Email marketing

Email marketing is cheap and a convenient way of communicating with your customers.

At the least it should be used as a support function on your website. Whenever a customer completes a positive action on your site – purchasing something or registering for something – they expect to receive confirmation. Email is the ideal tool for this as it is instant and these days internet shoppers expect it.

Once you start to build up a database and have customers opting in to receive information from you, you can send out emails for marketing purposes.

Marketing emails can be anything from newsletters to product offers to Christmas cards. The most important thing is getting the message right for the individual customer. Email is the most cost effective way to achieve such high targeting, as long as the data you have is good quality.

Creating emails

Text emails can be effective if they are short and straight to the point. However if you are selling products, images have more of an impact.

If you can code html web-pages you will be able to code an email in a similar way. However you need to ensure that your email provider can handle the format.

If you use Microsoft Outlook, you can download ready-made email templates for a fee. You can also get free email templates from other sources on the internet, which can be adapted to your needs. Just type 'free email template' into Google.

Optimising email creatives

• Put your most relevant information in the top third of your email, as this is what appears in the preview pane
• A customer should be able to tell who you are and what your email is offering by looking at the top left corner of your email
• Be careful of the words you use in your emails – some will flag it as spam and stop it getting through
• Don't use too many images unless you are promoting a lot of products
• Keep your image size small so that they download quickly
• Use ALT text on all your images so that if they don't appear, the reader can see what their purpose was.
• Include as many links as you can, including linking from your logo and images
• Make sure your links are obvious – underline text or use big, bright buttons
• Keep your text short and to the point
• Make sure your email design is consistent with your website design and your company branding
• Get your subject lines right
• Test all aspects of your email, including variations on your design and subject line
• Tailor the content to the individual customer wherever possible.
• Personalise the email to the recipient wherever possible

Sending the emails

Microsoft Outlook supports html emails and can send out bulk emails, so this may be a good solution to get started. It is not very sophisticated, however and cannot track the emails for you.

Dedicated email software that includes a reporting function is the next step. Some of these services are free, such as livewirecampaign.co.uk and some are paid-for such as cheetahmail.com. They generally offer the ability to upload your email creatives, edit them and add links, upload your data and then see who has opened and clicked on them.

The amount you pay per email send generally depends on the volume you send. The higher the volume the less you pay.

Staying out of trouble

If you are a b2c (business to consumer) company, you should never send unsolicited emails. This means that every person you send an email to must have opted in to receive it. If you buy a list from a company it is important to make sure that the prospects on it have opted in to receive communications from companies other than the one they gave their data to originally.

If you do send unsolicited email or 'spam' then the recipient can report you. This could result in prosecution as it is illegal to send spam emails.

If you are a b2b (business to business) company, you are allowed to send emails relating to your business to your existing customers and to prospects who have requested information, quotes or bought products from you in the past.

The emails to non-customers must mention the interaction that the person had with your business previously and must also give the recipient the option of unsubscribing from your email list.

Marketing emails such as newsletters and sales promotions must be opted-in for if you are sending to new businesses.

Technically you are allowed to send business emails to business email addresses (ie. john@johnsplumbing.com not john@hotmail.com), although we would always recommend sticking to opt-in prospects as these are the ones most likely to respond.

These rules are updated frequently due to the speed that the internet evolves, so you need to keep checking to make sure you are within the law.

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