Email Marketing - It Should Be In Your Plan

Written by: Dave WrightWeb Manager

Email marketing can be a very effective tool for staying in front of current and potential customers. We tout it all the time, but find that many clients still don’t get it. Even when we recommend it and add it to a marketing plan, people are still reluctant to take advantage of the venerable, easy, cost-effective, email marketing campaign. Email marketing should be a fundamental element in almost any marketing plan. Perhaps their reason for opting out is a lack of motivation. Or maybe their reason is a fear of commitment knowing they’ll have to come up with new ideas each week or month. Maybe they hate spam and think everyone will hate them for sending out emails. Or perhaps they’re bad writers or they just don’t like the idea of putting their thoughts or ideas in front of others to be judged.

Regardless of an organization’s excuse for not taking advantage of an email campaign, the fact is, they work. There are also simple solutions for each and every one of the previously mentioned excuses and we’d be happy to discuss them all with you if you’d like to schedule an appointment. But for now, you should simply accept that an email campaign is easier to execute than most people think.

An important, yet commonly overlooked factor when it comes to email marketing, is branding. Branding is the consistency of look, color, voice and personality of your business as it plays throughout all of your marketing. Branding is the platform upon which you serve your image to the public. Branding in your email campaign is essential because it’s your logo, your colors and typefaces that people will instantly recognize and know the message has been sent by you, a trusted source - definitely not junk mail.

So how do you maintain consistent branding throughout your email campaign? A custom designed email template, that’s how. While most email management systems like Constant Contact and MailChimp provide their own free templates to choose from, we don’t recommend them. You really need one custom designed specifically with your brand and content in mind. We design them for use in any of the email management systems. Then every week or month, simply update the content in the predetermined areas and send. Or we can do this for you. This guarantees brand consistency which is essential to your successful campaign.

Need help with your email campaign strategy, planning or execution? Give us a call. We do this all the time.