Email Marketing for Students Pursuing an MBA in Sales

In the right hands, email can be a crucial marketing tool, complementing and even outperforming social media. Emails help businesses consolidate relationships with a readership that has already shown enough interest to add their name and details to a subscription or mailing list.

For MBA students in sales and marketing, email is an effective way of nurturing leads, marketing new products and finalizing deals. The best email marketers are careful to maximize the medium, fusing business insights with the particular access granted by client inboxes.

Are you curious to learn more about the best uses of email marketing? Read on to find out.

Emails generate approximately 40 times the combined customer acquisition of Facebook and Twitter. While email use waned among advertisers between 2008 and 2012, it has now become increasingly prized for its unique function as a web marketing platform.

Unlike social media platforms, email helps advertisers personalize their messages to each client. For instance, the online shopping company Gilt Groupe reportedly sends over 3,000 versions of its marketing emails, personalizing them to the recipient’s past online behavior and brand interaction.

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Emails afford recipients an opportunity to respond to the advertiser and engage with the product. Alerting customers of promotions or specialized offers, emails can forge a sense of customer loyalty not available through mass social media posts. This may account for the two thirds of online shoppers who reportedly make purchases as a result of email advertising.

Once a recipient list is gathered, marketers can begin shaping their ideal campaign – a time to put an MBA in sales to practice. Advertisers may choose to customize emails to clients, but all recipients are typically sent a variation of a chosen template.

The first step is identifying how the email will stand out in crowded inboxes and speak to customer interests and needs effectively. Whereas some email campaigns will take the form of recurring newsletters or blog updates, others will be one-time messages sharing company updates, promotions or event invitations.

Email formatting can also be the difference between unsubscribed customers and continued brand engagement. Subject lines should be chosen to elicit curiosity, and avoid sounding like standard advertisements. Marketers are advised to consider the entire recipient experience, streamlining navigation, click options and text formatting for the easiest possible journey from client inboxes back to their site.

Students in an MBA in marketing program learn the importance of measuring an ad’s effectiveness – a key part of optimizing content. Across all email campaigns, marketers are advised to include an enticing call to action (CTA), inviting recipients to a desired form of brand engagement. These calls to action help businesses determine whether their emails are working – and whether their outreach strategies need refining.

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An estimated 41 percent of email ads are opened on mobile devices. Ensuring greater engagement thus means optimizing the experience across platforms. Once ads are accessible on all devices, marketers can determine their effectiveness with metrics like total bounced-back emails, the number of un-subscribed recipients and the rates at which emails are opened and clicked through. Once a problem is identified, email advertisers often rely on a/b testing, assessing the relative impact of new email features sent to a portion of their mailing list.

Are you looking for a leading MBA in Marketing and Sales? Contact WU Executive Academy for more information!

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