What Factors to Take into Account When Updating Your Email Marketing Strategy to New Technologies?
Email marketing has been in existence for a long time since the birth of text-only messages and the absence of spam laws. Nowadays, there is much more sophisticated technique because of the enhancements of innovations such as HTML, auto-responders, and web analytics and so on. You can also put it together with other communications platforms as well as additional marketing methods. Thanks to the advancement of technology, email marketing has also been improved a lot. However, you’d better consider the following things before implementing the latest cutting edge sensation.
Benefits of Implementation
Whether you are eyeing cloud computing, virtualization or a new CRM for your email marketing strategy, understand that new technologies should be much more than just cool. They must offer clear benefits and genuine opportunities for improving business performance. The technology you are evaluating needs to coincide with your existing objectives and deliver benefits that fall in line with the core logistics of your business. If not, implementing it could turn out to be a waste of resources, time and money.
Usability of the Solution
Before deploying any new technology for your email marketing campaigns, it is very important to consider its usability first. Sure, it may sound like an insignificant factor, but if the update lacks user-friendliness, practicality, or simply does not complement your current operations, it might not be the best solution. For instance, automation software is growing popular in the realm of email marketing. While it offers several benefits in terms of lead generation, communications, and performance measuring, the depth and complexity of such a system can be too overwhelming for many businesses to handle. This is just one example of how integrating new technologies could actually complicate a marketing strategy that had previously been simple and straightforward.
Cost of Implementation
It is very common for businesses to focus on so many other factors that they overlook one of the most important variables, the cost of implementing new technologies. More often than not, they come to find that this simple omission drives up the price up considerably. Pricing a new technology is not necessarily an easy task, especially when it is something that is just emerging on the scene. However, you must still take training, support, administration, and other factors needed to reap all the benefits into account. Some marketers have found that techniques such as risk and ROI analysis are effective ways to create scenarios for adopting new technologies and dealing with the cost factor.
Research and Study Your Market
For many businesses, implementing new technology depends on how customers, partners and even competitors are responding to it. This just goes to show how important it is to evaluate and understand your market. You should pay close attention to how the technology is benefitting your competitors, and more importantly, the demand from consumers. If your competitors are not battling it out and customers are not demanding the functionality or potential benefits, the market for a given innovation may not be stable enough to justify making an investment and updating your strategy. Of course you could benefit from being an early adopter, but without researching and analyzing your market first, implementing new technologies could be more trouble than you bargained for.
