Top Tips for Email Marketing Success

1.  Be aware of the law

There is a large body of law affecting email marketing, and marketers need to be fully aware of these regulations and operate strictly by them.  Ignorance of the Data Protection Act is not an option; as an individual you could face criminal prosecution and your company may face a hefty fine.  Having said this, it is better to operate a stricter regime than is actually required.

Here are the key points:

• Only send purely marketing messages to contacts who have said that it is okay for you to do so – make it absolutely clear to any individual whose email address you collect what you intend to do with it.
• Always make it clear whom the email message is coming from, and include proper contact details.
• Include the legal details of your business in the message (registered office, company registration number, VAT number).
• Always honour promptly any request for someone to be removed from the distribution list.

2.  If you are going to do email marketing then do it properly and certainly never dabble.

Compare an email message to a poster campaign.  If a poster campaign fails to deliver it will not affect the next campaign – people walking down the street will not avert their eyes from the new poster because the last one was ill judged.

This is not the case with an email.  Send out a poor email and the contact will simply not bother to open the next one.  The names on your contact list are extremely valuable so don’t waste your chance to market to them by ‘trying out’ email marketing without being fully prepared as a business.
This includes:

• A process to manage unsubscribes and validation emails that require you to take manual action to be white-listed in order to reach an individual’s inbox
• Time and resources to manage replies and enquiries
• If you are linking to your website, ensure all the destination pages and subsequent processes are working correctly
• If your goal is to generate new business, make sure your business is prepared for it. If you are sending out a large amount of emails, consider spreading the send over the course of a week rather than being hit with a large “spike” in staff workloads and potential delays in responding to new business.

3.  Use a professional Email Marketing System to send out your messages

You have many choices about how to send out your email marketing messages.  You can pay nothing to send your messages by using your standard desktop email system (MS Outlook for example).  Alternatively, you can use a specialist email marketing package to do the sending.  Typically, you will pay for a professional system on a ‘price per message’ basis.

There are many advantages in using a professional email marketing application, which, as a minimum, should contain the following features:

• Tools to help you build your message
• Contact list management, allowing for easy audience selection
• Tracking and monitoring abilities which enable you to see who opened the message and which links were clicked
• Feedback management to handle replies which are made to your message
• A system that constructs a technically ‘proper’ email
• Automated handling of unsubscribes and bounces

4.  Work hard to build your contact list

A contact list that you have built yourself will always be much more successful than a list of names that have been bought (and remember that you need to be very careful about the legal status of any mailing list that you have bought).

Here are some ways to help you build your list:

• Have a ‘sign up for updates’ type link prominently displayed on your website.
• Make sure that it is a ‘sign up’ page and not an enquiry form, and don’t ask many (if any) profiling questions.
• Offer the ability to sign up for information on all emails leaving your business – use the signature block automatically inserted at the bottom of your email.
• Make sure that all your staff are committed to collecting contact data and then show how this data is being used

5.  Carefully target your messages

As with all marketing activities you will be more successful if you address your audience with targeted messages.  Most ‘spam’ is email advertising rather then email marketing.  Marketing has broader objectives and, to take full advantage of your opportunities, you should use professional email marketing software to help build contact profiles.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that personalisation is limited to list segmentation and the mail merge of the contact’s name into the message – real personalisation can open up many more possibilities.  Good email marketing software can approximate one-to-one marketing; selecting and even positioning message content based upon what it has learned about a recipient. Effectively each contact can receive a unique and relevant message with very little extra work from you.

6.  Analyse the results of sending your message and, more importantly, use the information gained

Many email marketing systems will give you an analysis of your campaign – how many messages were opened, how many clicks each link received, etc.  Good email marketing software allows you to use this data to improve your profile of a contact.
Often it is possible to draw inferences from which people interact with your message.  For example, someone clicking on a ‘Kids Go Free’ special offer has told you that they have children. Store away information like this so that you have a basis for targeting future messages.

7.  Don’t send too often and offer a range of subscription options

It is a fine judgement as to how often marketing messages should be sent out.  If messages are sent too frequently your recipients are likely to switch off and not open them; or worse, flag your messages as spam.  The correct rate of sending will be business dependent.  As a general guide don’t assume a one-size-fits-all policy.  Think about offering a range of communication options rather than simply subscribed/unsubscribed.  This might mean offering a subscription for:

• Monthly newsletters
• Special offers
• Only information about specific products