Email Marketing - The Truth
Most people understand email as a useful messaging tool, it's quick to set up, easy to use and understood by most people. Yet with a little design magic and some clever technical behind-the-scenes stuff, email can also be a powerful marketing and customer communication device. This article looks at three core components of email marketing: why it's a good marketing tool, correcting some the myths and how Base Creative can make email marketing work for you.
Why it's good:
-
Sending emails is relatively cheap, especially compared with traditional leaflet marketing. Even if you assume the design and print costs of both mediums are the same the distribution costs of email are much lower than items sent in the post.
-
You can track what's going on. Thanks to some pretty clever technical stuff, you can see how successful your campaign is. This also makes targeted follow up marketing much easier.
-
Campaigns can be targeted. For example, you can use your website statistics to see when your website is most active, and then send your email campaigns at that time. Your email will arrive at exactly the time most people are interested in your website.
-
Your customers are in control. Because people can unsubscribe from your campaigns, they don't get loads of junk mail and you don't waste money sending material to people who aren't interested.
Myths:
-
"You can't put images in emails."
Correction: You can, but you need to do it carefully. Many email clients block images by default, so it's important the core message of your email is delivered without relying on images. -
"You can't put links in emails."
Correction: Again, you can. Again, you need to do it carefully. Lots of links without much other writing might get your email confused as junk/spam. Also, the text visible to the user should be the same as the actual link. So if I'm linking to www.basecreative.eu I should make the link say 'www.basecreative.eu' and not 'click here'. -
"Email marketing is spam."
Correction: For email marketing to be effective it has to be 'opt in' and 'opt out', a user has to ask to receive the emails and must have the option to stop receiving them. This is a requirement for every campaign we send out. -
"There is no way to tell if the campaign has worked."
Correction: Yes there is. You can easily see how may people opened the email, and how many clicked through to your website. Some systems will even allow you to see who clicked what and when, making it easy to follow up customers who have shown a particular interest in a product or service.
How we do it:
There are a couple of ways we do email marketing. If you using our content management system we can easily build email marketing right into it. If you're not, we also offer it as a stand alone product. We'll design the email for you, all you have to do is populate the content (we can help with this too) and send the campaign. You can do this as often as you like. Typically there is a charge for the design and then a small charge for each campaign you send.
Interested? Give Iain a call and they'll show you how it all comes together.