If you are marketer and are looking at digital channels, you probably have SEO to reach your audience, use SEM, and PPC to get interested audience to click through to your website and also have Social Media presence to build awareness and engage your audience. However, not many marketers swear by Email Marketing. Here are a few awesome reasons to look at Email Marketing this festive season.

It’s a direct channel.

Behind the mountains of online and offline purchase data, loyalty points system and CRM servers is the data about your customer or prospect. It can be a name of customer, with her physical address or her loyalty card number. In short anything that identifies your buyer uniquely.

This unique identifier in the online world is the email address. I call it the most important address on the Internet that you can own especially if you are conducting business online. We, as digital marketers, should give this CRM data, especially the email addresses its deserved respect, comb it for correctness, and update it regularly, literally like ants in an ant hill. This is your own data of customers that you can finally build a direct dialog with.

This email address is more valuable because the customers have given the permission to receive emails. If this permission is abused, it’s a simple matter for your email to land in the junk folder or worse be marked as spam. This has far serious implications than many marketers think and eventually you will see erosion in trust in your brand.

However done right, it will result in direct sales for you. (Download the Forrester Research)
(more…)