Email Marketing: A Buyer's Guide
Email marketing plays an increasingly important role in most businesses’ marketing strategies due to its relatively cheap cost and potential for reaching millions of customers instantly. However, we've all experienced the arrival of a new message in our inbox, only to delete it unopened after deciding it is junk. The last thing you want to do is turn off potential customers simply because you are sending out the wrong sort of mail, or sending out the right sort of mail, but to the wrong people.
In order to avoid these potential pitfalls you’ll need to make certain that a.) you have the right database of contacts and b.) the emails you’re sending out are engaging and appropriate to the product or service you’re promoting.
We’ll deal with the two categories separately in this Buyers’ Guide. While there are plenty of email marketing companies that offer both email lists and campaign management services, it’s more common that you’ll only be looking for one or the other. Either because you already have a dedicated marketing team to handle the creative and analytical side of things or because you already have a database of prospects that you’ve built yourselves.
This buyers guide has been written in partnership with Email Lists Business Expert Emailmovers.
In 2003 Emailmovers understood the importance of building a business concept around the key elements of Email Marketing – email data, design and delivery. Maintaining 100 million opted-in email addresses worldwide and building in-house design and delivery solutions has given Emailmovers the ability and knowledge to work successfully with clients such as Microsoft, Alcatel Lucent, Virgin Media and Experian.
Email Lists
If you’re looking to promote your company to a wider audience and generate new sales or sign-ups you’ll be looking to obtain a list of fresh and appropriate email addresses for use in your campaign. These fall into two categories:
Business to Business (B2B) Lists of business contacts are usually collected through telemarketing campaigns and online subscriptions or registrations. They can be broken down and categorised by:
- Business type
- Geographical area
- Number of employees
- Job title of contact
- Turnover
Business lists are normally available to rent for a one-off campaign, multiple use or outright purchase.
Business to Consumer (B2C) Lists of consumer email addresses are subject to stricter regulation than business lists. They must be opt-in i.e. the consumer must have given their permission to be contacted when their address was collected. Emails to consumers must also offer a clear and free opt-out method. For these reasons, consumer lists cannot be purchased and the company that provides the list will also perform the email broadcast. Consumer email lists can be categorised by:
- Geographical area
- Income
- Homeowner status
- Family status
- Age group
- Interests (anything from being a dog owner to restaurant connoisseur)
- Investment portfolio
There are also specialist companies which deal in public sector email lists for contacting government employees and civil servants (third sector and not-for-profit organisations tend to fall into the business category).
It’s always a good idea when sourcing email lists to get as much information from the provider as possible on how up to date the data is, how it is collected and what the average bounceback (B2B) or delivery (B2C) rates are. This will give you a basis for comparing the quality of the different email lists on offer.
Email Marketing Company Checklist
When searching for a company to manage your email send-out, you should keep the aims and objectives of your campaign at the front of your mind. Pricing structures and levels of service can vary a lot between companies and simply plumping for the cheapest option could leave you with a poor or inappropriate campaign that at best is ineffective and at worst damages the perception of your brand.
Here’s a checklist of some of the extra services an email marketing agency will offer and what to look for from each:
- Copywriting The ability to write good, clear, readable copy in the tone of voice most appropriate for your product is essential. Nothing is less appealing than opening your mail and being confronted by blocks of badly written copy. Check samples of the email marketing agency’s previous campaigns. Ideally the copy should be simple and condensed so that all vital information appears on one screen.
- Design Emails should be easy on the eye and structured so you can easily navigate them and understand what they are about. Links to a website or email address should be clearly displayed. This is nothing that a professional HTML designer can't handle, so check that the email marketing organisation has one on their books.
- Personalisation Mail should be a personal thing, so ask for ways that your mail can be personalised for individual recipients. Once again, look at the company's previous email marketing campaigns to assess how generic or customised they can be.
- Subject line testing The first thing we notice of any new message in our inbox is who sent it and what the subject line is. Ask the email marketing company whether any research has been done to identify which subject lines work better than others. Ideally, the subject line should be intriguing and not too salesman-like.
- Best practice Beating the spam blockers isn't just a question of presenting yourself in the right way, but also of hanging out in the right places. For instance, if ISP administrators receive a number of complaints about unwanted emails coming from your address or if they see you consistently send out undeliverable emails, you will be blacklisted as a spammer. Make sure the email marketing company has measures in place so this never happens.
- Data management Keeping your mailing lists as up to date as possible is also very important, so make sure that the agency has a system for adding email addresses and deleting them if they are returned to sender, sent out in duplicate or invalid. And if people choose to unsubscribe, make sure they stay unsubscribed.
- Response handling If a recipient decides to take you up on your offer you need everything set up to make the process as simple as possible for them. If the mail directs them to your website, they need to get to the right part straightaway and not have to re-register. If they’re calling a number, there needs to be someone on the end of the phone.
- Feedback analysis If you’re going to be running future campaigns you’ll want as much detailed analysis of the current one as possible. Data on how many emails were opened, how many click-throughs were achieved, how many sales or sign-ups resulted, how many people unsubscribed etc will help you calculate the cost-effectiveness of the campaign, refine the process for the future and more closely integrate email campaigns with your other forms of marketing.
The above should help you more clearly define what you need from an email marketing company to ensure the maximum possible success for your campaign. As stated above, pricing structures vary wildly between different companies. Our article on Email Marketing Prices can help you compare the different options.
What’s worth remembering though is that when you hire an email marketing company you’re hiring someone to deliver your message to your existing or prospective customers. Your brand’s in their hands, so trustworthiness and reliability may be more important factors than price alone. A good first step is to check if the company is registered with the DMA (Direct Marketing Association), as this means they will have to comply with the DMA’s DM Code of Practice.
This buyers guide has been written in partnership with Email Lists Business Expert Emailmovers.
In 2003 Emailmovers understood the importance of building a business concept around the key elements of Email Marketing – email data, design and delivery. Maintaining 100 million opted-in email addresses worldwide and building in-house design and delivery solutions has given Emailmovers the ability and knowledge to work successfully with clients such as Microsoft, Alcatel Lucent, Virgin Media and Experian.
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