Email Marketing – A Quick Overview

On face value, email is a highly effective method of reaching a target audience. It’s cheap, time specific, easy to personalise and measurable. Crucially it also pushes information to an audience in their homes or workplace in an obvious way, but this attribute has also been its greatest weakness as it has encouraged the rise of ‘spam’. We are now all inundated with trash email which can be irritating, offensive, or damaging if it carries a virus – all of which pushes up the barriers and makes it a real challenge to communicate effectively with potential customers through email.

Used well, email can support a wide range of marketing activities, including prospecting for new customers, promoting special offers and events, publishing newsletters (you’re reading one!), customer service and market research.

Successful email marketing now relies heavily on personalisation to provide information that is more relevant to an audience and on the sender having permission to contact a recipient. Therefore data collection and ‘opt-in’ requests are vital, as is the need to design messages to enable them to reach the recipient in case spam filters are in place for certain ‘hot’ words.

If you are considering using email as a marketing tool you may want to consider the following factors:

• Which marketing activities should you be using email to support?
• How can you integrate email with your other marketing campaigns and activities?
• How can you build your list of addresses effectively and legally?
• How should you obtain permission to contact an audience by email & have you considered the impact of data protection and privacy laws?
• What is the best way to design & create the actual email?
• How can you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns?

If email marketing is an area you would like to explore with our help, we can advise, implement and manage campaigns for you. Speak to us for more details.

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