Promoting products or services by email is a fast, powerful, targeted and cost effective direct marketing opportunity. There are not many of those about!
Email marketing is more successful if it focuses on people you know are interested in what you're offering.
Building A List
You cannot send unsolicited marketing messages by email to individual subscribers unless you have their prior consent. There are exemptions if their address was collected in the course of a sale or if the recipient has expressed an interest in "similar" items and chose not to opt out when the address was originally collected. "Individual subscribers" do not include companies or individuals within companies.
You ‘must' use your website to build your list highlighting the benefits of subscribing and providing a form to register immediately. It's well worth putting opt-in tick boxes for email information on all your paper-based marketing material.
Don't ask for too much information at the registration stage - lots of boxes to fill in will discourage people. Name, email address and phone number should be enough to start.
Email Selling
If you've got a large database of customers and potential customers for your email marketing campaign, it's worth analysing what you know about them, so you can send a more relevant message. For example, high-spending, regular customers could be sent details of a loyalty discount. Customers who haven't bought anything from you recently might be offered a discount voucher instead. Sound similar? Yes, but it's the perception that matters too.
It's important to consider how you're going to handle the response from an email marketing campaign. Have you got enough capacity to answer the phones and respond to emails if you get a 20 per cent response rate? Will you be able to offer your product or service to recipients within the promised time?
Email Newsletters
Interesting and relevant is the key to newsletters with links to relevant parts of your website so users can click straight through. Relevant = what is interesting or useful to the reader and not the writer! Consider sending different newsletters to different customer types.
Attract attention with the subject line but don't go overboard so that the message is seen as spam and deleted before being read.
Get straight to the point, use simple language (no jargon) and short sentences and encourage readers to click on a link to your website to find out more.
Get the frequency right - only send newsletters when you've got something relevant and interesting to say and monitor the effectiveness to make sure you're getting value from the time and effort you're spending on it.
Legal issues
Email marketing is governed by laws on data protection, privacy and e-commerce so understand what is allowed.
The Data Protection Act - read about privacy laws affecting your email marketing on the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) website.
Under e-commerce regulations, marketing emails must include certain information about your business, including its full name, contact details and a clear indication of prices if you refer to them. E-commerce regulations require you to make all commercial email clearly identifiable as such, either in the header or the text of the email.
When sending sales messages by email, the rules covering distance selling and online trading apply.
There must be a valid address for people to opt out of receiving emails from you.
