What is Targeted Email Marketing?

Targeted email marketing is a form of direct marketing that focuses on using email to reach a specific demographic. Targeted email marketing can successfully turn prospects into customers. At the very least, it can increase brand visibility, promote businesses and help business owners establish and maintain relationships with customer bases.

Email marketing is often thought to be a good solution for marketers and advertisers because it costs little to nothing to create and send emails. It also provides a way for marketers to track sales and determine the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Moreover, it can help identify a group of people interested in the products and services that a business is offering.

There are many ways to collect the email addresses of prospects. What can separate targeted email marketing from other types of marketing is the way email addresses are collected. One of the most popular ways to collect email addresses in targeted email marketing is to use an opt-in advertising campaign. In opt-in advertising, an advertiser can create ways to get a prospect's email address by having him or her willingly supply it. This also can result in winning the prospect's permission to contact him or her at a later date.

Of course, prospects will need incentive to give their email addresses over to businesses. Business owners often offer items of value to prospects that can be obtained in exchange for their email addresses. For example, depending on the type of business, business owners can provide free reports, promotional items or discount codes if prospects enter their email addresses.

After email addresses have been acquired, it's important for business owners to maintain respectful communication and abide by basic email etiquette rules. Sharing email addresses with other companies and emailing prospects too frequently can result in prospects blocking communication from the business. However, done properly, targeted email marketing can substantially increase conversion rates, the rates of website visitors who turn into paying customers.

Those business owners who feel that they need assistance in formulating and implementing a targeted email marketing campaign can look into employing an email marketing service. However, business owners who elect to use an email marketing service need to research company business practices before deciding on one. Some companies are likely to use methods that include sending emails to a large number of recipients who did not ask to receive them. Not only are these emails, which are commonly known as spam, unlikely to be open and read, it also can negatively affect a business' reputation.