Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing campaigns allow you to get in front of your clients time and time again, at a fraction of the cost of printed mailings. E-newsletters also add value to your web site, can boost holiday sales and can make your marketing job easier.

Added Value to Your Web Site

Providing an informative newsletter adds value to your site and gives users another reason to visit. Posting archives of previous mailings provides your site visitors with a library of information - one more reason for them to come back to your site. Adding content also gives search engines more to index.

Stay In Front of Your Customers

Newsletters allow your company to stay in front of your clients and leads. A site visitor may only come to your web site one time, yet if you convince them of the value of signing up for your newsletter, the single visit surfer is much more likely to return. Staying in front of your customers and prospects in this way increases the chances that your company is remembered when the time to buy comes.

Holiday Sales Booster

Newsletters are an excellent holiday sales booster. Sending a newsletter during the holiday season offering special discounts reminds gift-buying people the value and appropriateness of your product.

Easy to Use Software

Getting the right newsletter software can make newsletter mailings a snap or a nightmare. Here are some features to look for when choosing email newsletter software.

Opt In and Out Easily - This process should be automated so that clicking on a simple link will allow users to opt-in or out of a newsletter without additional administrative intervention. It is no fun and a waste of time to have to manually add and remove names and emails from your list and also opens the door to human error.

Double Confirmation - To ensure that your subscribers really did in fact subscribe to your newsletter, double confirmation can be used. What this means is that after someone signs up to you newsletter, they must also click a link sent to their email address to confirm that it was actually the owner of the email address that signed up. This can be particularly useful as an added level of security, especially with newsletters of controversial content that may offend some readers.

Scheduled Emails - Advanced email software programs will allow you to schedule your mailing in advance. So while you are in Aruba sipping cocktails on the beach, your server can be working for you sending out preprogrammed material without you having to be there. For daily or weekly newsletters, this allows business owners or webmasters to send multiple mailings while only having to attend to administrative duties one time, saving time and effort.

Auto Responders - Auto responders allow you to follow up with clients and leads effortlessly. For example, perhaps you have a free e-book download that requires a user to enter his or her email address. Several days after the e book has been downloaded, you could send an auto responder asking if the reader has any questions or requires any professional services the company offers that relate to the e book.

Allow Recipients to Automatically Update Their Contact Information - By allowing recipients of your email newsletter to update their own contact information via an automated form system, the work of keeping your list up to date is partially transferred to the recipient, saving you work and time. Also, many newsletter recipients will appreciate that you have the correct spelling of their name and that updating their information is an easy task.

In conclusion, email newsletters can be some work to do right, yet the reward can be huge. Email newsletters can increase your sales dramatically and also help get your company name out into the minds of buyers. Carefully choosing your email newsletter software before you embark on starting an e-newsletter of you own can save you countless hours of frustration. Choosing the right e newsletter tool can make the task pleasant and rewarding.

Halstatt Pires is an Internet marketing consultant with - an Internet marketing firm in San Diego offering automated web site systems through

How to Measure Return on Investment for Email Marketing

How to measure return on investment for email marketing

Half of email marketing agencies taking part in the DMAemail benchmarking study reported less than 40% of their clientstracking ROI. (Source: DMA Email Marketing Council)

One of the main benefits of email marketing is its measurability. Itcan also be its down-fall- many marketers feeling like they weredrowning in simple metrics such as clicks and opens. This obsession onthese performance metrics cloud more traditional key performanceindicators (KPIs).

58.4% of marketers within the feel they that were unable to use the results of their campaigns instrategic decision making or for calculating return on investment(ROI). This hinders the development of their email program and feedsthe common perception held by many senior management that email is acheap channel and not a traditional, measurable direct marketingchannel.

With an over-emphasis on clicks and opens, many marketers are nottracking ROI. This is mainly down to the perception that they needcomplicated tracking systems and solutions. Costly web analyticspackages are being deployed in some cases.

Many simple methods of measuring ROI are over-looked with manybelieving they need web analytics solutions that provide click streamtracking. Adestra recommend you consider simple, low cost methods ofproving your email campaigns are working before investing within suchconcepts. These can include:

Duplicate marketing pages to separate orders from email marketing

Simply duplicate your marketing pages and direct all email promotionto this new page. All orders are tracked against a separate productcode (e.g. BSC001b) allowing easy revenue accountability at a lowinvestment. Effectively, your existing sales reporting tracks ROI!

Use priority codes to label orders to identify orders from your email marketing

Get a customer to quote a priority code when ordering. To ensurethey give this code, we recommend you provide an incentive (perhaps adiscount or a complimentary product). Simple to action, this methodprovides considerable visibility.

Check for buyers in your email database

Using Adestras Message Focus, you are able to drill into your data and discover if the person who ordered actually receivedan email communication from you. Using our contact history tool, youreable to see when they opened emails, clicked through and on what links,to provide you with the people who began the purchase process.

Ask them!

Conduct a survey of your buyers and ask them what communications they remember seeing before they made the decision to buy!

These simple methods of measuring ROI should be used on provisionalcommunications before considering investing in more complicated andexpensive solutions. When you are ready to invest, there are a numberof options available to you, including:

More complicated email marketing solutions

Use Adestra hosted forms

By encouraging people to click through to an Adestra hosted form asthe call to action, we can pre-fill fields with campaign codes. Byhiding these fields from a recipient, they pass this vital marketingintelligence to you everytime they complete a form without ever knowingabout it.

Web analytics

Many marketers invest in a web analytics program. These can be freesoftware available off the web or in most cases paid for more programs.These programs allow you to track people as they move through yoursite. By using URLs which contain a source code (e.g.www.adestra.co.uk/src=Campaign1 ) you can track which campaign peoplecome from.

Alternatively, we can use a specific web address to bounce peoplefrom e.g. http://email.adestra.co.uk so that we know that everyone whois referred to the web site from this url is definitely from an emailcampaign

Cookies

If we use a branded web address in your emails (e.g.http://emails.client.com) then it is possible for Adestra to lay acookie on the recipients machine to be read by the server which iscarrying out the transaction (www.client.com). You can embed campaigncodes in the cookie information automatically, and you use your own webanalytics programs to measure orders from email.

Tracking and measuring your email marketing program is essential toimproving and refining your marketing strategy. This measurementdoesnt necessarily have to involve significant investments.

About Adestra Ltd

Fast, responsive and knowledgeable

Adestra Ltd are a digital marketing agency that specialise in inbound and outbound email, fax and SMS broadcast solutions. Serving the marketing and content fulfillment needs of clients in many markets including publishing, entertainment, travel and charities, Adestra are relied upon by the key players in both B2B and B2C marketplaces for bulk or highly targeted individual campaigns.

The Adestra Message Focus email service is todays best email marketing system and is the only one designed for advanced email marketers.

Adestras product and corporate information is located at