Do you check your email first thing in the morning?

Yes, in fact checking email has become our habit in the age of high technology. This morning I received an email from Dell.com with the subject “72 Hour Sale Starts now.” I believe you also receive some sorts of email promotions like Dell sent to me. Dell ads and  Dr. Theresa B.Clarke ‘s lecture about email marketing in MKTG 470 class on last Thursday makes me wonder how marketing works. People sometimes feel email promotion annoying and old fashioned. However, if marketers get it done properly, the benefits it brings to you is more than you can imagine.

Email marketing is not “dead”. In fact it is the opposite, it is still the most cost efficient method of electronic marketing. According to The DMA report, for every marketing dollar spent, email generated $57.25   the highest dollar value as compared to non-email Internet marketing $22.52 and print catalogs generated $7.09. Email marketing aims for several purposes, such as confirm the purchase, thank you your customer for ordering from you, keep your customers update or provide them with insight on your topic of expertise. Email marketing is growing very fast now a day due to its benefits.

First, Email marketing is pretty much the fastest and amazing out of all marketing methods when you use it correctly. The greatest benefit of all is the fast approach of email and the just as fast responses. It is possible to reach out millions of people in just a few seconds. Time to receive responses through e-mail is one to three days, while a direct mail campaign would take minimum 7 to 12 days to generate any responses. Further, responding to a direct mail is more cumbersome, while a person can respond to an email immediately. Second, email marketing is the most cost efficient. When doing email marketing, not much money has to be spent. All that is needed is a computer, internet, and time to write an email. Email marketing in general is free although you will have to pay for other things in order to do so. Third, it increases your sales. The reason is that the individual on the receiving end will receive the email and then make a decision. They will either delete your email without reading it, delete it after reading some or all, or read it and buy what you’re promoting/marketing. And the best part is those that are happy with the product or purchase could forward it to friends or family, thus increasing sales and your customer base. Last but not least, when appropriate, email provides a great opportunity for you to up-sell and cross-sell your products and services. For examples, Amazon.com or Dell computers have practice up-sell and cross sell intensively. Let say if you buy a case for your ipad, they’ll follow up with a list of other accessories for your Ipad.

Again, whether your business is an online store or a small local store, your business can benefit from email marketing.

On Tuesday, in our MKTG 470  class od Professor Clarke,  we have a guest speaker, Deb Van Horn, came and shared her insights about the benefits and uses of social media. Ms. Van Horn is currently the Vice President of Support Services for The Rockingham Group.  I would like to share some of her advice on social media in this blog post:

If traditional marketing tactics tends more about pushing the information to audience and not knowing its effectiveness, Internet marketing on the other hands is possible to yield a complete opposite results. Let say if you expose a 30 second ad on TV, you would not know how customers react to your ads; with Internet marketing, it is a two way interaction between you and your customer. As you can push something to your consumers, you will get the feedback immediately. With that being said, you measure your consumers’ liking through their active actions online. It is one of the factor influences on new sales. However, it is not all about getting sales, it is also building the relationship with customer, let them talk about the brand and ultimately refer to their peers. In term of cost, it is relatively lower than traditional marketing tactics such as: TV commercials, local radio ads, Newspaper ads. Ms. Van Horn has using Facebook as an example of social media form using to promote a brand. As a nature of social media, your customers can freely express their thoughts on Facebook,. Thus, keep in mind when you start create a Facebook for your company, you do not want any negative feedbacks the first thing that you need is a strategy to deal with customers’ complaints.

Thank you Ms. Van Horn for taking the time to come and speak to us.

Living in this technology innovation, our tendency seem to shift everything offline to online. What do I mean by that? Only few years ago when you have to spend hours to go to the mall, get in line and eventually  pay and get the product you want, now it takes you few clicks to shop online and the buying process being completed less than a minute. However, there are so many times that you surf on the Internet, go shop online with an item in mind and ultimately end up with leaving the site. This scenario probably happens daily to you as well as me as normal. In that regard, internet marketers have found retargeting marketing as a useful tactic to bring back their customers back to their site.

Retargeting Marketing

Let go back the shopping scenario. So let say after browsing several handbags at your favorite site, you decide not to buy it yet. Suddenly, you start seeing the exact same handbag ads display on every single site you visit, you will have a feeling of it is reading your mind and following wherever you go. Don’t let it scared you away.  You have been retargeted, a method of displaying ads of their recently viewed item on as many websites they visit as possible in order to reinforce the availability of the product and eventually persuade the customer to purchase it.

How do people response to Retargeting?
At first, online customer might experience the scared feeling as being spied. Later, people are more concern about the threat of invasion privacy as if somebody can use the same computer and pull off their information.

It is not as fearful as everybody can think of

According to Retargeting Ads Follow Surfers to Other Sites provided by Dr. Theresa B.Clarke, Retargeting relies on a form of online tracking that has been around for years and is not particularly intrusive. Retargeting programs typically use small text files called cookies that are exchanged when a Web browser visits a site. Cookies are used by virtually all commercial Websites for various purposes, including advertising, keeping users signed in and customizing content. (For more information about how internet cookie works, click here)

Retargeting definitely is  a clever marketing tool that marketers are recommended to utilize because of several reasons:

• Generate more sale as the reinforced presence of the related ads will eventually convert to sale
• Being able to display your ads cater to specific group with customized fit product aids to retain your online users
• Be productivity by  providing  personalized ads   to target customer in wide reach because we don not want to spend money on offering  what customer do not want to receive

As you can imagine, technology advance has brought people from all over the world closer and closer every day. Along with that, social networking becomes more and more influential in term of communication and business. I have been using Facebook for the last several years, and I could not deny the fact that it is changing constantly to allow users communicate effectively and efficiently. Facebook website has become a common ground for people which results to finding your old friends, relatives and family members. This in fact makes it easier for you to interact with them, and coordinate with them.  While Facebook tends toward to personal interaction, I found Twitter could greatly benefit me as well marketers in several ways:

1. As a job searcher, I always find a way to brand myself, Twitter can help me to do it. It provides an opportunity to share ideas and build my brand through the use of wise name, tweet or harsh tags.

2 .Twitter helps me connect and open up new relationships. It is a great place for me to searching for connection and information that relate to my interest.

3.  For marketers, Twitter allows you to interact with potential clients and your target audience.

4. Twitter is used as an effective promotional tool to announce offline or upcoming online events with a relative low price.

5.  Generate website traffic by using Twitter is a great tool. If you have published new articles in your blog or website, then you can inform that to your audience by posting links on Twitter, then other active users may re-tweet it. This will enable you to get indirect traffic as users are likely to click on your Twitter profile and visit your website.

For more information about Twitter marketing, click here