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The appeal of eMail marketing is hard to deny. There are estimated to be more than 450 million email inboxes worldwide, all contactable from your desktop. There are however a few important points to consider before creating your first campaign.

Why you should consider eMail marketing

1. It provides an extremely cost effective and fast method for delivering a compact message to the screens of thousands of potential clients.
2. You can create brand awareness quickly, build strong messages and receive instant responses that enable you to very quickly modify and tailor your campaign (impossible with traditional mailings).
3. email marketing enables you to build newsworthy and up-to-the-minute offers, especially important if you work in a business where prices may be sensitive to rapid changes and market fluctuations.

and a few reasons not to...

1. Some customers go online intermittently and when they do retrieve their mail your message could be just one of hundreds, or be read some time after you had intended, therefore losing it’s relevance.
2. Spam filters and large company servers often detect and block html email so your message may never arrive, although a plain text version sent with the html message and including a link to an web page displaying the html version can help ensure that something gets through.
3. Email marketing is sometimes associated (quite unfairly) with “down market” advertising, largely as a result of a small number of inconsiderate but persistent spammers who show no respect for the recipients of their unwanted messages. Give some thought to how your prospects might view this form of contact and whether it is the most suitable means by which to approach them.

Buying eMail lists

The best list is one that you have grown organically from a base of customers, clients or contacts that you know will be interested in receiving your messages. If you choose to purchase data or a third party list, be sure to run through a few checks first.
1. Validate the company selling the data to ensure that they are reputable. What other clients do they have? What response rates do their lists acheive? Check the validity of references and testimonials. If in doubt, go elsewhere. Remember it is your reputation at stake, not theirs.
2. Any list broker you work with must guarantee that all email address owners have agreed to receive emails. If they won’t, don’t use them.
3. Do not purchase CDs containing vast numbers of names and email addresses. These have usually been created with automated harvesting software, making their subsequent use illegal.
Search for registered, reputable list providers on the Direct Marketing Association website.

List management

List management can be difficult. If you are planning to send a large number of legitimate, non-spam emails, it might be a good idea to invest in some list management software, specifically designed to help you manage the names and addresses of recipients.

Once again a few things to watch out for…

1. It is possible to use email client software such as Microsoft Outlook to send mailings, but you will need to manually manage users requesting to opt out or unsubscribe from your list. Also the sending of bulk email through your internet service provider may violate your user contract, leaving you at best branded as a spammer and at the worst losing your service altogether.
2. Remember that if you put all of the recipients in the To: or CC: line of a message, all recipients will be visible to each other. Worse still, replies and bounced messages may also end up going to everyone on the list.
3. If your anti-virus software is not up to date you could be sending a virus along with your message, not the best way to start a new relationship.
4. A hosted solution is the most expensive answer, but the provider will generally be responsible for managing your email traffic and improving the effectiveness of your campaigns using professional software running on their own servers.

eMail response tracking

A couple of techniques you can use to measure the results of a mailling.
1. An embedded link in your campaign can let you find out how many people click through to the page.
2. Better still is the use of software solutions that have email response tracking and reporting built in.

In conclusion

Make sure your recipients are happy to receive your messages and make it very easy for them to unsubscribe from your list should they decide they are not. If you don’t your campaign may damage rather than benefit your marketing efforts. You will also be breaking the law!
We provide our clients with a highly configureable and easy to manage eMail campaign system that provides full user control and reporting. Please contact us to find out more.