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Email Marketing - A Good Practice Guide
90% of UK Companies now have email. A successful email marketing campaign will:
Both Aurora & Co Accountants (www.auroraaccountants.co.uk) and Klinicare (www.klinicare.co.uk ), since beginning online email marketing campaigns with Websynergi Design state they have seen a 30% increase in website traffic and an estimated 16% increase in new business.
Email marketing is much the same as traditional marketing and responds to the same stimuli. Because it is electronically driven it can have the edge over traditional methods but good marketing principles should always be adhered to. It is also important to keep up to date with the law relating to email marketing.
The underlying principles of good email marketing should be:
1. Know your customer
- personalise the email with the customer's name and promote something they have shown interest in, or your data shows that they may be interested in to substantially improve email newsletter opening and response rates
2. Be clear and consistent in all your email marketing communication to the customer
- Make it instantly clear what the mail is about. If it's confusing the email will be deleted very quickly
- Use language that is understandable to the customer group. Technical information may be inappropriate for marketing personnel but a link to such information can be valuable for technical staff to follow up and evaluate. But first you must engage the marketing representative with the advantages of your service or product
3. Use appealing and consistent branding and tempting content
- Emphasise sender and subject - the recipient will then know they have a genuine message from a reputable company. The subject line should attract the recipient to read further
- Apply consistent branding with logos, colour schemes, fonts etc. in all your communication, for instant recognition of your email - it must look genuine and valid to avoid being mistaken for spam
- Provide interesting and relevant information in your newsletters that will assist a customer's business
4. Ensure the customers has given permission for you to send them material
- You should ask customers to actively agree to receiving your communications. From October 2003 the latest EU directive on data protection became part of UK law. The adoption of the Communications Data Directive unifies practice across the EU, opening up the internal market. The legislation states that companies are required to gain explicit consent from both customers and prospective customers in order to send emails for marketing purposes
- Every email message sent must give the recipient an option to unsubscribe from the mailing list. This does no harm to reputable companies and will improve your customers' perception of you
- Target you email rather than resort to bulk email sending. People dislike receiving irrelevant communications and it can only diminish your reputation. It will be costly in the long run because you will not benefit from it
5. Capture email addresses
- from your website and all other forms of communication with your customers and use your customer database - ask permission to use their addresses to keep them informed
- publish a privacy statement below the subscribe box
6. Collect information about the success of your campaign
- How many people opened their emails? Which links did they follow? In order to determine who was interested in what and further refine subsequent campaigns, so that you best target your resources to yield higher returns
7. Respect the recipient's privacy
- Let customers know that the information you collect (e.g their email addresses) will not be passed onto anyone else
8. Have the technology and know how or employ a reputable company
- You need the technology/ software that will allow you to perform the physical task of designing your email campaign and sending it out to 100's or 1000's of potential customers reliably and tracking the results
- Alternatively, choose an email marketing company with whom you can establish a good working relationship. They will advise you on how best to run your campaign and how to tweak it to generate new customers. The boost in business should pay for their services!
9. Don't send Spam (unsolicited email i.e. sent without the recipient's permission)
- the response rates are so low on spam email it often won't justify your time, effort and cost
- lots of estimates have been done on how much it costs to gain a new customer, but we all know it is often not easy, can be time consuming - so why would you want to continually put your relationship at risk by sending your existing customers emails they don't want?
Some of the great advantages of email marketing over traditional (print) marketing are cost, immediacy and the opportunity for the recipient to investigate lots of further information very quickly by following a few links - you can send an eMailshot to 10,000 customers in a few days from the initial motivation and it is substantially cheaper then sending printed material.
Having said all this, there is a big factor missing - email marketing should only be a part of your overall online marketing strategy:
- people need to be able to find you through the Search engines and your website needs to be developed or tweaked to rank high with the search engines, through legitimate methods
- your website content needs to be interesting, informative and relevant to your target customer group
- traditional methods of marketing need to be used and integrated with your online and email marketing
Finally - if all this seems like too much or too large scale for your business, don't be put off - some companies offer a 'business starter' type service (we do this for small businesses with a service tailored to their requirements). An email capture form is added to your website, subscribers' email addresses are stored securely and customers' email addresses can be added from your records, once you have permission to use them. Regular mailshots can be sent to those who have subscribed and do this, dare I say extremely cheaply and with minimal burden on you.
90 % of UK companies now have email. We predict a huge growth in email marketing in the UK - those companies that operate it legally and in a professional and ethical manner will be the most effective in actually adding value and generating new custom for their businesses. Also as we are all competing in a global market place - it will be better for you to communicate with you customers or subscribers now before other European companies do so.
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