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.