS Marketing?
SMS Marketing is a marketing channel, much like email marketing, that allows businesses to message customers with marketing messages through SMS, or more commonly known, text messaging. These marketing messages can vary from promotional messages, product launches, new lines, sales, offers and more. These messages are mostly meant to communicate time-sensitive offers, updates, and alerts to people who have consented to receive these messages from your business.

There are lots of ways businesses are using SMS marketing such as;

• A new product or service
• Sale or offers
• Notifications
• Delivery updates
• Appointment reminders
• Important news
• Customer Service
• Support

Basically SMS marketing can help businesses with anything and everything!

Advantages of Email & SMS Marketing

1.Permission based – your marketing list will be made up of people who have actively chosen to receive emails from you. Customers who are genuinely interested in your products and/or services are more likely to engage with your business.

2.Flexible design – you can send plain text, graphics or attach files – whichever suits your message best. A choice of design options gives you scope to convey your business branding.

3.Scalable – can be used to reach large audiences or smaller targeted lists.

4.Personalization and segmentation – you can personalize messages. You can also segment your marketing list, so that your customers receive messages from you that they are interested in – this will help boost their engagement with you.

5.Shareable – it’s easy for people to forward and share your content, building your reputation by word-of- mouth or viral marketing. This may help influence new customers to become followers of your brand.

6.Conversions and increased sales – if you have a new promotion people can click on links and follow your call-to-action immediately. Email marketing is also effective at every stage of the buying process. For example, you can influence someone to choose your product, nurture the customer relationship post- transaction and also encourage future purchases.

7.Measurable – you can evaluate the success of a campaign by using web analytics software. You can easily test different copy, subject lines and designs to see which is most effective. This allows you to optimize future campaigns.

8.Test before you send – A/B testing of subject lines, calls-to-action, personalization, email copy, images or messages ensure your email content is as effective as it can be before you send it.

9.Less intrusive – unlike telephone marketing, recipients can read your message at a time that suits them.

10.Cost effective – the costs can be much lower than many other forms of marketing. There are no advertising fees, printing or media space costs.

11.Environmentally friendly – better for the environment than direct marketing by postal mail because nothing is printed.

12.Time saving – through automation you can trigger SMS and emails to be sent to customers based on an action they have performed on your website.

 

Marketing your products or services by SMS and email can be a fast, flexible and cost-effective way of reaching new customers and retaining existing customers. Email and SMS marketing can allow you to create targeted and personalized messages. This can help you to build meaningful relationships with your customers. It can also improve response rates to your direct marketing campaigns. However, it is important not to overuse such marketing. Receiving marketing emails and text messages can irritate people if it is irrelevant, too frequent or unwanted.