E-mail history

It's always important to understand the history of something to understand why it's important!

Today I will talk about how email marketing has evolved and what the outcome of the challenge has been between offline marketing communications and those sent via direct emails to the consumer or between companies.

Remember the days of marketing through your snail mailbox?

Take a minute and take a stroll down to your regular inbox.

No, I don't mean going to your computer to check your email inbox.

I mean a walk to your actual physical mailbox where people mail you paper letters and packages.

Now collect and put in order the mail you will find there.

You are likely to find several promotional or marketing flyers that are trying to sell you localized services.

However, you may also find catalogs and promotional postcards for global brands.

Consider for a moment what the world would be like if mail in your physical inbox was the only way to send you personalized communications to market products and services.

It would be a highly inefficient system.

In fact, postal items must be printed in bulk to reduce costs, and perhaps the message you received is not even personalized with just your name.

Therefore, anyone who wants to advertise you would have to pay not only for the printing of the postcard, flyer or catalog to be sent, but also all the stamps or postage costs for sending the shipment.

Finally, the marketer who sent the mailing should wait a period of time before you receive it.

It may take several weeks for the post office to deliver it, and it may take even longer for you to remove the message from your inbox and read it.

Because of that timing, the offer the marketer was sending you may no longer be as specific and relevant to your interests.

Finally, the marketer would have no way of even knowing if the mailing had an impact on you unless you used a specific promotional code included in the mailing.

There was no way to even know if you had looked at or received your snail mail!

Does this sound like an effective way to market your products or services to a mass consumer audience?

Well, until the 1990s, it was largely the only way to get a marketing communication into the hands of a specific individual.

Marketers came up with many ways to try to make postal marketing mailings more personalized and better track their response rates, but the truth was that once a mailing was sent, figuring out whether it worked or didn't work was more guesswork compared to the real facts.

The entire process was, and is, expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to examine for success.

Luckily for you and your consumer or business-to-business marketing needs, the 1990s arrived and the Internet was born.

Soon after, email began to become the primary personal form of business communication.

Not long after personal email exploded in popularity, email marketing became an area of ​​specialization for those with marketing experience due to its improved ability for personalization, segmentation, frequency, relevance of communications and, most importantly, tracking capabilities.

1991: The “birth” of the Internet

While there are many people who "claim" to be the founders of the Internet, experts say that the Internet as we know it now began in 1991 when CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) publicized a document known as the New World Wide Web Project.

Although it was a British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, who created it, he actually founded html, http and the very first web pages in the world for CERN already two years before the official document, the publication of which is considered the " birth" of the Internet.

Not only has the Internet changed life as we know it, it has also changed marketing as we know it!

Over the next decade, many experts estimate that the Internet grew by as much as one hundred percent per year in terms of bandwidth used.

The greatest growth peaks were recorded in 1996 and 1997.

Today, of course, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who does not admit that the Internet plays a key role in their daily lives, from gathering information to processing communications, primarily through the use of email and, more recently, social media.

1996: Hotmail becomes the first Web-based email service.

One of the biggest benefits of the creation of the Internet was the ability to use email to communicate with people.

Email was fast, free, and could speed communications around the world in a way that most people had never previously imagined.

However, during the early years of the Internet, email was only available to people who fell into specific groups: college students who used their college-dependent email address, which they were enrolled in, or employees who were able to use company email addresses.

The second group typically had significant limitations on how to use email and who to communicate with.

While some people may also get email services provided by their Internet Service Provider (ISP), those services typically required that you check your email specifically from the computer supported by your ISP.

Email was not a type of communication with which you could respond from anywhere on the globe.

Then, in 1996, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched what was then called HoTMaiL (with the letters referring to html).

It was the first web-based email system, and suddenly email was available to anyone with access to the Internet.

This didn't just mean people who had home computers connected to the Internet.

It also meant anyone who could use a public computer in a library or shopping mall had the ability to send and receive email.

