This free Email Marketing guide is to help you learn what is needed to be successful with mailshots…
Email is a very effective and cost efficient way of marketing your business digitally.
It is much cheaper than traditional paper based marketing, has much better metrics and depending on your business finances can give you a much further reach (10,000 emails at 1 cent per email = $100; 10,000 leaflets printed and distributed = much more than $100).
So it must be simple right? Well yes and no!
Once you have a good distribution list and a fantastic email template, along with content that will interest the email recipient, then yes it can be easy.
To get to that level though can take:
- Years to do it properly…
- Days to do it via purchasing email lists…
- Hours to get blacklisted as a spammer for emailing random people!
Step 1 – How to build an email client distribution list…
If you have been very good with your business then you may already have this.
From selling your products/services, letting people register on your site and having the old “receive newsletter” checkbox option, or even historic data that you have taken over.
You already have the contacts…..
If you have the contacts then you now have 2 options. You can:
- Email a nice template email asking if the user wants to opt in to your emails creating a double-opt-in list (really making sure the user wants that newsletter).
- Send them the newsletters without asking again (hell, they’ve already said yes once!).
The main difference between these is that the double-opt-in users are highly unlikely to mark your emails as spam, whilst the other lists are more likely.
Keep in mind you will lose a lot of contacts on the list when you try and get double-opt in, but your IP will remain blacklist free (a beautiful thing).
You don’t yet have an email distribution list…..
You are a new business or one that has never bothered with all this record keeping malarkey (bet you wish you had now…). Well there are several options here:
1 – Start to build a good list up
Using you website (newsletter subscribe feature), emails you send to clients, any products sold, leaflets or feedback forms, etc.Get as many as you can from real customers who actually have an interest in your product or service. Let us stress this is the BEST, yet most time consuming way of building up an email distribution list (lists generally take years to build up).
2 – Buy a list from a reputable email distribution list dealer
These will be lists sold by companies such as you who may have sold up or gone bust, etc.These lists are usually 50% ok and may have some good contacts. Make sure they are relevant to your product, service and general target reach and geographical location.
Keep in mind this is not permission based email marketing, as the reader probably only accepted emails from the original company.
However for those people who did not uncheck the “receive emails from 3rd parties that we have carefully selected” …..then more fool you!
3 – Go for broke and buy a cheap list of the internet from some random company (urrrrghhh)
95% of the users on these lists will not be interested in your products and you have a large risk of being marked as spam if you use them, due to the unwanted and unasked for email you are sending these people.
It may not be pretty, but very occasionally if you have an amazing email template that is fun, exciting and really does relate to the readers then you may get away with it.
Watch out though as if you get marked as spam 1 too many times then OH OWWWW – You have been put on a blacklist and now your company is finding it hard to send emails to your customers!!!!Blacklists were created for a reason – to stop this practice……
Step 2 – You have your email distribution list and now need a design…
Emails are no longer rich text boring things. They can look like full websites with advanced HTML and brilliant images to entice readers to click on the links.
What you need to do is decide how these designs will be made.
1 – Do it in-house
You have an in-house web designer or graphic designer who can easily and effortlessly draft up a Michelangelo worthy email design template.
Brilliant – get it done but remember to try and stick to a similar theme so that readers will know it is your brand when they see the email (instead of just pressing delete or unsubscribe or worse – spam/junk).
Also remember the larger the images, the longer it takes to load in Outlook or any other email client. Anticipate what the email looks like when the images are not loaded, as in many email clients this is what the user first sees.
2- Pay a design company
Plenty of em out there. You’ll pay anywhere between $80 and $1000 for the designs (£50 and £600), but usually you pay for what you get.
Make sure you specify exactly what you are after (best look at examples and find one you think is appropriate for you business).
Once you have a great design, theoretically you can use it for years, or until you fancy a rebrand or just a change.
3 – Don’t bother with the design – the content is so good that who needs fancy images, etc….
You can make some good emails that look professional without loads of images and maybe just your logo placed well (even for this a basic knowledge of tables is needed).
Just remember that every email should have a purpose, be it to get a phone call, an email response, a click-through to your website or even a facebook follow (or “like”, depending on if you use a group or page).
Design the email to fit the purpose!
If you get an special offer email from GBK you would expect it to be like the one below, very graphic and a clear purpose in its use. Great call to actions. Strong visible message!
Click to view this full size
If, however, you are a chartered accountant and you are sending an email out to 1000 lawyers then perhaps you would want the email design to look more professional, as this would attract the target audience more:
Click to view this full size
Some of our Favourite Email Design Examples -
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Step 3 – Got the contacts and the design – Now the content!
The content (copy/text/images) is crucial to make readers engage with the email.
- If it is a more professional email (chartered accountant) then short, INTERESTING and concise content with clear headers breaking up the email in easily readable sections.
- If it is a more design based email (GBK) then make sure to really focus on the call to actions and not have them overshadowed by the design.
Now we are not going to start lecturing you on how to write good copy, as the delivery all depends on the subject matter and the target audience.
However try and follow these simple rules when creating the content, for any email, and hopefully it will make less of you emails deleted in a microsecond.
1 – Make the “First Glance” Count…
2 – Don’t Bore the Reader…
3 – Call to Actions…
4 – Unsubscribe links…
5 – Experiment…
Step 4 – Right done all that – Now how do I send the emails?
Lots of choices = lots of opinions on which is best.
“Bulk Email Program” or “Online Email Marketing Software”???
We would recommend an Online Email Marketing Software for the following reasons:
- Your work server doesn’t crawl to a halt from being exchange being clogged up.
- The emails still come from your email address, if not your server. Think of this as a buffer between you and the blacklist companies (although you can still get blacklisted – hence why permission based marketing the standard these days, not to mention the higher conversion rates..)
- The stats generally will always be superior from the EMS’s to what you can install on your server (unless you pay mega-bucks).
- Although difficult to integrate with any CRM you may have, there are possible integrations with XML and feed data to EMS’s.
- If sent from a bulk email system on your server, other people can mark the email as spam can inform your ISP. Your ISP gives your company a spam rating and can blacklist you or worse, withdraw your account. This can cause major issues on your company’s emailing as you will be on international blacklists. It can take weeks of bureaucratic arguing to sort this out, if you actually ever manage to.
Spotted Panda recommends the following:
1 – Campaign Monitor
- Very popular and very good stats for each email sent.
- Campaign monitor are quite aggressive to the number of emails marked as spam, but mostly this is justified.
- At 1 cent per email this is a great platform for sending out your emails.
2 – Mailchimp
- Again very popular with some different pricing options.
- Possibly not as good stats but great as a starter (there is a free deal).
- More salesy and not as good stats as campaign monitor, but still very good
4 – Constant Contact
- Just as good as the other boys
- has a 60-day “free” trial
Bulk Mailer – If You Must…
- Does what is says = atom bombs peoples inboxes.
- Warning – nothing to stop your IP being blacklisted here.
Some Comparisons!
The images below show some comparisons of the well known Email Marketing Software’s (EMS).
Pay Per Email Comparison
Pay Per Subscriber Comparison
Other Email Marketing Resources
3 Techniques That Will Actually Make a Difference In Your Email Marketing
- Great PDF from Infusionsoft.
Campaign Monitor Email Design Guidelines
- Good instructions on designing emails – tables, images, mobile viewing, etc.
- Good study on the best subject line to have when sending mailshots.
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Tags: email marketing, email news
