E-mail marketing

The new information technology, internet and e-mail, have practically elimin- ated the physical costs of communications.

(Peter Drucker)

E-mail marketing has been called the original social networking tool and I could not agree more. If you think about social networks in general, email plays a large role in them.

(Simms Jenkins, author of The Truth about Email Marketing)

We forget that the RSS-centric world we live in isn’t the one many (and probably most) of our customers live in. That’s why the old-fashioned occa- sional email update – which gives people the juiciest bits and leaves out the rest – still has so much power.

(Matt Linderman, Signal vs. Noise)

This chapter is about

When you reach the end of this chapter you’ll have answers to the following questions:

l What is e-mail marketing and how can it beneﬁt my business?

l How can I make sure my e-mail marketing campaign won’t be seen as spam?

l How can e-mail marketing tools help me?

l How can I use technology to manage my customers?

l How can I write effective copy for my e-mail marketing campaign?

l What are the main design considerations when crafting an e-mail?

l How can I test a campaign’s success?

The new direct mail

E-mail marketing is one of the most powerful elements in your digital marketing toolbox. It lets you communicate easily with your customers on a personal level through a universally accepted digital medium. Choosing the right approach for your e-mail marketing communications is, of course, key. Unsophisticated mass-marketing techniques, or anything that smacks of e-mail spam, are likely to be ignored, that’s if they make it to your prospect’s inbox at all.

Think of the junk mail that arrives through your letterbox every day. Most of that gets thrown out, unread, and in many cases unopened. A scene in the 1991 Steve Martin comedy LA Story depicts the main character, Harris Telemacher, watching a never-ending barrage of junk mail pouring through his letterbox. He nonchalantly kicks a wastepaper basket under the unwanted stream of promotional bunkum and continues eating his breakfast. While exaggerated, it’s a scenario many of us can empathize with – and an apt analogy for what’s happening with electronic mail today.

Naturally, as e-mail started to become integrated into our business and personal lives, so the mass marketers turned their attention to the new medium. Junk paper mail became junk virtual mail. But whether it’s online or in the ‘real world’, if your business becomes associated with streams of junk mail (or spam) it will destroy your credibility. People will either ignore your electronic missives or ﬁlter them out before they even arrive.

Despite the proliferation of spam and the fact that most people’s inboxes today are bursting with irrelevant and unsolicited messages, e- mail can still be used as a beneﬁcial and effective marketing tool that delivers real value, both to your customers and to your business.

Customers will still open your e-mail

The truth is, many customers will welcome regular e-mail communications from your business, in the same way as they may welcome the occasional traditional or ‘snail’ mail offering a money-off voucher for their favourite store. They’ll open an e-mail containing a newsletter or promotion from

you, as long as they recognize your brand, are expecting to receive communication from you, and are conﬁdent it will contain something of value to them. The key is to make these messages relevant and interesting for your chosen audience; fail in that, and unfortunately your message is destined for the virtual recycling bin.

E-mail marketing can be a tricky ﬁeld to navigate effectively. You have to simultaneously respect your customers’ right to privacy, protect your brand, and ultimately maintain your value proposition over time. It’s very easy for your carefully cultivated e-mail prospects to unsubscribe from your mailing list, and once you’ve lost them they’re probably gone for good.

What exactly is e-mail marketing?

E-mail marketing is a fusion of marketing savvy and imaginative copy. In its simplest form, it’s an e-mail sent to a customer list that usually contains a sales pitch and a ‘call to action’. This could be as simple as encouraging the customer to click on a web link embedded in the e-mail. Some examples of e-mail marketing campaigns are:

l a hotel promoting a special summer discount;

l a recruitment company informing business clients about a free seminar;

l a gadget store offering a money-off code to be used at its online checkout;

l a ﬁtness centre offering members a special printout voucher that entitles the bearer to bring a friend along for free;

l a beverage company encouraging people to download a game that integrates into the user’s Facebook or MySpace proﬁle.

