Archive April 2008
Email marketing
This blog entry was spawned after having recently attended an email marketing seminar hosted by a bulk email provider.
Aside from it being a shameless product plug, there were some quite interesting points made. It’s also a reminder of how similar email marketing is to search results and AdWords, as many of the same principles apply to both.
If you’re currently engaged in email marketing, these are (or at least should be) things you’re doing already. If you’re not marketing by email – why not? It’s a cost-effective, virtually instantaneous medium: targetted email communications should definitely be in your company’s marketing repertoire. Here are few key points to remember:
- Message: what are you trying to achieve? Why? Don’t just cut & paste swathes of copy off your website – tailor the content to be relevant, succinct and accurate to the audience;
- Targetting & segmentation: So you have 10k email addresses on your database? Great! Don’t send them all the same message. Prospects, customers and loyal customers all have different requirements and expectations from you;
- Personalisation: It sounds simple, but it’s overlooked so often. Tailoring the offers in the email is one thing – but utilising additional data you store about your customers is gold. “Dear customer; buy our widgets and get 5% off!” holds far less weight than “Dear Mr Jones; you recently bought a widget, and we hope you’re enjoying it. We thought you might be interested in these widgets as well“;
- Data: there’s no point in trying to add personalisation if your data’s duff. In fact, it’ll have the opposite of the intended effect. “Dear E, we see you recently bought a $product_ID$ from us. We thought you might also be interested in #INVALIDVALUE!# as well“;
- Deliverability: make sure your email scores low on spam filter values. Certain words, number of exclamation marks and embedded images will put spam filter scores through the roof – resulting in your carefully-crafted email landing in the recipient’s Junk Mail folder.
Do it right, and email marketing is invaluable. Do it wrong, and the results could be damaging.
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