A cog in the marketing wheel
While discussing your email marketing campaign with your co-workers have someone search for "broadcast email software". You'll see that Google returns over 60 million results. Those kinds of numbers sure indicate that broadcast emails are far from obsolete. We believe they still play a vital role in a comprehensive online marketing strategy and shouldn't be overlooked. The key is that they are just one part of a successful marketing campaign and should be used alongside a number of other marketing efforts.
What is a broadcast email?
In contrast to automated emails which are triggered by an event and targeted to the actual visitors behavior, broadcast emails contain a broad, uniform message that gets sent to a large list of people.
Monthly NewslettersSome of the more common types of broadcast email are:
Sales Events
Coupons
Other Event Notifications
We use broadcast emailing for our company newsletter. We send ours out during the first week of each month. We don't bombard our audience with daily or even weekly emails and we don't send our newsletters with any type of blatant marketing overtones. We use them as a way to keep our audience informed about the latest marketing trends and include tips for them to improve their own internet marketing process.
Being viewed by our audience as trusted advisors is the goal of these types of broadcast emails. This will keep them coming back as well as telling their friends about how helpful our newsletter is. We generate leads and customers from our inbound marketing efforts. If there's overlap.. BONUS!
Should I use them?
The simple answer? Yes! As I mentioned earlier, though, they need to be included in a larger marketing approach. Design Sherpa indicates in their "Benchmark Report Excerpt: 2012 Email Marketing" that 67% of organizations plan on increasing email budget in 2012. This number includes both automated and broadcast emails. Pretty substantial numbers!
Now, I'm not saying just because other companies are jumping off bridges that you should. No, no, no! What I hope you take away from that statistic is that it might be worthwhile for you to think about where your internet marketing budget is being directed. If the fact that many other companies find enough value in email marketing that they are reallocating budget in that direction there's probably something to it! I'm just sayin'.
Where's the downside?
For those who do use broadcast emails for internet marketing there are some things to be mindful of. Some of the inherent pitfalls that you can come up against are:
More difficult to measure success
Statistically lower ROI (Return on investment)
Too much time can pass between subscribing and receiving
These concerns should by no means deter you from using broadcast emails as long as they're used in conjunction with an automated, targeted email follow-up system. This just indicates that you need to have a slightly adjusted set of expectations from your broadcast emails as you do for your targeted email marketing. As we mentioned in our previous post "Is Mobile Email Marketing Worth It?", 27% of consumers prefer to get special offers in their emails. Don't let them down!... Broadcast!!
If you enter into a direct email marketing campaign with realistic expectations and goals, you can acheive great success. Now get out there and start emailing!
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