You can also use e-mail when you don’t have anything speciﬁc to market, as a mechanism to maintain consumer engagement, strengthen your brand and add credibility to your business. In fact, even in the Web 2.0 world of blogs, social networks and RSS feeds, e-mail newsletters are still incredibly popular and offer a very effective way to get your brand out in front of your list of prospects on a regular basis. Examples might include:

l an accountancy ﬁrm keeping in touch with its clients by informing them about changes in tax legislation;

l a weekly newsletter from a public relations company that contains interesting snippets of industry news and web links to longer articles;

l a daily digest or breaking-news alert from an online newspaper;

l a young-adult book publisher using e-mail marketing to promote free and exclusive screensavers, ring tones and wallpapers to its young readers.

Because e-mail is an incredibly cost-effective communications medium, when used effectively it can deliver an excellent return on investment (ROI).

E-mail marketing tools

When it comes to managing and sending your marketing e-mail, you probably won’t want to rely on your standard desktop e-mail client to do the job. While it’s a perfectly feasible approach for very small lists, as more people subscribe to your e-mail offering it will quickly become cumbersome and unmanageable.

What you need instead is one of the many customized e-mail marketing systems out there. These can be software you install on your local machine, software you run on your own server, or a software-as-a-service (SAAS) offering hosted by an online service provider. These systems let you manage your e-mail list and craft your design templates for your messages and, most importantly, help you to track your e-mail campaigns.

Some of the functions e-mail marketing tools can provide (and this is not an exhaustive list) include:

l easy-to-use tools that let you create and work from e-mail templates without having to be a technical expert;

l testing tools that allow you to check that your message will make it past major spam ﬁlters;

l tracking tools that show how many people have ignored, opened or responded to your e-mail (more about this is mentioned in detail towards the end of the chapter);

l personalization tools that let you modify the content dynamically to individuals or speciﬁc target proﬁles on your list.

Customer relationship management

It’s no good using e-mail marketing tools if you don’t know who you’re sending your e-mails to. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a

Figure 6.1 E-mail marketing specialists like EmailLabs (www.emaillabs. com) offer hosted solutions to manage every aspect of your e-mail marketing campaigns

business concept that has been around for about 25 years. It’s the art, if you will, of keeping your customers happy and maintaining an ongoing personal relationship with them. Let’s say you run a small grocery shop in an equally small neighbourhood. Over time you’ll get to know your regular customers, their likes and dislikes, and what other products they might be interested in trying, etc. Larger businesses struggle to maintain that sort of personal connection with consumers, and that’s where CRM comes in.

For instance, if you keep a record of the products or services customers have bought from you in the past, what they’ve looked at on your website and how often they’ve contacted you, you can merge that information with the relevant demographic details and then, using CRM technology, you

can track and anticipate what those customers are likely to be interested in. The result? Relevant, targeted marketing that is much more likely to convert.

When it comes to e-mail marketing, CRM can help you segment your list, allowing you to focus highly targeted campaigns to the customers most likely to respond. You can ﬁne-tune your e-mail offering and align it with your customers’ purchase history. The possibilities are virtually endless.

If your business already uses CRM systems for more traditional marketing, then you should be able to incorporate that information into your e-mail marketing strategy. Some CRM systems cater for e-mail campaigns as part of their feature set, while others integrate with your chosen e-mail marketing solution.

We’ll talk about technology where appropriate as we progress through the chapter, but ultimately e-mail marketing tools will prove effective only if you, as a digital marketer, spend time developing the right e-mail strategy for your business and execute it in the right way.

Before you start

Before you begin planning your e-mail marketing campaign, there are a number of things you need to consider from practical and legal perspectives.

Gathering your e-mail list

As we mentioned earlier, people won’t respond to seemingly random e- mail communications: they won’t even open them. So before you can do any e-mail marketing you’re going to need to build up a list of customers who are willing to receive e-mail communications from your business. The best way to do that is to encourage them to opt in to receiving your e-mails at every opportunity.

