Email Marketing Fundamentals
Published in Getting Started Advertising & Marketing
E-mail marketing is essential to eBusiness success
E-mail marketing is one of the most overlooked marketing opportunities. Many businesses collect information about their customers and prospects and never use the information. Let me preface this article with a note about spam. I do not condone sending unsolicited commercial bulk email, or spam. And under the new Can-SPAM act, you must be very careful of how you perform email marketing to abide by the law.
That said, email marketing is one of the best, cost effective ways to market to potential and current customers. Email is virtually free, and maintaining a useful email marketing program is very inexpensive.
First and foremost - Ask for permission!
It may sound like common sense, but even if you have already sold to an individual or they have agreed to receive certain information from you (i.e. receipts, order information), you still need their explicit permission to send them marketing material. If you already have email accounts for customers and prospects, I would recommend sending an initial email to your addresses asking permission to send them a newsletter or sales & marketing information. Only add them to your marketing list after they have responded giving permission. This is called opt-in.
Don't confuse this with opt-out, which would be automatically including your customers and prospects in your new marketing list and requiring them to then remove themselves from the list if they do not wish to receive the information.
It is never a good idea to email customers you have not been in contact with for more than 2 years. If you haven't communicated with them in a long time, delete their email addresses from your system.
Now that you have permission, set a newsletter schedule
You need to stay in constant contact with your customers and potential customers so they remember you the next time they need your product or service. This does not mean, however, that you need to send an email every day. Set up a schedule, either monthly, bi-weekly or weekly, to send an email newsletter or marketing email. Resist the urge to send an email every day or multiple times per week. It will only lead your membership base to unsubscribe from your email lists.
Many retailers are asking their customers how often they would like to receie emails. Most newsletter management software will allow you to setup multiple lists, and send to any or all of them at a time. You could setup weekly, bi-weekly and monthly lists. Once a month you would send to all lists, once a month you would send to bi-weekly and weekly, and once a twice a month you would send only to your weekly list, covering all lists appropriately.
Email Format - Text or HTML?
You can poll your members and ask them whether they would like to receive text or HTML newsletters, and keep two seperate email lists. This is a perfectly acceptable and regular practice, although I don't understand why. There may be a few people who have the ability to read HTML email but prefer text, but they are a vast minority... and there is a way to include a text version of an email so those without HTML viewing capabilities will still receive the text version.
This is done using MIME formats in the email message. The technical aspects are beyond the scope of this article but most newsletter management software applications support this feature. You can maintain one email list and send your message in both text and HTML formats.
TEST Your Email Design
Get as many email accounts as possible, and install every local email client you can on your computer so you can test how the email will appear. CSS support in HTML emails is very limited, and a good rule of thumb is to only use inline styles. Get a Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail and other free accounts to see how these web services render your email. You'll be surprised at the subtle differences.
Sending the email
Now that you have an email marketing list, have a schedule and format to send the email, you need to actually write and send an email newsletter. The content of email newsletters and marketing information changes from industry to industry, but the same principles apply to email that would apply to a magazine ad or traditional newsletter.
The actual composition of your message may be difficult if you are not a web designer. Sending emails to hundreds or thousands of recipients using a standard email client would not be efficient. Fortunately, there are several programs and services that assist in building and sending mass email campaigns.
Online Hosted Solutions
Desktop Solutions
Infacta Group Mail is a Windows application that manages email lists and sends email messages. The program has a composer that includes WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML email creation. Some program features include a subscriber and unsubscriber function, email address validator, and quite a few free plug-ins that are available for download from the company's website.
Now you're ready to email
Now you have all the pieces to put together a successful email marketing campaign. Remember to follow the rules, never SPAM and abide by any applicable laws such as the new Can-Spam act. Email marketing has been and will be an important form of communication between businesses and customers. Are you ready to start your email campaign?
About Brandon Eley
I am an Internet entrepreneur and own several e-commerce companies. I started 2BigFeet.com in 1999 and have shipped big shoes to all 50 states, most provinces and over 40 countries all over the world. We have a warehouse and retail store in LaGrange, GA.
I also work as the Interactive Director for Kelsey Advertising & Design. I am responsible for enterprise level web applications for Fortune 100 companies as well as e-commerce websites and other client projects.
I also run several content websites and write for several publications, including SitePoint where I am also a Community Advisor, The Apple Blog and others.
