4.2 Email Marketing
4.2.1 Emails

An email is a quick and inexpensive alternative to a conventional letter. The advantage: E-mail is popular. Anyone who has internet access receives an email address. Meanwhile, more people have an email address as an internet access. Emails can reach the key target audiences directly and save compared to the normal mailing enormous costs. Newsletters and mailing lists are an excellent tool for business communication policy and customer loyalty. Interested users can leave their email address below to receive an electronic customer newsletter automatically in the future by email (Herbst, 2002, p.166).

There is a large diversity of newsletters and new ones are constantly being developed. A newsletter can be a news article, a discussion, information or it can give help for a particular field. The different types are mixed as well. The user expects something interesting that can solve a problem. He will opt-out, if a newsletter only contains advertising. Therefore it has to be a mix form between clever product placement and something that has value for the recipient. Newsletters can be put in two categories, those which should generate sales and those which should generate traffic on a web page. But the normal case is that these two forms are mixed as well (Kneidl, 2001, p.40).
billions of advertising messages are sent daily via email and often companies do not have the permission to send these emails (Absolit, 2009). The difference between spam and a serious newsletter is only the permission. It is regulated by law that in a B2C newsletter the company is obligated to have the permission from the customer. The company has the proof. In a B2B contact it is sufficient that both companies had a commercial contact. But at the bottom of the newsletter there has to be the opportunity to opt-out from it.
the newsletter, there are two other important tools of the email marketing: the discussion list and the autoresponder. During the discussion list, the communication runs in both directions. Participants will receive email messages and can send emails to participants as well. These messages are again forwarded to all subscribers of the list. In contrast to the newsletter, the operator does not deliver the content but makes the infrastructure available, with which the subscriber can communicate.

Autoresponders reply to incoming emails immediately, the sender receives a confirmation and thus the comforting feeling that his question was received. Through the use of autoresponders you can already get the potential to provide a variety of related information and also gains time for the individual respondent (Chaffey et al., 2003, p.353-359).

There are various factors to measure the success of email marketing. With professional email software it is possible to get information about the following points (Fischer, 2009, p.79-80):

Sent emails
The number of emails sent by the newsletter software.

Bounce rate
The number of email addresses which do not exist any longer or are wrong.

Deleted emails
The number of unread emails which are deleted directly.

Opened emails
The amount of emails which are really opened by a human, not by a computer. The problem is that an opened email does not mean that the email is really read. Unfortunately it is not possible to measure how many times a user spends on an email.

Click rate
A newsletter should request an action by putting a link in the email text. It can be recorded how many recipients click this link to arrive at a landing page how often.

Conversion rate
With temporary links and cookies it can be measured how many purchases result from this newsletter.
disadvantage of newsletters is obvious. Due to the numerous emails that are sent daily, newsletters can easily be classified as spam messages and end up in the trash so quickly. Furthermore users fear that companies abuse their addresses to sell them to third parties. Many users do not enrol in a newsletter because of this reason although they are interested in the company and its services.

Max Adler Salzhemmendorf Webdesign

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