In Chapter 3, we mentioned that your website is the hub of your digital marketing world. It’s also the ideal place to capture e-mail addresses for your opt-in mailing list. You can place a simple, prominent form on your website encouraging visitors to sign up for regular e-mail updates, the latest special offers or any other value proposition that will resonate with your audience.

You can rent e-mail lists to try to recruit new customers, but make sure that the organization providing you with the list is a member of your

country’s direct marketing association or similar, and ensure that its anti- spam and privacy policy is clearly outlined. Anyone on these lists should have opted in to receiving third-party e-mails from companies like yours. You’ll also need to check whether anyone on that list has previously asked to be taken off your own mailing list.

Another way to attract opt-in is when a customer completes some kind of transaction on your website, like purchasing a product, downloading a whitepaper or requesting additional information. By making an e-mail address a mandatory component of the transaction you can add to your e-mail list. Legalities vary here, but in many cases, including in the UK, it’s ﬁne to send marketing e-mails to people once they’ve completed a transaction with you – as long as you’ve given them the option to decline. This is referred to as a ‘soft opt-in’. And remember, every marketing e- mail you send out must provide the recipient with a straightforward way to unsubscribe from your mailing list – an opt-out, if you like.

Legal requirements

Another crucial factor is, of course, to be familiar with the law in your jurisdiction. Sending unsolicited e-mail out to random consumers will breach spam legislation in most Western countries. Anti-spam laws are there to enforce ethical e-mail marketing practices that respect customer data and privacy. Legitimate businesses will follow the laws, but spammers are hard to trace. They will typically use underhanded techniques to harvest e-mail addresses and send large volumes of unsolicited e-mails.

Astonishingly, about 80 to 95 per cent of e-mail trafﬁc today is spam (News.com, 12 December 2007, http://tinyurl.com/5veq4w). The practice continues because: 1) it costs practically nothing to send a marketing e-mail to millions of people on a list; 2) even the tiniest conversion rate turns a proﬁt for the spammers; and 3) most spam can’t be traced, and originates outside the relevant jurisdictions.

Just in case you hadn’t picked up the vibe, we’ll spell it out: spam is bad. It’s against the law, and what’s more it annoys the very people you’re hoping to connect with – your future customers. When you’re just starting out and don’t have much of an opt-in list, it can be tempting. Don’t do it!

Anti-spam legislation in the United States

In the United States, the CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non- Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) came into effect on 1 January 2004. The Federal Trade Commission has a fact sheet, accessible at www.

ftc.gov/spam, outlining legal requirements for businesses sending e- mails. The main points include:

l Recipients must be able to opt out of receiving future e-mails, and such actions must be processed within 10 business days.

l The source of the e-mail must be traceable.

l Subject lines must not be deceptive.

l Your full postal address must be included.

Apart from ﬁnes of up to $11,000 for violation of any of these terms, there are additional ﬁnes for using spammers’ techniques including automatically generating e-mail addresses or harvesting them from the web.

Anti-spam legislation in Europe

The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 are the overriding anti-spam legislation. You’ll ﬁnd that individual countries will interpret the law in their own ways, and you’ll need to take data protection legislation into account too.

In the UK, you can download a fact sheet for marketers from the Information Commissioner’s Ofﬁce website at www.ico.gov.uk. This clearly outlines, in Q&A form, what digital marketers can and can’t do with e-mail. As we’ve mentioned, having the recipient opt in to marketing messages is crucial (but don’t forget the ‘soft opt-in’, which means that once you’ve collected contact details from people who’ve bought a product or service from you or expressed an interest then you can go ahead and market to them as long as they’ve been given an easy way to opt out).

Logistical problems

Sometimes the mail doesn’t get through. There is a variety of reasons why your e-mails may not arrive in your customers’ inboxes. They may have been inadvertently or incorrectly categorized as spam by the internet service provider (ISP) or ﬁltered into a junk mail folder by a web-based or desktop e-mail client. Spam ﬁlters are so aggressive these days that people may not even see much spam in their inbox, but an overzealous spam ﬁlter can sometimes intercept legitimate mail too.

