Despite the threat of spam, viruses and the amazingly inadequate but widely-used Outlook 07, email is still going strong. According to the “Internet 2008 in numbers“pingdom report there are 1.3 billion email users worldwide. Email continues to be the main method of direct remote communication for businesses and consumers alike. Here’s what you need to know to get the most out of email marketing.

Because of it’s popularity and ease of use, email marketing, done in the right way, is a very effective way for businesses to communicate with both potential and existing customers.

There are loads of ways you can use email marketing, (other than just reminding your customers you exist) but here are a few ideas to get you thinking:

• Announce new products/services
• Share news about your business/group/website
• Cross-sell or up-sell products/services
• Direct users to your website
• Tell/remind customers of a deadline/event

Benefits

Unlike web marketing, as long as you get in the inbox at the right time and in the right way, you’ve got a captive audience. What’s more, your competitors are more than a click away, which gives you the chance to get your message across.

Email is proactive, and you can plan other business activity around it. So if you email asks people to ring you, you can make sure you’ve got plenty of people available to answer the phone. Or if you’re selling a product, make sure you have enough in stock.

Email is a lot cheaper than print, and it’s also more enviromentally friendly. And unlike print media, with an email system you can measure pretty much everything in real time.

If you use a template, anyone can send targeted campaigns, which means you can send your campaigns almost as quickly as you can write the content.

Context

There are a number of different types of email you can send to clients to achieve different goals:

• Periodical - weekly/monthly/quarterly newsletters with general information/updates
• Event/action based - received by the client upon sign-up or purchasing
• Date specific, eg Christmas, Valentines day
• Emails which target specific people on your list: eg customers who haven’t bought anything in the last thre months, or whose birthdays are coming up in the next week.

Avoid purchased lists

Don’t buy lists that aren’t relevant - in fact we’d recommend not buying lists at all. If people haven’t signed up for your emails, it’s very unlikely they’re going to read them. Unless you’re confident that what you’re sending is of genuine, specific interest, your email is going to end up in the spam folder, unopened and unread.

It’s also unclear how up-to-date those email addresses are or how they were gathered. You may be paying for incorrect information that has no chance of getting read.

Stay out of the Spam

It’s worth being aware that spam isn’t just unsolicited emails, it’s also emails that come too often, or that are not relevant to the recipient. Most email clients (email receiving/viewing systems such as Outlook or Hotmail) allow people to flag emails as spam. This means that if you irritate your clients in future they won’t have to even ignore emails from you as they won’t even be aware you have emailed them.

Every email that reaches the inbox is run though spam filters, such as Spam Assassin or McAfee Security Center. Spam filters assign points to various elements of the email that could be indicators that the email is spam.

Things that might get your email marked as spam:

• Too many pictures and not enough text
• Certain phrases such as No Obligation, Over 18, Free trial
  
• Coming from an email address that is “at something-offers”
  • Get an email management system that will give you statistics, so you can see what’s working and what isn’t.
  • Make sure you have something to say and say it quickly, link them to your website for more information and set up a new page with targeted messages.
  • Time it well - try to avoid being lost in the Monday morning email backlog.
  • Send it from a real email address, so people can contact you.
  • Get your email tested, to ensure it gets past the spam filters and looks right in lots of different email clients and have web version of the email incase it doesn’t.

Tips for good email marketing

Want more advice on how to make the most of email marketing? Contact Jo York from Ki Media on 0191 645 2442 / jo@ki-media.co.uk