Suddenly, email was no longer limited to a small group of people who needed to communicate primarily with each other.

Email was out of the box for the public and anyone who wanted to communicate with anyone else could do so through HoTMaiL.

Unsurprisingly, people loved the service and queued up for it.

A year later, in 1997, Microsoft purchased HoTMaiL for four hundred million dollars and renamed it MSN Hotmail.

How many people use email today?

 

Today, Hotmail is still technically a large Web-based email service in terms of end users, according to the most recent data from comScore.

Hotmail is said to have around one billion users.

However, it has been overtaken by Google's Gmail, which has around three billion.

As for Yahoo! its email services rank third with around 800 million reported users.

The birth of email marketing.

While email began as a communication tool for academic and business purposes, it quickly became a tool for personal communications between friends, family, and even people who had never met in real life!

As people began to spend more and more time using email as their primary communication tool, marketers realized that email communications were the future of marketing communications and switched to using of email as a means of communicating effectively with customers.

Email marketing, even in its early days, had a number of advantages over both postal marketing and telesales as a form of direct-to-consumer or business-to-business communication.

We'll look at these benefits in detail in the next section of this book, but today email marketing is a solid part of any comprehensive marketing plan and has entire industries built to help businesses of all sizes effectively market themselves.

SergioTraversa.com would, of course, be an example of what you will find on this site.

SergioTraversa.com works to develop useful email strategies that make it easier to email consumers or business contacts with personalized messages and complete tracking.

In addition to companies that focus mainly on the development of email marketing solutions, online commerce has seen the birth, especially in the 2007-2008 crisis years, of home based businesses, i.e. small companies created by students, the unemployed and housewives , due to the small investments required by the type of business.

Even individuals can therefore become email marketing experts.

Most medium-sized or large companies employ at least one email marketing specialist and can have up to several employees who focus solely on creating effective email marketing strategies and campaigns.

Of course, you may not even need an entire staff, but you need to understand the basics of email marketing strategies, the benefits and tactics of email marketing.

We will cover all these topics in this book to make you an expert in email marketing.

A further in-depth study relating to email marketing is constituted by my Advanced Course on Online Follow-up Marketing, which is essentially based on the use of an autoresponder and your email marketing campaigns relating to your newsletter.

In my Advanced Course on Blog Marketing, in addition to learning how to build a blog, you can learn how to integrate email marketing into a blog through my two courses, which the first is this Advanced Course on E-mail Marketing, and the second is the aforementioned Advanced Course on Follow-up Marketing On Line.

Newsletter and direct sales messages

Summary:

1. Introduction

2 – The fundamental contents of a newsletter

3 – The specific contents of a newsletter

4 – The elements in favor of a newsletter

5 – The elements against a newsletter

6 – The five best strategies for using a newsletter

7 – Direct sales messages

8 – Typical content of a direct sales message

9 – Arguments in favor of direct sales messages

10 – Arguments against direct sales messages

11 – The 5 best strategies for using direct sales messages

12 – Conclusions

1. Introduction

One of the most frequent questions from those who have had their first contact with the world of Email Marketing is whether their email marketing program should take the form and contents of a newsletter or a direct sales campaign, or whether it can take on the form and contents of both types of messages.

Naturally, the most effective email marketing program should contain elements of both strategies.

But, apart from this, we must still try to identify the differences between an email message that is part of a newsletter and a message that has the direct sales function.

Only after this in-depth analysis will you be able to choose which type of form and content you will want to adopt based on the purpose you want to achieve with your e-mail marketing program, as well as based on the target users you will have identified when setting up your email list. departure.

2 – The fundamental contents of a newsletter

First of all, a newsletter is characterized by the desire to offer information that is interesting, useful and engaging, but which belongs to a specific sector, which is subject to rapid technological evolution or to the identification of new and unprecedented contents which are in any case up to date. with the times.

This information is intended to make you known and to create a close relationship between users and your brand.

