Email Marketing: The Frontrunner in Direct Marketing Techniques - By: Allan Michael Taylor

The merits of the use of traditional channels of advertising, such as television, newspaper, and radio, are extensive and are well established. Aside from creating great recall and immediate credibility to your merchandise, these forms of advertising offer a high reach prospective because it can be shared by a large number of people. But as effective as these forms of mass media are in transmitting to the general public the products and services offered by a company, the stark reality is that advertising through these channels can be quite expensive. If you are an owner of a small to medium scale business with limited budget for promotions and advertising, you know that promoting your business through these media is already out of the question. Luckily for you, less expensive yet equally effective means of marketing your goods and services are available to you through direct marketing.

Direct marketing brings your business directly to the consumer through channels such as direct mail, fliers, catalogues, coupons, telemarketing, and email marketing. However, although these techniques share the same characteristics of directly communicating the message to the consumer and calling them to a specific action, email marketing is favored the most because it is relatively more inexpensive than the others. Basically, email marketing is the use of electronic messages to communicate to a targeted set of consumers what your business is all about with the aims of convincing them to buy your product and of enhancing your relationship with the customer hoping to get future purchases from them. The latter is probably one of the many strengths of email marketing over other methods of direct marketing; the opportunity to establish a growing connection with your customers for as long as they remain to want to receive your emails. Handing out coupons and fliers can't do the same thing for you, because keeping in touch with your customers in that way is a problem. Direct mailing also loses out though you have a constant contact with your customers, because nowadays people check their inboxes more than they do their mailboxes.

Additionally, the use of the opt-in service also called permission marketing, gives email marketing another one of its advantages. Simply put, the opt-in service eliminates the usual disadvantage of email marketing, which is to be branded as unsolicited email, by transferring the choice to the consumers on whether they want to receive emails from you or not. In this way, any email advertising you send to them can be considered as something they were anticipating. This benefits you, because now you can tailor your advertisements based on this group of consumers with the increased likelihood that they will respond to your ad and purchase something. Also, you get the luxury of being able to measure directly the positive effects to your business caused by email marketing because with the use of a software you can track all the emails you sent out including how many of them have been opened and have been positively responded to by your targeted customer.

With the many advantages email marketing brings to your business in terms of ease in advertising your brand and generating an increase in return of investment, a switch to email marketing is your best bet now at successfully promoting your business.

About the Author

Victor Green is an Account Executive at EliteEmail.com, the award winning email marketing solution used by companies who need the top email marketing software. Try the complete small business email marketing program today for free!

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