Email is really the only cost effective tool to send out very regular marketing messages, newsletters and mailings. Not only is it fast and cheap, it also gives significant opportunities to target messages, personalise and track the results.

We often get asked about response rates for email marketing. In general, our experiences are that for an opt-in list, which is a list of customers who requested that you send email to them, the open rate is typically 25-40%. For a bought-in list or a cold list that has been acquired from other sources, the open rate is never any more than 10%. When we are talking click throughs, no matter what the source typically there will be a 1-2% click through ratio of the people that opened the email. The numbers above explain why email marketing is more effective for larger cold lists, or smaller opt-in lists.

Email marketing is only really of use when your company has relevant information linked on their website as the email can offer a direct call to action link through to your website. Our experiences show that people rarely phone in from email campaigns but they will click through so it is important to capture that click through using tracking tools.

Email marketing done badly does present some problems, however. Unsolicited emailing will be seen as spam. Responsibility and relevance are the words to consider here. You must have permission to email the recipient. And if you want them to respond positively, you must send messages that are genuinely of value to them.

Building your email list

Having a good quality central database is key to not just email marketing success but all marketing mailing successes in the future. Building a good database of all your customer’s information, what they buy, when they bought and full contact information will allow you to target and personalise email messages to individuals.
These recipients must have given their permission for you to send them marketing emails by 'opting in' on a form or on your website. Make sure you include simple opt-in tick boxes on all your marketing material and add a subscribe to newsletter function on your website to make it easy to capture this information.

The law on email marketing

You can contact customers that have agreed to receive information from you in the past. The important thing is that they must actively opt in. Sending unsolicited marketing emails, or spam, is illegal. When we say customers in this article we do refer to home users/individuals. Currently as the law stands, businesses can email unsolicited email to other businesses and that is within the law, however anyone that has registered with the Direct Marketing Association's Email Preference Service should be removed from your contact list.
Finally, each mailing should include an unsubscribe option so people can opt out if they wish. Tools like SO-MAIL allow this to automatically remove that person from the central database and provide this as report data to you following the campaign.

Creating your marketing emails

Whether you send regular email newsletters or occasional offers, the content of your marketing emails must be relevant and useful to the recipient. Send one or two irrelevant messages and your prospects may start deleting all your emails, or even unsubscribe.
To ensure relevancy, target messages to specific segments of your database rather than the whole list. Check out responses to previous emails and also buying habits to make sure your message is reaching the right people.

Email marketing messages are basically very simple website pages. You can create a full HTML eshot to look just like a webpage with a few restrictions, and also create a text based version for contacts that choose not to display HTML content.

Before pressing 'send', always test the email campaign to yourself to not only check that it looks correct, but is it really relevant or useful?

Measuring the response to your emails

Tracking the results of your email campaigns will enable you to establish what's working and what's not.
Work with a marketing agency like SO Marketing who offer tools to measure responses to gather key information such as: how many emails were delivered, how many people clicked through and how many people unsubscribed.

Find out more about how cost effective email marketing can be - call us today on 01538 750 538!

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