A newsletter has the characteristic of being able to continuously expose your brand and your products in the minds of your customers, so as to predispose them to always be eager to purchase from you.

It has the function of creating a viral diffusion of the name of your company, your products and your brand itself among your subscribers, by sending interesting information, useful because it is cutting-edge, and engaging.

A newsletter is also a suitable tool for generating traffic visits to your website.

Finally, it can help you acquire sales thanks also to the effective characteristics that your products present and your promotional offers.

3 – The specific contents of a newsletter

While the specific content of a newsletter message can essentially depend on the sector in which you operate, the segment of subscribers to your list who receive that message, your tests on the contents to which recipients react positively, in general the most common features that a newsletter message may present are represented by:

• articles that focus on the most frequent problems in your sector, the expert column;
• columns that focus on specific advice useful for buyers and users of your products;
• the frequently asked questions column;
• the testimonials of your product, not only written and signed, but also on video, resident on your website, but linked in the email;
• reviews of products, features and functions;
• announcements of new products with new features;
• the calendar of the most representative events
• special offers and discounts;
• the comments of the most experts;
• comments from customers and most well-known users;
• links to the websites of commercial partners
• links to sections of your site containing useful product information;
• links to your social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn;
• the call to action aimed at forwarding the newsletter to friends.

Obviously, the more creative and unique the content of your newsletter is, the more you will be able to involve subscribers.

What I have provided you represents a list that can immediately give you useful advice regarding the contents that subscribers usually want to read.

4 – The elements in favor of a newsletter

Like any decision regarding your marketing plan, including a newsletter in your marketing mix must also seek to create some balance between the pros and cons of a newsletter.

In this list I present you with some favorable elements, which you will have to take into account when deciding which is the best format for your newsletter to take on for your email marketing campaign.

Providing subscribers with content that is engaging means they will be much more willing to open, read and click through to your newsletter messages rather than a series of direct sales messages.

Your customers really appreciate the fact that not all of your communications have the purpose of inviting them to buy something from you, and this can guarantee you a greater affirmation of your brand in their minds.

Of course, you will also be able to generate sales but not in the same quantity that you could obtain with a series of direct sales messages.

A newsletter is very effective in increasing visits to your website, and this is very important if you have set up a business model based on visits to the site and/or advertising via impressions.

Since a newsletter is not a direct sales tool, you can very well rent or sell space within your messages to your partners, but you will have to do some tests and evaluate the possibility of cancellations, but then it still depends on your line starting editorial, in the sense that if you have set it in a way that excludes the presence of advertising, even from others, you will not be able to suddenly change the setting.

A newsletter message offering an offer at a special price conditional on purchase within a certain time can very well be sent to all subscribers, unlike a sales message, for example a follow-up message, because in the latter case, the message reaches the recipient depending on the moment in which he signs up, and yet in order not to create problems with other subscribers it will always be necessary to maintain a certain discretion.

Naturally, the message with the offer via newsletter will only reach those registered by a certain date and not to subsequent ones.

The length of the message of a newsletter allows you to insert a multiple series of contents, such as sections of your website, and in any case everything that is suitable for spreading your brand and the image of your company.

5 – The elements against a newsletter

Here is a short list of points against using a newsletter:

Precisely because a newsletter will never be able to express itself in a call to action, you will not be able to count on repeated purchases like in direct sales, such as, for example, through a series of follow-up emails.

Creating a newsletter certainly involves a lot of effort, given that it requires the drafting of content comparable to the pages of a site that contains the full version of the articles and columns included in the messages.

Since a newsletter has many sections, it is much more difficult to carry out tests to verify the effectiveness of any content within the body of the message, such as a section header or a particular image.

In short, a newsletter requires a lot of work in its creation compared to what happens for a direct and non-direct sales message it doesn't even get many sales.

However, a newsletter can help you retain customers and ultimately produce sales in the short and long term.

Therefore, when you evaluate the pros and cons of a newsletter, consider that you will have at your disposal the possibility of composing excellent content and at the same time you will also be able to satisfy the need to still obtain a return on the investment in a newsletter.

