Small Business Trends: Email Marketing Success Is About Relevance

By Lisa Barone

Though it may sit in the shadows of today’s shiner marketing techniques, email marketing continues to be an effective, low-cost way for SMB owners to reach out to, inform and retain current customers. In fact, according to new numbers from Forrester Research, email marketing will reach $2 billion by 2014. And that’s a very good thing.

Email marketing is effective for one simple reason: Customers like receiving targeted messages from companies they care about. They like when they’re emailed about things they’ve already shown in an interest in. And that’s where the email thrives.

Email marketing is all about customer retention. It’s about building stronger relationships with customers who already know you and decided that, yes, they want to keep hearing from you. They want to stay up to date on what you’re doing, they want to hear about new products, they want to hear about hot deals, etc. The messages that land in their inbox help keep your company name in their top of mind and force them to constantly be thinking about you. WebProNews took a look at the Forrester Research and quoted an Epilson brand study that said that 84 percent of recipients like receiving emails from companies with whom they’ve subscribed to their newsletter. Eighty four percent. That’s impressive. It’s hard to get 84 percent of people to agree on anything. (more)