Email Marketing

Are your marketing messages getting lost in the clutter of mail, email and advertising? Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools available today. You can achieve great results with email marketing despite the minimal time and cost involved. It is an ideal way for companies to drive prospects and customers to websites and stores. It is much faster, cheaper and easier to execute than other forms of advertising. It also offers the advantage of targeting more precisely than direct mail. Surveys demonstrate that many customers and prospects not only appreciate, but actually prefer hearing from companies via email as opposed to telemarketing, direct mail and other forms of communication.

The bottom line is that email marketing works. At FurnitureDealer.net, we average nearly a 40% open rate and about 33% of those who open our emails then click through to pages of our clients' websites. Despite the minimal cost, our email campaigns outperform direct mail by more than 2 to 1.

These statistics help explain why email marketing works

• 96% of Internet users' main reason for being online is email
• 53% of business users check their email six or more times a day
• 34% of internet users check their email continuously throughout the day
• 42% of business users check their email while on vacation
  (source Jupiter Communications)

Affordable

Email marketing is affordable. When compared to direct mail, there is almost no production, materials or postage cost. Costing less than a penny per email, Email marketing is dramatically more cost effective than direct mail. You will be able to cost effectively deliver newsletters, preferred customer promotions, sale notifications, new service announcements, event invitations, greetings and much more. Unlike other forms of advertising, you will not be as limited by cost per square inch or cost per second. This will enable you to better educate and inform your prospects - which will ultimately lead to profitable relationships and transactions.

Effective

It works too. Email marketing makes it possible to proactively communicate with existing customers and prospects instead of just waiting for them to contact you, return to your Web site or store. It is a great way to drive site traffic and store traffic, increase sales and build customer loyalty. Since you will be able to communicate more information, more often. Email can also be used to help establish long-lasting relationships with prospects and customers. When you inform and educate, you become a trusted expert. You can begin developing two-way "learning relationships," that encourage customers to teach you about their preferences, needs and problems so that you can best help them. In the process, you will discover new sales opportunities too.

Immediate

Another real benefit is that it is immediate. Email marketing generates an immediate response. Well designed campaigns typically get a significant response within 48 hours of the time they are sent. Time-sensitive information can be sent in minutes, as opposed to days or weeks, and you can see the results of your efforts instantly. Our email campaigns typically achieve a 10% open rate within two hours of being sent out.

Interactive

Clear calls to action such as "Click here to learn more about this service" or "Click here to print your savings certificate" allow a customer to take immediate action on your offer. Unlike other forms of advertising, when your customers receive your emails, they can take immediate action to start shopping or interacting with your company. Once your headline and/or message copy get their attention, the customer can click directly from your message into relevant parts of your website to get more information, contact you, purchase something, print an offer, apply for credit, start shopping and more. You can even ask your customers questions, and they can instantly answer and modify their profiles. Try that with other forms of advertising. Email marketing can also be a very effective way to stimulate customer referrals since it is so easy to forward it to a friend.

Targeted and Personalized

It is quite possible to segment subscriber lists according to interest groups and other criteria in order to achieve the highest response rates. Different offers can be made to different segments. Different subject lines and copy can be used. With email marketing you can cost effectively start to implement micro marketing (and even 1 to 1 marketing at the individual level) rather than the one size fits all broadcast advertising most commonly used with newspaper, radio, television and direct mail. You can even create very effective personalization in your messages. It has never before been possible to manage customer communication at such a personal level. The opportunity is tremendous!

Easy

Creating HTML email campaigns with graphics and images is pretty easy too. There are a variety of third party web-based email marketing solutions available for small and medium sized businesses. We recommend creating a well designed template that links to various parts of your website and has custom links specific to your offers. Many solutions come with very powerful and useful tracking and reporting capabilities that enable you to know who opened your message, when they opened it, who clicked on each link, which addresses bounced, and much more. by knowing who opened your email, which links in your message were clicked most and least, you can better communicate with your customers and improve your results going forward.

Permission Marketing

Unlike conventional marketing strategies where you make a one-time pitch and hope the prospective customer responds favorably, permission marketing is all about building relationships with people who first agree to learn more about your company and its products or services. Because email is the primary vehicle for permission marketing, your costs are substantially lower than with other marketing media. And the benefits go well beyond "making the sale." Your email subscriber list becomes a true asset for your company. These people have agreed and given permission to receive communications with you and are voluntarily teaching you about their furnishing and decorating needs. At FurnitureDealer.net, we help our clients develop and implement strategies to build their customer subscriber list. We focus online and offline. Our website has a useful sign-up application and we work hard to stimulate subscription. We will also work with your company to develop offline and in store strategies to recruit and work with your opt-in customer subscribers.

Email Tracking

Incredible information is available from your email campaigns that can be used to help improve future communications and even start to develop 1 to 1 marketing capabilities.