Maximize your marketing dollars with E-blasts! When designing electronic communications, or “eblasts,” you can save money by leveraging the web hosting service you are already paying for. If you have a website, you’re already paying for hosting. Instead of subscribing to an additional eblast service to host your images, you can simply upload a directory of images to your hosting web server and link to the files from your chosen email client or HTML code. This option enables you to remain in full control of your images and content while saving you money.
Another potential money saver is to actively update your current mailing list. For example, if your database is 10,000 strong and you receive 1,000 bounce backs or undeliverable email addresses, updating these addresses will minimize the number of bounces you receive. Afterall, do you want to pay for emails that cannot be delivered? If you are paying per email address, in most cases, making these updates will save you some money on your monthly bill.
There are a number of great statistical tracking applications you can use free by simply creating a Google account. Ask your webmaster to and make sure your eblasts, landing page, and website all have tracking codes on them, which assists Google in providing performance data to you. Google Analytics will provide you two forms of information: 1) it will validate your statistics from your chosen email client; 2) it will validate the traffic coming from your website. This creates a consistent method to overlap your data, ensuring that the traffic you are receiving matches the marketing expenditure. This analysis is a bit complex, however the returns on your investment of time is incredibly high.
Spending money on eblasts or any other online or social media marketing vehicle (such as Facebook or Google Ad Words) must be tracked to access its effectiveness. Through analytics, you will receive hard data that will prove the return on your marketing investment. If you want to know how much it is costing to reach each current or potential customer, analytics will do the job.
It’s much easier to spend money when you understand the return that investment is providing. Additionally, you have the opportunity to continuously hone in with laser sharp focus to adjust your advertising dollars and invest more into the markets and software applications that best serve you. Analytics will provide you a roadmap and true metrics to base your purchasing and funding decisions. E-blasts, E-blasts, E-blasts.