A newsletter represents the best tool to create the loyalty of your customers and the diffusion program of your brand.

A newsletter can also play a fundamental role in keeping customers loyal to your company, your website and your products.

However, it will always have inferior results in terms of customer acquisition, direct sales and lost customer recovery strategies.

6 – The five best strategies for using a newsletter

I present to you the five best strategies that you should always consider when and plan to use an email newsletter.

Insert a summary of the article in the content of the message, together with a link to the full version of the same. 

This not only increases good traffic visits to your website page, but also prevents your newsletter from being marked as spam, rather than going to the inbox due to the use of words that trigger spam filters.

Make links clear and visible and use text links. 

Make sure all links leading from the message to your website, partner sites, or other locations are clear and visible. 

If possible, set the color to electric blue and underlining for links for easy user recognition.

Although in web design it is considered normal, even if not in use, to use the words "click here" in a link, in email design it is actually rather discouraged because it is considered a spam practice. 

Make sure your links are text-based and not image-based, as those links may not appear in all emails. 

To avoid any risk, make sure that the corresponding text link is also contained under the image link, so that if the recipient's email client deactivates the images, the latter will still be able to understand what to click on.

Prioritize content that users can see in the first 300 vertical pixels so a reader can decide whether or not to read the full email. 

Make sure the most engaging newsletter content appears within these first three hundred pixels and don't waste space with useless graphic headers or useless graphic welcome messages.

Use a “Summary” or “In this email,” since newsletters tend to be longer and users tend to scan them quickly, using a summary or short list of what is in the email makes sure users can quickly refer back to it to see what content they might want to read.

Allow readers the ability to read the newsletter on a web page.

In particular, give users who read their email on their smartphone the option to click on a link to read a version of the newsletter, embedded in a web page, instead of having to read the entire newsletter in the their email inbox, it's a huge plus. 

Offering this option will significantly increase the number of users who explore your newsletter.

Email newsletters are a great way to provide users with your story, resources, and reasons to make purchases or visit your website.

Although the time it takes to create an email newsletter may be long, the benefits you will benefit from will last a long time.

7 – Direct sales messages

Unlike a newsletter a direct sales email aims to increase sales and revenue of your product or service through clicks to your website, so it also aims to increase the click-through rate .

Direct sales emails are best for customer acquisition, revenue generation, and retention.

This also means that tracking the results from that message will be simple, it will either have generated sales… or it will have generated nothing.

Let's say that in reality every e-mail sent within a sales system based on e-mail marketing, which takes the form of a newsletter, or a broadcast, or a follow-up of messages, can give different results, but that the line between having results or not is not so clear.

In fact, there may be messages that sell, or that sell little, or that sell almost nothing.

Split testing is always the only way to verify the type of message that gets the most results.

8 – Typical content of a direct sales message

What is the typical content of a direct sales email?

Sales results may vary based on the specific content or tactic of your direct sales email, but either way, what's appealing about a direct sales message is that its purpose is simple.

The content of a direct sales message is conditioned by the period in which it is sent, the sector the sender belongs to, the target segment to which it is sent and the objectives you want to achieve in terms of sales and turnover.

However, the following contents are typical of direct sales messages and are independent of the previously listed aspects:

• New incentives for the buyer

• Automatic percentage discount or via coupon code

• Free gift given by virtue of the purchase

• Buy one, get one free

• Free shipping

• Free priority or expedited shipping upgrade

• Sending additional product information

• Bonus in cash or points

• Offer of a discounted product due to the intervention of a friend

• Offer a free trial period

• Offering product samples

• Exclusive offers for VIPs

• Seasonal products

• New product announcements

• Product testimonials and reviews

• Product support from authoritative and famous people

9 – Arguments in favor of direct sales messages

Direct sales emails have their own list of advantages and disadvantages to consider when inserting them into your marketing mix. When determining the direct sales email rollout in your email marketing plan, consider the following key points:

Below are the positive points of sending a direct sales email:

• A direct sales email requires less editorial effort than a newsletter, with reduced content and image requirements and typically just a referral link to a page on your website.

