Email marketing is one of the oldest methods of encouraging online publicity – but it is still one of the very strongest. Setting up an email marketing campaign (despite what many “experts” will have you believe) can be done for next to no money, and once you have started you will have yet another tool with which to encourage your online popularity. In reputation management there are three goals. Firstly, you want to develop a good reputation by making sure that lots of people are aware of the good service you provide. Secondly, you want to spread that reputation wider by getting more people and methods involved in promoting your business. Thirdly, you want to safeguard your reputation against damage from disaffected customers or rival businesses. Email marketing can actually be involved in all three of these tasks if you know how to use it, and so is one of the most powerful weapons in your PR arsenal. This article will outline some of the key concepts for you, in order to encourage you to give serious consideration to an email marketing campaign.
The main exercise for any email marketing campaign is winning subscribers, and it is in this aspect of email marketing that the most obvious benefit to reputation management can be found. By sweeping your net as widely as possible and attracting people to your business website and social media pages, you are widening your reputation – and WOM (word of mouth) publicity is not to be underestimated. If you truly do have something of value to offer your subscribers, their friends and family are sure to eventually hear about it. Thus, through email marketing your reputation will become more widely known. This is the second aim of reputation management that we discussed above, and the one that will be most positively affected by any campaign that primarily involves marketing.
Once a campaign is up and running, you will have the responsibility of creating some great content with which to keep your subscribers interested. If you can do this – or if you can find someone else to do it for you – then you will hopefully have a regular readership. Once you have this level of online publicity, you can start engaging your subscribers in interactive discussions (as well as activities such as competitions, etc.) in order to gauge their opinion of your business and find out how your service could be improved. By doing this, and by following it up with some publicised information about how your business is constantly being improved, you can reinforce the idea that you really care about your customers.
Finally, you can involve email marketing in your reputation management regime by encouraging regular interactions with your customers. Perhaps encourage them to join your social media pages, or some other point of content, and tell you what’s good about your company. This will give you all the positive online publicity you need to drown out any bad reviews you may get in future (and remember: you can republish the good ones as often as you want!)
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