Promote New Products with Email Marketing

Promoting new products through email marketing can be highly effective, and it does take some work to learn how to do it well. We have compiled a list of tips to help you learn how to promote new products successfully through email marketing.

1. Product Reviews Help to Give Credibility to a New Product

Having your new product reviewed by an unbiased reviewer gives the product much more credibility than just telling your customers the product is great. If your customers see that other people have used the new product and had success with it, they will be more likely to take the product seriously and consider using it.

Including links to online reviews of your new product is an easy way to direct customers to good reviews. Only include trusted review sites, and if you don't have any reviews, consider submitting your product to these sites for review.

Many online sites that review new products do accept product submissions. You can even submit your product to several of these websites and then select the review that you feel best illustrates the benefits of your product.

2. Customer Testimonials are Your Secret Weapon to Promote a New Product

These are entirely different from official reviews, but they are equally as powerful. Having your actual real customers tell potential customers (peer-to-peer) that your new product is great and how positive of an experience they had with you is one of the best marketing tools and can go far in helping to promote your product.

Customers trust other customers. Of course, a staff member on the marketing team will write a glowing email message about the new product, but a customer review will be more honest and carries more weight. A customer review of a new product may even highlight some issues with the product that help other customers to decide whether or not the product is right for them.

You don't want to include reviews that are overly negative, obviously, but don't automatically exclude any review which is positive overall yet mentions a potential problem with your product. Customers will view a review with both positive and negative aspects as more likely to be truthful and trustworthy.

You can also acknowledge the problems that your reviewers raise. For example, "Jane M. in Iowa raises a great point about sharpening her serrated knives with the X 200. Our new knife sharpener works best when used with non-serrated knives. If you are looking to sharpen your serrated knife, please adjust the position of the sharpening wheels to the blue line, or try our special sharpener that is made for serrated knives, the X 100."

If you acknowledge potential issues with your new product and offer comprehensive solutions, it shows that you respect your customers' feedback and you are working to rectify the problem. It helps customers to understand that if they should have an issue with a product after they purchase it, you will help them rather than just ignoring their complaints. It helps to build your reputation as a trustworthy company that treats its customers well.

3. How to Truly Promote Your New Product? Offer Great Deals

Of course, including great deals and promotions is a no-brainer when you want to promote new products through email marketing. Offering great deals on new products in your email marketing newsletters also encourages your subscribers to forward your emails to their friends, thereby promoting your new products to brand new potential customers.

A common way to promote new products offers a special price on the product or add-on gift to the first X number of customers. You can include a promotional code in the first 500 emails you send out, for example. You can also do a limited time deal for your new product, that offers early bird customers a lower price.

4. Promote Your New Product through Other Channels Simultaneously

Marketing campaigns are always more effective when they take place on multiple channels. This means that you should promote a new product in different ways at the same time. As you run your email marketing campaigns for your new product, you should also be advertising the product on the front page of your website and on your social media pages, like Twitter and Facebook.

You can also promote new products through video ads, billboards, magazine ads, paid ads on other websites, text message promotions and more.

The reason this type of cross-promotion is so effective is that it helps the new product stay in people's minds. If a customer receives an email marketing message about the new product, they may be interested but they may forget about it during the course of their day. If they then see the product again when they check your website, and they drive by a billboard of the product, and a video ad about the product pops up when they are online, the customer thinks, "Wow, this new product is all over. I better check it out!"

Other Fantastic Tips to Promote New Products with Email Marketing

• Know your customers' buying habits, preferences, and top purchases. By analyzing your email marketing data, you can see which customers have purchased products in the past and so are more likely to purchase your new product.
• Include industry news related to your products. If you time your new product release and promotion correctly, you can meet a real need for the product. If your product solves a current problem or addresses an ongoing issue, especially one that has been in the news recently, let your customers know how your new product fills this void.
• Send at the right time based on your customers' habits. Review your email marketing data to see when your emails receive the highest open rate and when your customers make the most purchases.
• Design with your products in mind. Your entire email marketing newsletter for the release of the new product should be designed around the product. Do not include any information that is not relevant to the new product, and do not advertise other products or services in that initial email.
• Include giveaways and contests. An exciting contest can help gain more momentum for your new product, and social media is one of the best ways to spread the contest and reach many more potential customers.
• It's always fantastic when a celebrity is spotted with your product! Many companies send their products to celebrities for free, in exchange for the prestige and trend-setting that comes from customers seeing pictures of a celebrity with certain products.

Interested to see how SimplyCast can help you promote new products? Contact us to learn more!