• Since a direct sales email has only one call to action, it is easier to segment the user list and present the most appropriate offer.

• The revenue and sales numbers generated will be higher with a direct sales email compared to a content-based newsletter.

• Because a direct sales email has shorter content and only includes a call to action, it is easier to test individual email elements such as headers and images.

10 – Arguments against direct sales messages

Below are the negative points of sending a direct sales email:

• Direct sales emails can often result in much higher spam complaints and unsubscribes than a newsletter.

• Direct sales emails can cause irritation in users, who may very well stop opening your email messages altogether if they begin to perceive that every communication from you is simply a solicitation to purchase something.

• Direct sales emails focus only on a single business, meaning they should not offer the opportunity to promote other sections of your website, partner sites, or other content.

11 – The 5 best strategies for using direct sales messages

Here are the top 5 strategies that should be practiced for direct sales emails:

A call to action: While you can feature multiple products in a direct sales email, don't ask customers who read the email to do anything other than purchase as it will distract them from the intended goal.

Don't clutter your direct sales emails with links to other content, links to additional information about the same products for sale, or even links to social media.

Use equal amounts of text and images: While it's important to use images to showcase your product or generate emotion, always remember that many email clients don't display images.

Always make sure there is an amount of text equal to the amount of space taken up by the images so that users can know what the product offer or feature is without having to load the images into their email browser.

If possible, try to give the html email the appearance of a plain text message, with only the addition of a small company logo at the end of the body of the email, especially if they are messages addressed to entrepreneurs (therefore in the case of B2B sales strategies).

Be careful of spammy words in your text, because direct sales messages run a greater risk of using words that could trigger your email provider's spam filters. For example, words like free, sale, discount or click here can cause your email to go to spam instead of the recipient's inbox.

Make links clear and visible and use text links.

Make sure all links leading from the message to your website, partner sites, or other locations are clear and visible.

If possible, set the color to electric blue and underlining for links for easy user recognition.

Although in web design it is considered normal, even if out of use, to use the words "click here" in a link, in email design it is actually rather discouraged because it is considered a spam practice.

Make sure your links are text-based and not image-based, as those links may not appear in all emails.

To avoid any risk, make sure that the corresponding text link is also contained under the image link, so that if the recipient's email client deactivates the images, the latter will still be able to understand what to click on.

Put the best offer in the subject and immediately under the header, in the body of the message.

Offers can also be for more than one product you would like to sell, so make sure that if you are making multiple offers or promoting multiple products, your best offer is not only first on the list, but is also described in the subject line .

12 – Conclusions

Direct sales emails are a key way to increase revenue, sales and get good traffic to your site and a higher click-through rate.

You can include this setting in any email marketing mix strategy.

Remember to always be balanced when inserting your offers, and therefore when using your messages for direct sales, do not crowd them with too many offers so as not to irritate your users, and also be aware of the causes that can activate anti-filters spam.

Whether you decide to use a content-based newsletter or multiple messages set up for direct sales, your ideal email marketing mix will be able to combine both strategies when you deem it most appropriate.

Take some time to think about the different versions of messages you can use, how they fit your email marketing goals, the size and content of your message database, and your internal resources.

Direct sales emails are best for acquisition, revenue generation, and recovering previously lost customers.

Direct sales emails can also play a role in keeping customers connected to the company name, its website and products, but should not be used as the exclusive means of achieving this.

Direct sales emails should absolutely not be used to increase customer loyalty and build your brand.

Now you can start to fully visualize the types of emails you might want to send.

Ten steps to make an effective e-mail message

Here you will find the ten most important steps to consider when drafting HTML email messages.

Enter the focal contents of your message in the space between 7 centimeters in height and 600 pixels in width

For recipients who are equipped with email programs that contain a preview panel, or who simply need to click on the subject to open the message, the situation remains absolutely unchanged.