For customers this seems great, but it does mean that they’re missing out on potentially useful and informative e-mails – like your latest missive! In internet lingo, whenever a legitimate e-mail is blocked it’s referred

to as a ‘false positive’. For your e-mail marketing campaign these false positives can be a real setback. Even discovering that your bona ﬁde opt- in marketing e-mail is being blocked can be tricky, and resolving the problem can be difﬁcult, especially when you’ve followed the rules to the letter.

Your best bet is to avoid the spam trap problem from the start by making sure your e-mails don’t look and read like spam. If your e-mail software has an option to test how well your message will fare with spam ﬁlters, use it, and change anything that it ﬂags as suspect. You should also make sure that all of your e-mail can be traced back to a valid IP address from a reputable host. If you do that, there’s no real reason for your e-mails to be blocked.

An organization called the Spamhaus Project (www.spamhaus.org) works to track and block spammers, and you’ll ﬁnd more information on why legitimate e-mails can sometimes be blacklisted on their website.

E-mail formats

Another reason your e-mails may not be seen is that you’re sending them out in a format that your recipients’ e-mail clients – the software or website used to read and reply to e-mails – don’t recognize. This isn’t as much of a problem as it used to be, because the adoption of internet standards has improved signiﬁcantly, and almost all mail clients today will handle rich text or HTML e-mail unless the user has speciﬁed otherwise.

When you send out your marketing e-mail, you can normally choose to send it in its most basic plain text form (with no formatting). You can then be pretty certain that all clients can read it. One step up from plain text is rich text format, which allows you to format the text with font sizes, colours, bold and italics, and allows recipients to click on web links. This looks better than plain text and can be very effective for simple informational newsletters.

The most sophisticated e-mails are built using HTML (the same code that developers use to build web pages). This essentially means that your e-mail can look exactly like a regular web page, complete with images, web links and all the rest. Images aren’t sent with the e-mail, but are usually pulled in from a web server when the e-mail is viewed. HTML e- mails can tie in with the look and feel of your website, which is great news if you’re looking for brand continuity and a seamless user experience when your prospects click through to a landing page!

Some e-mail clients (and web-based e-mail like Hotmail and Gmail fall into this category) automatically block external images for security reasons, but allow recipients to override the setting for mail from people

that they trust. Even so, you’ll probably want to make sure that your message is clear without images, just in case. Use images to augment the main message of your e-mail, but make sure your value proposition and call to action are clearly outlined in text form.

Generally you won’t need to worry about sending different versions of your e-mails to different customers. A standard called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) allows you to send messages out in ‘multipart’ format. This means your recipient’s e-mail client will be able to view the message in the best way it can, and if recipients prefer to receive text-only e-mails then that’s what they’ll see.

Planning your campaign

As we’ve covered in the strategy chapter (Chapter 2), you need to know what you want out of your overall digital marketing campaign. Speciﬁcally, when it comes to your e-mail campaign, you’ll need to deﬁne who you are targeting, why, and what you want out of it. Do you want to generate more sales? Or are you looking to maintain a relationship with your customers by keeping them up to date with the business? It’s important to be speciﬁc here and to make sure that your e-mail marketing strategy feeds into your overall business goals.

Digital CRM can help you to segment your customers and to target a speciﬁc group of them with a certain offer if that makes sense. You can also deliver personalized content to them, and you should endeavour to personalize all of your e-mail marketing as much as you can. At its most basic, this involves using the customer’s name at the start of the e-mail, but more sophisticated software will allow you to pull in tailored dynamic content based on a particular user’s proﬁle. For example, an e- mail from an airline could highlight the number of frequent ﬂyer points a particular customer has left to spend before they expire, or an online bookshop could recommend new books based on what a customer has recently purchased.

