Email Campaign Marketing Techniques
Email campaign marketing techniques vary, depending on what the final desired outcome happens to be, but by and large they stay similar with only relatively minor adjustments being necessary. Marketing with email has become extremely popular. Its simplicity and ease of use, coupled with its extremely low cost and its ability to reach millions almost immediately, has made it a firm favourite for many marketers.
Direct mail has been around for hundreds of years. The form that we are most familiar with today had its birth mainly around the turn of the 20th century. However, the use of advertising through the written word that is subsequently dispersed as wide as possible arguably has its roots in ancient Egypt. A piece of papyrus dating from over 3,000 years ago, and now in the British Museum, was written by an Egyptian landowner to alert others to look out for his runaway slave. In its essential form, it was direct mail!
Just over 40 years ago Arpanet, the forerunner of today’s Internet, sent the world’s first email. It went from a university in Los Angles to one in San Fransisco, and it opened the floodgates of multiple trillions of emails to follow. Early email campaign marketing techniques followed the example of existing direct mail to a large degree, but with the limitations of a text only medium. Soon marketers realised that it didn’t really matter that they couldn’t make their messages pretty to look at as all they really needed was persuasively written text.
Today’s email campaign marketing techniques have been refined in ways that are often quite ingenious. The autoresponder was one major innovation that helped to drive the email marketing machine forwards by leaps and bounds. This meant that the sending of messages in preplanned stages could be automated. All that is required was to set up a simple program with the a number of messages, determining when each one should be sent out, and the program does the rest without the need for further human intervention.
As with any system, email has been abused by some. A sketch by the Monty Python comedy team involving a bunch of Vikings in a modern day café all chanting “Spam, spam, spam,” gave its name to unwanted and unsolicited bulk email. Spam has become a serious problem for just about everyone now. Some perpetrators of spam do end up in prison when they are caught, but most of them don’t. Email campaign marketing techniques that involve spam do appear to work, but they are definitely not advised.
The sheer power of email and email campaign marketing methods are usually underestimated. Some 247 billion emails are zipped around the world every day. If all the email users worldwide were considered citizens of a country, it would be the world’s largest with a population of 1.4 billion. Time yourself how long it takes to read this sentence, for 20 millions emails have been sent out in that time. And finally, in 2009, around 13.5 billion dollars were spent on email campaign marketing that were previously spent on direct mail. It seems to be taking over.
