Do you know someone without an email address? It is extremely rare. Email is the killer app and has remained so for decades now. When people who do knowledge work say that they are working, much of what they mean is that they are managing and using email.
We live in our email and it is the place where we go to collaborate with others to get things done.
However, email has a problem as a medium. It is saturated and for many people it is full of noise. This reduces its effectiveness for getting attention with people. They are dealing with spam, overwhelming inboxes and disorganization.
However, if you are not noise and you have highly valuable information that people anticipate then email is highly effective.
An email marketing system is an important choice. If you sent out a thousand emails from your own email, it would be inappropriate in many ways. Among these would be the risk of spam complaints that reflect on your email host and you as a sender.
This responsibility is transferred to your email marketing vendor instead. Their reputation and domain is what is being used on your behalf and carries more credibility with email recipient servers.
You are paying for deliverability. The web has matured and the interrelationships and protocols between email senders and email receivers is continually being refined.
Email receivers such as @gmail.com, @yahoo.com and @hotmail.com have rules for what email gets delivered in someone’s inbox, in their spam folder or not at all. Email senders work to regulate what is being sent out and help ensure your valuable and anticipated content is delivered without issues.
We manage our marketing clients’ email distribution lists and content within our Bullseye system. It is the second most important asset our customers own in their business. First is their content living perpetually online on their content management system. Second is their email list of people they have permission to communicate with regularly.
An email marketing system has base functional pieces such as managing separate email lists, a content editor for sending an email and design functionality.
The design should be congruent with your other branding elements and present your content and promotions in a readable and attractive way.
There should also be analytics that help you towards actions for selling. Knowing what people are reading in their email, whether content has been shared or forwarded and the open rates for various content helps you to refine your marketing messaging and identify who are ready customers.
Over time, your system increases in value as an asset. You can see who is engaged and whether your content is working in certain areas versus others.
Furthermore, your relevance in the mind of your future customers will grow as you position what you are the best at in the world and why you matter. People typically don’t understand what others do because their minds are so inattentive. Repetition with relevant, valuable and anticipated content overcomes this barrier with people and having a powerful email system to manage and deliver your messaging is critical to making this happen.