Good e-mail design is also important here. It makes sense to establish some brand continuity between your e-mail templates and your website design, so that every aspect of your digital marketing campaign works together seamlessly. Remember though that the content is paramount, and while your design should look good it should complement rather than compete with your content for the readers’ attention. Make your content punchy, scannable and engaging, and don’t forget the all-important call to action.

You should also take the frequency of the e-mails you send out as part of a campaign into account. People don’t want to be bombarded with marketing e-mails – even ones they’ve opted in for. Sometimes it can be hard to predict exactly how often you should send out marketing e-mails and when, in fact, is the best day or time to send them, which is why it’s so vital to track and analyse how your campaign is progressing. If you notice people suddenly starting to unsubscribe from your mailing lists, ask yourself what’s gone wrong. Perhaps you’ve been sending out too many e-mails or have changed their format. Whatever it is, keep a close eye on your e-mail campaigns and try to rectify any problems quickly. If you don’t, your marketing e-mail may be perceived as spam, and that’s damaging not just for your e-mail marketing but for the broader online reputation of your business.

Dos and don’ts of an e-mail marketing campaign

Take a look in your own inbox; look at the array of newsletters and marketing e-mails you’ve signed up to receive. Do any of them jump out at you and scream ‘Read me’? Why? What was it about that particular message that made you want to open it? Are there any e-mails you’ve signed up for that you actively look forward to receiving? Analyse the marketing e-mails in your own inbox, deconstruct them, and apply what your learn to your own e-mail marketing campaign.

There are some best-practice guidelines, many of them based on common-sense principles and, of course, putting the consumer ﬁrst. The ones we’re listing cover design, copy and delivery of your e-mails. This certainly isn’t a deﬁnitive list; and of course, as with everything else in digital marketing, some of these ‘rules’ are more relevant in some circumstances than in others – so feel free to interpret these as they apply in your particular case. As your e-mail marketing campaigns evolve, you’ll naturally start to ﬁnd what works best for you. After all, nobody knows your business or your customers like you do.

E-mail design

Many of the same usability principles that apply in website design will relate to e-mail template design, particularly if you’re using HTML to construct your e-mails. You will want your message to display consistently and effectively across as many computers and e-mail clients as possible.

People will be viewing their e-mails using different screen widths, and they’ll be using e-mail clients that display messages in different forms. Test your templates on as many different platforms as possible to make sure they work.

Of course, a strong design is only one part of the story, but it is an important one and works to make a positive ﬁrst impression. Keep things simple and follow the dos and don’ts below to enhance your message:

l Do think in terms of ‘above the fold’: just like a newspaper folded in half, the top of your e-mail needs to capture the recipients’ attention immediately. You don’t want to force them to scroll through a page of text before they reach your once-in-a-lifetime offer announcement. Make sure you get to the good stuff early. Remember, too, that some e-mail clients will show a ‘preview’ of the message below the subject line. Where possible you need to engage your prospects in the ﬁrst couple of lines.

l Don’t clutter your e-mail message with images, because a lot of e-mail clients will block images by default. Your recipient should be able to read your message and call to action without relying on images. Images are there to support and enhance your message; they shouldn’t be the message. Don’t simply scan in the company brochure and plonk it into the e-mail – it’s a recipe for disaster!

l Do think of your corporate identity and how this should extend into the design of your e-mail. Your business should have a consistent brand identity. Your e-mail marketing message should complement your brand image perfectly. This is especially true if the reader clicks through from your e-mail to your website. You want the experience to ﬂow seamlessly between the two.

l Do work out the most popular e-mail clients among your target audience, and design your mails accordingly. Doing so will ensure that the vast majority of them will see your e-mail correctly. Remember to test your e-mail by sending it to a variety of different web-based e-mail accounts, and use a number of common clients like AOL, Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Windows Mail and Microsoft Outlook to view your e-mail before sending it to your list.