Therefore, regardless of the email software used to receive your messages, these must have the main content inserted with a maximum size of 600 pixels x 7 centimeters, in order to give the reader an immediate overall and synthetic view of the entire message, for ensure that he is later motivated to read the entire message.

Therefore the summary of the contents, your sales proposition, your call to action and any information suitable to attract the navigator to read the entire content, must be inserted in that space.

Consequently, avoid using graphics that are too heavy both in terms of pixels and in terms of displayed size.

In fact, in the first case you would run the risk that your logo or what is described in the inserted image are not loaded by the recipient's program, while in the second you would give less space to the contents which must already appear in the preview panel or when opening the message .

Make your text links look like links

If you want to get the highest click-through rate, format your links so that they stand out as such within your message.

Usually the links should be underlined and colored electric blue and in wide format.

However, if your graphics prevent you from using the color blue, always remember to use underlining.

Never use graphical links in messages, such as buttons or similar objects, but if you feel the need to insert them, make sure that there is always a text link nearby.

Limit the use of images to the bare minimum.

Certainly images can strike the recipient and make him feel the importance of your brand and make your offers and promotions more attractive.

However, remember that most email programs are by default set so as not to load or display images.

And therefore visualization often implies a prior positive action on the part of the recipient.

If you insert too many images or if you make the few you have inserted too large and invasive, know that most of your recipients will see blank space instead of the images themselves.

It is true that some of the recipients will be able to view the images, but do not base the sale of your product and/or service and your advertising messages only on them.

Therefore I advise you to format your message in html so that your every important message is not trapped in an image.

Then also use alternative text (ALT) and a text title within the image tag to ensure that your main clauses appear even when the images are not loaded.

Include as little text as possible in terms of sales pitches and promotional content in the message

Typically an email message contains sales pitches and descriptive text content.

All this can be considered as the heart of any promotional message.

So don't create texts that are too long

In fact, you ran the risk of being placed in the recipient's spam box, or even being blocked by the recipient's server, because your contents exceeded the heuristic percentages of spam messages attributed to certain words (such as free, buy, etc. .).

So avoid boring the recipient with overly long texts

Therefore shorten the content to the bare minimum and use links that refer to the complete article, or to your product page, inserted on your website.

Make sure you respect the privacy policy

Include your email address in the message so that subscribers to your list can unsubscribe with a single mouse click or by replying to your message, and make sure that your message clearly shows that it is an advertising and promotional message, therefore commercial.

Make cancellation easy.

With any professional autoresponder software you can make the unsubscribe system ultra easy because it will only really be enough to click once on the link contained in the message, while with systems relating to external e-mail marketing services, this is practically impossible, and therefore you need to click at least 2 times.

While this may seem against your best interests, if you make it difficult for users to find an easy way to unsubscribe from your list you run the risk of your messages being marked as spam.

This can damage your reputation and the admissibility of your messages and block your online activity.

Therefore, and I will never tire of repeating this, make the system for unsubscribing easy and simple for subscribers so that they don't include you in spam.

In this regard, avoid inserting too much empty space between the body of the message and the cancellation link, because you would always get that negative effect by giving the impression of wanting to make cancellation difficult.

Personalize the subject and body of the message with the recipient's name

Your email message will be more effective if you personalize the subject and body of the message with the recipient's name.

Obviously remember not to insert this name further into the body, only once is enough.

There is an exception to this rule: that is, when the sector in which you operate has a target made up of users who, for privacy reasons, prefer not to see their name displayed in the subject and body of the message.

When you need to personalize the subject and body with the recipient's name, professional software can help you.

Avoid using internal style sheets and use style sheets external to the message (CSS)

Your message, governed by internal style sheets, may not be well interpreted by the email programs of the major internet service providers.

There are some ISPs, such as Gmail, which completely exclude the internal style sheet of the message, both from the head tag and from the body.

