Highly-established online businesses are heavily involved in high-profile marketing through platforms like television and social media. Even though they are great options for the promotion of your business, they are slightly outdated. Decades have gone by and they have been virtually the same throughout, running your advertisement generally through the public. There is no concept of targeting features in televisions or billboard advertisements.
On the other hand, digital marketing seems to be the alternative that brings many opportunities to the table. It allows you to target your advertisements in different groups. Marketing people tend to learn about direct email marketing to bolster their business. In a direct email campaign, you can easily personalize the number of people who can receive your newsletters. Therefore, we can say that it has a direct advantage with respect to the rest of the marketing methods. You will have a clear understanding of the target audience that you want to prioritize or not.
What is Direct Email Marketing?
If you want to increase online sales for your business in today’s day and age, you must understand what is direct email marketing. It is defined as an email marketing campaign that sends an email directly to those subscribers that are connected with your brand or website. It is used to create a relationship between a specified business and its potential with the existing customers. A professional email campaign gives a business a competitive edge over the rest of the competitors.
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Email sent by a business owner is extremely personalized, and the email automation tool is used to speed up the procedure. Email marketing is a low-cost digital marketing methodology as it is able to generate efficient results for both small-scale and large-scale business owners. Considering its customized nature, this method is much more simple to gauge with respect to the rest of the marketing methods. You cannot expect the viewers to interact with a TV ad. However, you can measure the impact of a direct email by checking certain metrics.
How to Measure Direct Email Marketing?
Let’s go through the metrics that help you get to the goals of direct email marketing. Open rates refer to the number of times that a specific marketing email was checked by a particular subscriber. It gives you a percentage of the total number of emails opened compared to the number of emails delivered. If you have a high open rate, it means that your email campaign is on course to become successful. After all, the basic objective of a marketing person is to convince the subscribers to open your emails.
Once you have achieved a high open rate, your next objective should be about increasing your click-through rates. It refers to the percentage of links that your subscribers have clicked on while going through your email content. For those who don’t know, it is not the same as your online conversion rate, which is the percentage of converting visitors into customers through a certain course of actions. The calculation is done by dividing the number of clicks an email gets by the number of subscribers for a specific email and multiplying it by 100.
Benefits of Direct Marketing
1. Target Niche Audience
One of the big benefits of direct email marketing is that it enables you to target a specific niche. The majority of the email management tools enable you to categorize your audience into multiple groups so that you can easily send different emails to each of them. In simple words, the more targeted recipients you have regarding your emails, the more benefit you will attain from your email marketing methods. For example, if you have a specific number of people interested in tennis equipment, you can send them details about the latest trends within the tennis community as part of your email content, which will increase the chances of click-through rates.
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However, it is not necessary that the entire group of that audience will be interested in your email. Therefore, if you send the email to the entire email group, it will reduce your click-through rate because there would be many subscribers that won’t be interested in your content. When you build a website on Strikingly, make sure that you look into the email management tool, such as MailChimp. When you integrate that tool, your created subscription form on your Strikingly website will be recorded in your MailChimp account.
2. Detailed Information
Email marketing provides you the freedom to work around your newsletters. By creating attractive newsletters, you will attain the huge benefits of direct email marketing. You will create a good reputation for your brand image and online sales. When it comes to the email content regarding an email campaign, there are no boundaries whatsoever. The information you provide as part of your email content should not be limited to products and services alone.
As a business person, you must also give information about the latest trends in your respective industry. Moreover, you can also talk about the impact of the economy with respect to your niche. When your recipients gain so much knowledge through your content, it will help you build trust in their minds with respect to your brand.
3. Tracking of Response Rate
When we talk about the goals of direct email marketing, customers have always been the biggest priority. One of the ways they are able to fulfill their demands is by the regular tracking of response rate. Email marketing campaigns make it easy for you to analyze all the metrics involved in direct marketing, such as click-through rate and open rate. If you don’t know about the number of people who even looked into your email, you will not understand the reasons behind the lack of additional sales.
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Redemption tracking is an alternative to the tracking of your response rate for the email campaign. For example, you can ask your customers to bring the coupon they received in their email to redeem a special deal. The coupon will have a promo code, which will get them their discount. If you have a website on Strikingly, you can easily create coupons for your respective subscribers.
Disadvantages of Direct Marketing
1. Added up Costs
When you go through the process of implementing direct email marketing, it will bring four of the following components to the floor:
- Email list, not customized as per your own on your Strikingly website
- The inclusion of sales offer as an incentive for the subscribers to visit your online store
- The design of the newsletter
- Email delivery for which you may require the email automation tool
Even though this marketing method involves a low budget, the costs may add up and may cost you more than the other marketing methods, such as social media marketing. For example, if a freelancer holds the responsibility of creating your website design, delivering your newsletters, and the usage of the email management system, your costs may rise eventually as compared to other marketing forms.
2. Low Response Rates
The response rates are one of the goals of direct email marketing. However, the problem is that response rates are usually very low. It may take you months for you to send newsletters to your subscribers before you can actually convince them to visit your online store.
Strikingly’s Email Feature
Strikingly is a free website builder that enables you to take full advantage of the benefits of direct email marketing. The email feature is part of our VIP plan and Audience Plan. VIP users have the eligibility to send newsletters to 2000 different contracts. You can easily add the Audience Plan as part of your current plan. If you don’t have a subscription to either of these plans, you can send 100 emails as part of the trail in the Newsletter system.
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The Audience tab enables you to send emails directly to your subscribers, which you have gathered on the Strikingly website forums. You can find all of these contacts on the Strikingly dashboard. If you want to send emails, you must look into the following steps:
Image taken from Strikingly
- Click on the contact which you want the email to be delivered
- The pop-up window will highlight all the interactions with your selected contact. You must write the message i.e. email content in the space provided
- Click on “Send via Email” when you are finished
Conclusion
Have you understood the way of implementing direct email marketing? Have you used it as part of your online business? Has it had an impact on your online business? If you have gone through the tutorials regarding it, there is no reason why you won’t opt for the Strikingly newsletter feature. Not only will you be able to write quality email content, but also deliver it to your prescribed subscribers that are interested in your respective niche.
If you are interested in our Strikingly newsletter feature, you must create a simple website with a landing page on our platform. Once you complete the registration on Strikingly, you will fall under our free plan, which will allow you to create a professional website without any problems. Strikingly provides you with a domain worth $24.95, which may change as per your domain name and extension. So, build your email list, run an email campaign and test your results.
