Email Marketing Campaign

07 Jul 2008

Email Marketing is one part of a set of disciplines known as eMarketing or Online Marketing. eMarketing is basically using the Internet arena for marketing purposes. Along with email, other eMarketing activities are:

Website (providing up-to-date, relevant content for your customers and prospects)
Search Engine Optimisation
Advertising, e.g. Banner advertising, Pay-per-click campaigns

This article focuses on email marketing.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is sending targeted, relevant emails to your clients and prospective clients using best practices. It is a cost-effective way of building business relationships and ultimately increasing your revenue. With Email marketing you can keep in touch with clients and also recruit new ones.

Why use Email Marketing?

Acquiring new customers, i.e. selling your product / service online
Viral Marketing: A self sustaining and self promoting form of marketing. Your clients and prospects take on the role of 'spreading the message' themselves.
Profiling your customers / prospects: Using online survey’s / polls and by analysing their interaction with your email campaign (i.e. what did they click on)
Targeting your product or service: Using your customer / prospect profiles you will build up a picture of what they are interested in and how interested they are. You can then tailor email campaigns for them.
Brand reinforcement

What are the advantages of Email Marketing?

The ability to distribute information to a wide range of targeted, potential customers at a relatively low cost, specifically it is less expensive than direct mail or print.

Your Return on Investment (ROI) can be tracked.
It lets the advertiser "push" the message to its audience, as opposed to a website that waits for customers to come in.
It is easy to track. An advertiser can track users via page clicks, bounce messages, unsubscribes, read-receipts, click-through’s, etc. These can be used to measure open rates, positive or negative responses, correlate sales with marketing.
It is familiar. Internet users use email all of the time.
Green - email marketing is paper-free

Fundamental “best practices” are:

It should always be permission based: Only to send emails to those that have opted in to receive them.
To provide a clear and obvious way for recipients to opt out of receiving your emails and making sure that when they do opt out they really aren’t sent any more emails.

What is involved in an Email Marketing campaign?

Write the email. This is probably the hardest part of the whole process. Certainly until you’ve gone through the process at least a couple of times.
Important things to remember are:
Keep it short: People are usually put off by lengthy emails and are less likely to read to the end. If you do have lots of information about your products and/or services then this should be on a page of your website and there should be a link to it in your email.
Following on from the last point, in most cases your email should drive people to your website. Generally people find it easier to read content in a browser rather than their email application. Also, in this way you are generating traffic to your website.
Design the look and feel of the email using this.
Test, test and then test again.
Any minor changes to the test are made.
Scheduled as required, i.e. on a Thursday at 11.00am.
A report will be provided 1 week after the email has been sent, that contains the open, read and click-through statistics.

What Redstrand can do

Overall creative theme.
Email copy: While you are in the best position to write about your business and what it provides, we can help you put your message together in a compelling way.
Email design, including logos and images
Creation of both HTML and text versions of the email
Additional email functionality: polls, refer a friend, survey and personalisation, Unsubscribe link
Scheduling and email send
Tracking and reporting the open, read and click-through statistics