l Do remember mobile users. More people are using Blackberrys, iPhones and other mobile digital devices to access their e-mail while on the road. They may not be able to view the entire subject line of your e-mail and may also be limited by small screen size when they click through to the mail. It’s vital for mobile users that your message works in text form and that you ‘hook’ them with killer content really early.

l Don’t put fancy videos, music and Flash animation in your e-mails. For a start they’re distracting, and because of the inherent security threat of active content they can be blocked by ﬁrewalls (software that helps to shield your computer from internet nasties). If you want to promote using rich media content, use your e-mail as a vehicle to encourage recipients to click through to it on your website rather than embedding it in the mail itself.

l Do remember that if you sketch out (on paper or in Photoshop) what your e-mail message should look like, it needs to be converted into HTML. Your web designer should be working with you to ensure that the design will work as a functional e-mail.

l Do be consistent. Make sure your template maintains some consistency between e-mails. Most e-mail marketing tools let you create templates that you can use to format your e-mail consistently over and over again.

l Don’t send attachments, like PDFs or word documents, in your e-mails. People are naturally suspicious of e-mail attachments sent out to lots of people, and with good reason. It’s also not a good idea to ‘push’ content out to people. If you have a ﬁle you want to make available (perhaps a new brochure or whitepaper) it’s much better to provide a link in the e-mail to a web page where your prospects can choose to download it if they so wish.

l Do provide a link for the person to unsubscribe. This is a legal requirement. If the person can’t click the link, make sure it’s clearly spelled out so that they can copy and paste it into their browser. Some people will automatically respond to the e-mail and use the word ‘unsubscribe’ in the subject line or e-mail body, so try to incorporate a way to pick those up, if you can.

l Don’t forget to link to your website’s privacy policy. If you are tracking stuff in your e-mail (such as how many people are actually opening it, etc), then you’ll need to point that out in your privacy policy and reassure your readers you won’t be using the data for nefarious means.

E-mail copy

While the design and look of your e-mail are important, it’s the copy that’s going to galvanize people into action. Beneath the gloss and the sheen, you’ll need to write compelling, engaging copy to get results. Our top things for writing great e-mail content are:

l Do think of a catchy subject line that clearly outlines what the e-mail is about and encourages the recipient to open it. Don’t try to be too

clever – clever headlines can be ambiguous, and ambiguous e-mails don’t get read. Your headline should be descriptive, yet compelling, which can be a tricky combination to pull off – but if you manage it you’ll see your e-mail open rates soar. Also remember that some e-mail clients (including Gmail) let people preview the ﬁrst sentence or two of their e-mail before they open it – giving you another opportunity to grab their attention.

l Don’t assume people know what you’re talking about. Your customers aren’t stupid, and you shouldn’t treat them as such, but they’re busy and will tend to scan through your e-mail quickly. You need to make sure your value proposition and call to action are crystal clear and that key elements of your message (including links back to your website) stand out from the body of your e-mail.

l Do get someone else to proofread the e-mail before you send it out. Read it in its ﬁnal, HTML form. Then proofread it again. Make sure as many other people as possible in the business read your e-mail to ensure that it’s accurate not only in terms of spelling and punctuation but also in terms of the content. Check prices, dates and contact details. Then check them again!

l Don’t go crazy. Multiple exclamation marks, overuse of capitals (seen in the internet world as shouting!) and desperate pleas will turn people off and may also ﬂag your message as spam, which means it won’t reach your prospects at all. Avoid overzealous use of punctuation and formatting, not just in the body but in the subject line too.

l Do mention your company name in the ‘From’ ﬁeld.

l Do follow through. It’s not worth enticing people to your website with a killer e-mail offer only for them to discover all sorts of terms, conditions and caveats when they arrive. Make your offers genuine, and follow through with them when people respond; otherwise there’ll be no second time.

l Don’t use long paragraphs. Keep text short and punchy. Long paragraphs can be unwieldy unless they’re exceptionally well written. They’re difﬁcult to write well, and when written poorly they’re difﬁcult to read, so people don’t read them. Keep your paragraphs and sentences short and punchy. It will give your content life and energy and will zip people through your e-mail quickly.