Therefore always make use of style sheets external to the message because you will be able to facilitate the correct display of the message by the recipient, because it will appear in a more orderly way, compared to a message from which the CSS style has been excluded.

You could possibly make use of the font and p tags within the message to easily create better message formatting, but without great demands.

Limit the use of words considered spam to the bare minimum

It is quite difficult to avoid using words that activate anti-spam devices.

So pay attention to your content because recipients' email programs check your messages for words that are considered spam and to which they assign a specific score.

When the sum of the scores for each word exceeds a specific limit, your message could be blocked both by the recipient's server and by the latter's email software.

To overcome this inconvenience, only professional autoresponder software contains a particular function that allows you to immediately see the spam score you have achieved.

But not only because with that software you will be able to find the words in your messages that have reached that total.

Always test the results of your messages

It is really important to verify the effectiveness of your efforts, test the results of your messages and normally you could do tests by changing only one element at a time, starting from the object and then moving on to other elements, such as graphics, etc.

But to proceed, obtaining certain results, divide your main list into several parts and send the various versions of your messages to each of them.

This way you can verify that the formatting you choose for your message is displayed correctly by different email service providers.

Furthermore, you will be able to examine the subject of the message and the graphics that are more attractive and convincing and ensure that your messages reach the right recipient's inbox, rather than the spam one.

The changes you make will allow you to choose for all the messages the optimization of the message that brought you the best results for that small group of recipients.

E-mail marketing is essential for your business

E-mail marketing is essential for your company, whatever is the structure and the subject.

In general, using e-mail marketing in the form of follow-up marketing campaigns and sending newsletters is necessary to increase your online business, finding new customers and retaining those already acquired.

Regarding the scope of acquired customers, a problem may arise arising from the privacy law.

So to set up an email marketing campaign with your customers you need to delve into the following aspect.

First of all, please note that in Italy, as in the countries that join the European Union, the purchase of your product and/or service presupposes the implicit consent of your new customer to receive promotional messages for further offers for others products and/or services, as long as the products subject to future promotions are similar to the product initially sold (in Anglo-Saxon speaking countries and the United States a rule applies that excludes such a need).

If you have ever noticed, in the past, before the issuing of the European GDPR, on every sales page of a classic Italian e-commerce site you could find a box and the words "Select the box to receive any future promotional messages" .

Currently, based on the European GDPR, this box is no longer necessary to obtain consent to receive emails with content relating to offers of products similar to those previously sold.

This box is only necessary when it comes to subscribing to newsletters or automatic follow-ups, since it is always necessary to ask for consent to the sending of future commercial promotions, if users are primarily asked to give their address and -email, as in a form or registration form, in exchange for a gift, bonus, discount, etc.

Therefore, if you already have a large database of customers acquired with a first purchase, on the one hand you will be able to use it 100% to promote further supplies to your customers via email, on the other it is a precious reserve for obtaining new sales with your email marketing campaigns to try to retain your customers.

However, you will have to make your mailings with a grain of salt!

Why'?

Simple, you could also be accused of spamming, with all the negative consequences that could derive from it, if you don't get in touch, via email, within a certain deadline, or at least by telephone, because the new customer could very well forget about you and your your company.

If, however, you also have a second group of customers who have known you for a long time and trust you, you will be able to carry out your promotional email marketing campaigns without problems, trying to maximize your sales.

In addition to being an easy-to-use tool and a rather economical means, e-mail marketing has the advantage of giving you an immediate response from the market, unlike all other standard advertising channels, for which considerable investments are required and whose effectiveness is measurable in relatively longer times.

In fact, the results of your email marketing campaigns are quickly measurable.

This will allow you, equally immediately, to make any changes to the settings, form and contents of your messages, to verify which ones obtain the best results and to set up your new campaigns, significantly improving the performance of your business online.

Generally we talk about e-mail marketing as Direct Response Marketing (DRM) or immediate response marketing, precisely to indicate the immediate measurability of the results obtainable by the target market.

