Are you using email marketing? You should be! It’s an effective business tool to incorporate in your customer-relationship strategy for communicating and interacting with customers. You must maintain a dialogue with your customers to improve their experience with your company and to keep them loyal to your brand, products and services.

Email is far less expensive on a cost-per-contact basis than other advertising options, such as banner ads, print advertising and telemarketing. It’s fast, inexpensive and easy to use as a marketing strategy. It’ll keep customers engaged, even when they’re not buying.

Reviewing emails is part of your customers’ daily routine and allows them to immediately act on your delivered messages. With many of your customers now using smartphones and tablets, they get your message when and where they want it. One of the greatest benefits of email marketing is that your message is delivered very quickly. Reader response times are generally within 48 hours.

Email marketing builds brand awareness. Keeping visible to your customers continues to build relationships and interaction with your customers. This assures that when they are ready to buy, they will think of your company.

It’s important to remember that a successful email campaign requires that you create a message that is compelling to those who receive it. Create the desire to have them open your email with a strong, informative and want-to-know-more subject line. Show your customers that you care about them. You need to craft clear messages to customers, based on criteria around their needs. If you do, you’ll see real, measurable results – right away – in building customer relationships, without investing a lot of your time and money.

For your existing customers, send them service reminders, special offers, updates about new products or services and expert information on topics of interest. It’s a great way to stay in front of current customers and reconnect with your customers that haven’t purchased from you in a while. For your prospective customers, let them know who you are, what your business is all about, what you stand for, what you offer, how you work and the products or services you offer.

With email marketing, you can create marketing campaigns consisting of a series of emails to reinforce your message. It costs little to maintain your email-marketing program. Email creates an interactive connection and helps to nurture customer relations.

You’ll be able to track your click-to-open rates, and send automated messages to new subscribers. Your email campaign’s effectiveness can be easily measured when you use a good email template system and software. By being able to quantify the success while in progress, you can adjust your strategies to improve results. It can also drive traffic to your website. Using links embedded in your messages, customers can quickly be directed to your website.

If managed properly, email marketing is very effective. First, you have to build a contact list of people who want to hear from you – called permission marketing. This will ensure that you are not spamming anyone. If you get your customers’ permission, your marketing efforts are better targeted and help ensure that your emails get through to those on your list.

A well-planned, email-marketing campaign is a win-win marketing strategy. What more could you want? Once it’s set up, it’s easy to do and on your budget!