Online marketing
Email marketing
Using email to communicate with customers, members, donors and supporters is one of the most common online marketing approaches used. It is seen as a cost effective way to send direct mail with no print or postage costs, and you can track the response rate to email, unlike physical direct mail. However, you may still need to consider design and transaction costs.
Email marketing is a natural extension of a website. A website is passive in the sense that people are required to visit it to get information. Email allows you to initiate contact and deliver a message.
Essentially, every email you send has marketing value. Within an email you can provide your company details and a link to the relevant parts your website. You can even incorporate a call to action, such as a ‘register to receive our regular newsletter’.
Benefits of email marketing
Email marketing is typically used to build brand credibility (such as email newsletters), and advertising products, services, campaigns and events. As with other types of digital advertising, the performance of a campaign is immediately measurable. With a good email marketing tool you can monitor who opens your email and who opens a link.
Email marketing allows you to link straight to information on a website. An email newsletter may have only an introductory paragraph to a topic and a ‘read more’ link that takes the user to the full version of the article on your website. Note that such a link must go straight to the article and not just to the homepage. To maximise the potential of your email marketing, make it as easy as possible for people to reach the information that interests them from the link in your email. Once you have attracted someone to your website, you can try to encourage them to engage more with new calls to action.
Another benefit of email marketing is the ability to run multi-email campaigns and provide automated responses to resulting enquiries at limited cost. For example, you can send out a news email with a call to action to download your latest research. As people download the document, they receive an automatic email response thanking them, and suggesting that they also read your corresponding value proposition. You have now reinforced your message and delivered two components as part of one process. Knowing who read your first email and downloaded the content will provide valuable information for your future marketing efforts.
To maximise the success of an email marketing campaign, consider adopting the following strategies:
- only target people with an interest in your information
- ensure to deliver strong content and calls to action
- create a strong landing page (the page(s) linked to from your email).
Various commercial email marketing applications and web-based services can also provide you with analytical information about your email marketing campaigns. For example, you can measure the number of email recipients who received your email and the proportion who clicked on links. Using these techniques you can experiment with different copywriting and design approaches to see which attract the most clicks and therefore are most effective. When evaluating an email marketing tool, it is useful to consider the type of analytical data it will give you to measure the impact and effectiveness of your campaign.
Challenges of email marketing
There are two main issues to consider if you chose to adopt an email marketing campaign. The first is the task of building your contact database. The second is conducting your campaign(s) so that they achieve your aim of promoting interest in your organisation.
To build a contact database you can invite people to opt in via your website, encourage referrals from existing members, or purchase databases of users who have agreed to share their details when they registered with another website or another marketer. Take care when purchasing user data and look for suppliers that comply with industry best-practice guidelines from the Australian Direct Marketing Association and, of course, with privacy laws and anti-spam laws.
From a business perspective, if you choose to use email marketing it makes sense to do so carefully so that you achieve your aim of promoting interest in your organisation. If you send emails to people who are not interested in hearing from you or have not agreed to receive them, you run the risk that your email will irritate them, which damages your brand. In that case, you also run the risk of issuing ‘spam‘, which has legal consequences. There is legislation governing spam which you must observe if you are undertake email marketing, with potential penalties if you fail to do so.
If you have questions about legal issues, you can use the useful links – legal assistance section of this website to find a lawyer who can provide further advice.
In devising your email marketing campaign, it is useful to remember that, in addition to commercial and legal considerations, many email programs are designed to include spam filters. If these filters assess your email as spam, they will automatically send them to a junk mail folder. This means that your customers, supporters or donors will not see them in their email inboxes, which reduces the chance of your campaign having a positive impact.
There are some basic steps you can take to minimise the proportion of your legitimate emails that get caught by spam filters:
- ensure you only send bulk emails to people who have opted-in to receive such communications
- ask email subscribers to add your email address to their whitelist (list of approved senders) if they are interested in what you are sending them
- avoid using words or phrases commonly associated with spam, such as offers that sound too good to be true or offensive terms
- make it easy for people receiving your emails to unsubscribe from your mailing list if they wish to
- consider using an email marketing application or web service to measure the number of people clicking the links in your email and feed this information back into future marketing campaigns to increase their relevance
- avoid sending bulk emails that include only one large image or attachment and instead use only text or a combination of text and images.
Building an email database
You can start to build an email database by collecting the details of your customers and people who visit your site or who you otherwise deal with, provided that you observe Australia’s Privacy laws. You can invite visitors to your website to register their email address with you. This is best achieved by offering visitors the opportunity to receive free newsletters or updates on subjects of interest, or by offering to provide early notice of new supplies or special prices.
You may wish to offer a place for people to register their email address on the home page of your website (so they do not have to go looking) for more information. This is a useful call to action. It is also good practice to include a link to your company’s privacy policy wherever you ask for someone’s email address or other personal information. Remember, whenever you are dealing with this kind of information it is important to consider privacy laws.
Bulk email services
There are services available to help you manage bulk email and email marketing campaigns. These usually provide tools to help create emails, send them out at nominated times to your specified recipients list, personalise the address field and provide data on how many were read, clicked on and replied to. These include:
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