E-mail marketing

On face value e-mail marketing 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. This attribute has also been its greatest weakness though, as it has encouraged the rise of 'spam', making it a real challenge now to connect with potential customers through email.

Email can be used to support a wide range of marketing activities including prospecting for new customers, promoting special offers and events, newsletters, customer service and market research.

Planning an email marketing campaign

Successful email marketing now often uses personalisation techniques to provide information that is more relevant to an audience and relies on the concept that a company has permission to contact an audience. Both of these concepts are crucial in differentiating your email as a worthwhile offering from the mass of spam coming into an inbox.

When planning an email marketing campaign you should also consider the following:

• Which marketing activities do you want to use email to support?
• How should you build your own list or rent an effective list?
• How can you integrate email with your other marketing campaigns and activities?
• How should you obtain permission to contact an audience by email and have you considered the impact of data protection and privacy laws?
• What is the best way to design and create the actual email?
• How can you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns?

You should also read our more extensive list of e-mail marketing tips.

How The Web Marketing Workshop can help

We design and implement email marketing campaigns from start to finish and can therefore provide you with consultancy and support for your campaigns at various stages. For example, we can:

• advise you on how to best utilise email marketing in you particular situation
• source and develop lists or databases to manage your in-house lists
• help you comply with data protection and privacy laws
• plan and write the email creative
• manage the mailing process
• provide detailed reporting to measure the effectiveness of each campaign.

If you'd like to discuss the planning and implementation of email marketing campaigns for your business, please contact us now for more information.

Alternatively, why not request our FREE 30-minute marketing report to discover a wider range of marketing opportunities for your site.