l Do think about tone. Be approachable. E-mail is a business tool, but messages tend to be on the informal side. That informality can be even more important in a marketing e-mail. Be personal and approachable. Write as if addressing an individual rather than an audience. You may be sending it out to thousands of people, but each person is reading it as an individual. Use a conversational style, as if you’re interacting with the other person face to face.

l Do provide as many details about where the e-mail has come from as possible. Always use your company’s domain name to send the e-mail, and provide full contact details for your business within the body of your message.

l Don’t use scare tactics. Never ﬂag e-mails as ‘high priority’ or ‘urgent’ if they’re not. It can alarm people, and they won’t appreciate it when they open your message to ﬁnd just another ‘one-time-only’ offer.

E-mail delivery

l Do keep your e-mail list ‘clean’. Unsubscribe notiﬁcations need to be applied to your mailing list regularly – automatically where possible, but you should also monitor for unsubscribe requests that fall through the automatic list-management net. If you discover that an address on your list is bouncing regularly (ie the messages are undeliverable), then investigate why, and if the address is dead prune it from your list (don’t remove it immediately, as e-mail downtime is more common than you might think).

l Do be prepared for an onslaught of replies when you launch your campaign, such as ‘out of ofﬁce’ autoresponders and ‘unsubscribe’ requests, as soon as your e-mail starts hitting people’s inboxes.

l Do investigate any irregularities. Make sure your e-mail deﬁnitely got out OK by sending it to a few ‘test’ or ‘seed’ e-mail addresses of your own. If a lot of mail bounces, check that an ISP or webmail provider isn’t blocking your e-mail. If it is, contact your e-mail service provider immediately to get the situation resolved.

l Do remember to use the BCC (blind carbon copy) ﬁeld if you choose to use a regular e-mail client to send e-mail to small lists. You don’t want people seeing everyone else’s e-mail address!

Measuring your success

Analysing the success of your ﬁrst campaign can provide you with valuable data that can shed light on how you progress and evolve future campaigns. You can use your e-mail marketing tools to analyse:

1. approximately how many people opened the e-mail (called the open rate);

2. when people typically opened your e-mail;

3. what links people tended to click on (the click-through rate);

4. the percentage of people who opened the e-mail who then went on to click through to the website (the click-to-open rate);

5. who never opens e-mails;

6. the types of e-mails with the best conversion rates;

7. e-mails that regularly bounce;

8. how many people unsubscribed to your message;

9. which e-mail clients or providers blocked your messages;

10. how frequently a series of e-mails is opened by a particular sub- scriber.

Target your campaigns

The more data you have on your subscribers, the more you can split and segment them into niche groups that you can target with more speciﬁc campaigns, as long as your set-up can support it.

If you have a complex business with a wide array of different customers, investing in a sophisticated CRM system will let you build an even more detailed proﬁle of your customer base and of their purchasing behaviour. By linking your customers’ accounts (if they have registered on your website) to other databases within your business and ‘mining’ customer data from a variety of sources, you can get an increasingly granular view and can target ever more relevant messages to particular subsections of your e-mail list.

Test your techniques

To gauge the success of a potential e-mail campaign, you can also run A/B split tests with a small group of subscribers. Have two (or more) versions of the e-mail that communicate the same message in different ways (a different subject line, for example), and see which one is more effective. Then analyse the results and send the one with the best result to the entire list.

Still a vital component of digital marketing

The beauty of e-mail marketing is that it lets you deliver your message directly to an individual who actually wants to hear from you. Compare this to your website, which is necessarily more generic (to appeal to a

broader audience) and needs to work harder to attract and retain a visitor’s attention.

While e-mail marketing is just one of the many ways of connecting and maintaining a relationship with your customers, and is perhaps getting a bit long in the tooth compared to the young and dynamic social media channels that are emerging, it nevertheless remains a stalwart of internet marketing and when executed properly can be incredibly effective.

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