Firstly, companies are investing in email marketing as a medium. This makes sense too, as pay per click prices are rising and the wider economy continues to be sluggish.
Email marketing is cost-effective, however this only tells half the story. Sending out thousands of emails without permission, and without having a connection with the people on your list, amounts to little more than spam.

On top of this, more emails are being sent than ever before. This is creating firstly a deliverability problem for marketers as spam filters block more of your emails, but more fundamentally is creating an attention problem. We get more emails than ever before, and are using more and more ways to filter the email we do get. Getting your email opened, read and clicked on is getting hard!

As Sharpa suggests, relevancy is a key issue. Provide relevant messages to people who recognise and trust you, and your email marketing will be more effective. But how do you improve relevancy?

Well, you probably already hold the information you need.

• Are they an existing customer? Your accounting system may contain a treasure-chest of information you can use to make your emails more relevant. What products have they bought in the last three months? Can you target them with related up-sell offers? Can you offer them any customer-specific special pricing or quantity breaks? Getting this information into your e-shots can increase your responses multiple times over.
• Do you hold any information about them in a CRM system or customer database? What are they interested in? Can you target them with geo-targeted offers, for example an event invitation?

Getting all this information in to your e-shots quickly, without giving up your evenings and weekends is difficult – and for most companies the effort isn’t worth the reward.

What if the hard work was done for you?

We have partnered with Communigator – one of the UK’s leading Email Marketing providers – to provide an integrated email marketing solution that makes it as simple as possible to improve the relevancy of your e-shots. Not only can you pull in customer data dynamically* from your CRM and accounting systems, but integration to Google Analytics will then tell you what actions your prospects and customers took because of your e-shot, right down to a monetary value if you run an eCommerce store.

*By dynamically, we mean without the work!