E-mail Is So Pushy
At what point in the sales cycle does e-mail have the biggest impact?
At what point in the sales cycle does e-mail have the biggest impact?
Not to sound like the guy from the tractor-pull commercials, but last week sounded like this: “E-mail! E-mail! E-MAIL! Don’t miss E-MAIL!” It was everywhere I turned:
Don’t get me wrong. Anyone who knows me knows I pretty much live in the e-mail world, so exposure to all this wasn’t new. But the volume of content in one week did get me thinking about why and how e-mail works best in a marketing environment.
We know 97 percent of marketers use e-mail, and we know people now rely as much on e-mail to manage their lives as they once relied on diaries and planners. But at what point in the sales cycle does e-mail have the biggest impact?
When you think about a customer’s buying cycle, it typically starts with awareness of a need or problem, moves to consideration, then evaluation, and finally purchase. After that, a whole new experiential cycle begins as a customer tries a product, responds to the products performance, shares experiences, then determines the future relationship with the product/brand or company.
E-mail clearly plays a role at every phase of both cycles but, considering the impact of other digital media influencers and offline advertising and marketing, I’ve concluded e-mail’s most valuable role is being pushy.
Many technology firms and tactical e-mail producers will show you phenomenal results of e-mail’s impact at each phase of both cycles. E-mail continuously generates superior (or at least extremely competitive) response rates when compared with any other channel. Yet with longer-term analysis, e-mail’s strongest impact proves to be its ability to speed up the sales process and facilitate the positive experience sharing/repurchase efforts in the experience cycle.
How pushy is your e-mail? Conduct these two quick reports to check your campaign’s effectiveness:
Thank goodness e-mail is pushy! Because of that, our marketing efforts just continue to get better.
Meet Jeanniey at ClickZ Specifics: E-Mail Marketing on October 2, in New York City.
Want more e-mail marketing information? ClickZ E-Mail Reference is an archive of all our e-mail columns, organized by topic.