Email is the best online channel for sales conversions

Email is probably the digital channel that most businesses and consumers are most familiar with. I know that many people find email marketing painful and that spam has increased to record levels. But if email marketing is done properly, you should never receive an email that you didn’t request and that is not relevant to you personally.

What is Email Marketing?

But we don’t want to assume that everyone knows what email marketing is. So for the newbies, email marketing is a way for businesses to communicate messages to their users/ customers who have expressly given the organisation permission to market to news and offers via their email address. In simple terms, its an electronic brochure that comes into your email inbox. It is illegal to send unsolicited messages to people via email. A user must opt-in to receive email communications.

Email gives you an opportunity to test and refine

Email is the easiest way to test new messages, products or services on a sample customer group. Constant testing helps you learn more about your customers and constantly improve your marketing and your products and services to better service their needs. The happier your customers are, the more successful your business will be.

Email subject lines, email content and email reporting provide almost unlimited testing opportunities. Design A/B sample tests, language, brand message or tagline tests, multi-variant content tests. Email gives you the perfect reason to segment your database and endeavor to send only relevant content and information to your customers.

If you want to improve your email marketing or set up a testing schedule, perhaps an Email Marketing Strategy Workshop would be helpful for your business to grow your online revenue?

Email Database building

Email is the key to database building. A newsletter subscription allows you to collect valuable customer data – title, name, email, phone number, address, post code, gender, interests, and whatever else you can link to your business so that it is relevant for you to collect the information from your users.

Email gives us an excellent opportunity to monitor our customers’ behaviour and interests by the content they click on. Email also allows us speak with our customers directly and give them information that is relevant to them.

Email data collection and customer privacy

However, email also demands of your business a certain amount of consideration about privacy and compliance.

Your customer data is very valuable to your business but it is also valuable to your customer. Personal details collected must have the consent of the individual, this is done using an opt in tick box, bot-proof captcha widgets (where you enter a word or random numbers into a box to prove that you are a real person) or secure certificates.

You also have an obligation to ensure that the way you collect this personal information, via your website, is secure. You must also make sure that your customer data is stored securely and cannot be made available to third parties or compromised.

If you have an eCommerce business and are collecting credit card details and other online transactions, your obligations are even greater. If you are not familiar with PCI compliance, you should probably start investigating immediately as it will be mandatory by most banks by 2012.