Furthermore, you will be able to segment the target of your messages based on the specific needs of the recipients, something that advertising messages on billboards, newspapers, radio and television, apart from the costs involved, cannot do, or rather, they can also obtain successful results. a certain importance, but in the face of huge investments, and to monitor its effectiveness it will be necessary to proceed with the creation of equally expensive opinion polls or market surveys.

Not to mention the costs of paper mailing and telemarketing, which have fewer and fewer results and more and more limitations due to privacy, which are legally sanctioned, the same as those of email marketing, but with the difference that in the latter case the Email sending and sales processes, in addition to having almost no cost, can be 100% automated!

If we then move on to talking about an attempted sale with the help of a team of agents or representatives, representation is currently no longer as profitable as it once was.

In fact, a major transformation has occurred in the market: from distributive sales, once the main driver of a company's development, carried out through a network of representative agents, which today, with lower costs, is also carried out by shopping centres, has moved on to selling increasingly personalized and less generic products.

Obviously I am talking about the business to business or B2B sales sector, while in business to consumer sales opposite considerations apply regarding the generic nature and customization of the products.

Therefore everything that needs to be personalized can still be sold with personal contact, created by a network of agents, while for the rest you will also have to opt for online sales and this in competition with the same shopping centers or wholesale.

But not only that, because attempted sales with personal contact are no longer as profitable as they were a few decades ago, also because nowadays company targets no longer have the time they once could dedicate to sellers' visits.

Companies, pressured by the necessary reduction of staff, by having to chase after their customers and production needs, will purchase the essential tools for their business on the basis of schemes that are now based on price, with equal quality, rather than on the skill of the seller, making the representation activity less and less requested and less and less profitable.

Furthermore, the area of ​​product sectors where the person of the seller still has a certain importance and influence is increasingly narrowing towards specialized technical profiles, in which the seller must be an expert in the subject, who knows how to provide a quick solution to the problem , in this panorama where we run more and more to survive rather than to earn.

Therefore, companies will increasingly go online to look for the best offer, with the consequence that representation will be increasingly reduced to a mere collection of orders, following an already pre-arranged contact, perhaps obtained by telephone or also via the internet and/or e-mail.

Moreover, it is now known that most companies, when making telephone contact, ask you to send a presentation of the company and the specific product via e-mail, and then conclude that, if interested, they will contact you.

To avoid the impasse it is necessary to first create a website that meets certain attractive criteria and the contents of e-mail messages that are truly focused on the problem to be solved and that are concise and decisive.

Naturally it is necessary to exponentially increase the contact options and the number of contacts, that is, you need to shoot into the crowd by widening the range of pellets.

In short, any business selling to companies will have to set up its own marketing plan, integrating it with web promotion and email.

And if the very nature of the product and/or service does not directly allow purchase and delivery with the order form inserted online, it will still be possible, via the web and with email messages, to provide the necessary information and guarantees , creating the conditions for an offer request, perhaps brought personally to your target.

From another point of view relating to products not advertised with advertising or sales networks, another signal that pushes the creation of online businesses supported by e-mail marketing is that of the huge demand for products that must satisfy needs and pre-existing compelling desires, precisely because internet research normally has as its object products and/or services that fulfill the function of satisfying needs whose necessity has already been verified.

In fact, it would make no sense to try to sell something new online that no one is looking for, because it would be a totally unsuccessful activity (unless you have the necessary capital to face a particularly expensive market survey and in case positive, you can invest in a massive use of standard advertising, or you can equip yourself with a sales network entrusted to representatives).

Indeed, everything that is new, and that at the same time is advertised in the mass media, with considerable investments, can also be sold online, but with other types of strategies that base their support directly on the websites that operate through electronic commerce, as, for example, happens for consumer goods such as clothing, food, smartphones, computers, etc., i.e. the business to consumer or B2C sector, where the e-mail marketing used follows completely different from those that you will be able to delve into and that I will take care of in this blog.