Size doesn’t matter.  Whether you’re an SME, a small-growing business or just one man and his dog, we understand that the thought of using any online marketing activities, let alone email marketing might be a daunting one.  You may have concerns about a lack of email addresses or on how to create a professional looking email.  That’s where Suite26 can help.

Here are 5 simple steps to you help build your email list, engage with your customers and follow up on your campaign results.

1. List building by collecting email addresses

The quickest and most effective way of collecting valid email addresses from customers who are interested in your products or services is to provide an email opt-in subscribe form on your website so that customers can sign-up to receive your newsletters or promotional offers.  The other way is to get your employees to actively ask customers for their email addresses at every point of contact, whether it’s by phone, face-to-face or online.

2. Understand your customers and carefully plan your email messages

First you need to understand your customer base and consider how they can benefit from X, Y or Z news or offers. What do they see as value?  If you plan to send a regular email newsletter, make sure it’s newsworthy and of interest to the reader.  Separate your customers into specific groups depending on their interests, location, purchasing amounts and more.  Then send targeted emails that specifically relate to their needs and interests.  Also consider the best day(s) and time(s) to send your emails, giving them the best chance of being read.

3. Creating your email template

Create an email campaign that will grab the readers' attention, engage them and get them to respond e.g. sign-up, contribute, trial or buy.  Use a professional looking, properly designed HTML email template as it can be the difference between inbox or junk folder delivery.  Having a custom-built email template designed for you can give your messages a professional look and feel each time you send, helping your customers to instantly recognise your brand and help increase traffic straight to your website.

4. Write content that will engage customers

When it comes to writing your content remember these key points:

• Keep it simple – both your subject line and your message

• Decide what the objective is for the email - what do you want the customer to do next?

• Use clear, well placed call-to-action buttons or words that will direct recipients through to a specific webpage

• Carefully consider your opening paragraph as this is what will initially be seen by customers in their email program’s preview panel.  You must be able to grab their attention in a few seconds and make them want to open it and read on.  Personalising the email with the recipient’s name can help achieve this.

• Always use fresh and interesting new content on each and every send

• Make sure there’s good ratio between text and images.  Too many images and not enough text can make the email look like spam to Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo email filters

5. Understand your results and what to do next

Unlike other marketing activities, email marketing provides results and a return on your investment.  After sending your campaign you’ll immediately receive stats showing who’s opened your email, who’s clicked through to your website and much more.  You’ll then be able to determine which customers are interested by how many times they’ve read your email and exactly how interested they are by the number of times they’ve clicked, and what links they’ve clicked on.  With this information you can plan to follow up with another email specifically targeting these interested customers.

Have You Started Email Marketing Yet?

So if you’re a small business still unsure whether to start using email marketing, simply follow the steps above and you'll have no problems at all.  With a little effort at the beginning, you’ll soon see that email marketing works, not to mention it has one of the best Return-On-Investments of all marketing activities.  So don’t be put off, give us call on 0845 313 0912 and we’re happily have a chat about your requirements.  We’re here to help you get your email marketing underway.

We'll be:

- Giving out one-to-one demonstrations
- Providing advice and support
- Dishing out free email credits to visitors

Last but not least, we'd just want to put a face to a name and voice.

So if you're serious about expanding your online marketing activities but can't face the trek to Harlow to come and see us, Internet World at Earls Court might be the place to meet.

If you want to arrange a specific time to meet us just call us on 0845 313 0912 or email sales@26.co.uk with your preferred date and time.

Look forwad to seeing you there.

Event details

Where: Earls Court 2, london

Dates: 27th, 28th and 29th April 2010

Cost: Free! Register today

The census revealed that the most valuable marketing tactic invested by companies online is search engine optimization, although closely followed by email marketing at 75%.

The report discovered that 11% of companies allocated at least £100,000 to their yearly email marketing budget. There was also a 5% increase in the amount of companies that found that investments in email marketing returned at a rate greater than 500%.

And yet only 4% of companies claimed that their returns on investment for email marketing were insignificant.

You'll find the guide here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010450051033.aspx

Most points there are fairly obvious and would never be used by legitimate mailers, but a couple there may catch people out who use a term in a legitimate way.

The guide is not a complete list and there are many other factors that could still cause your email to get blocked.   It should also be noted that this guide is for the filter built into the Outlook client only.

Here at Suite26 we always advise you to test your email campaigns as much as possible in as many different email clients before sending.   It's easy to register a Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail account and just send a preview message to those accounts, but we would also recommend using an email testing service such as LitmusApp which will test your email in a number of different email clients and against lots of different spam filters.

We all talk about permission based email marketing and how important it is to ensure your mail is delivered reliably to your recipient's inbox, but this article shows that while a recipient may technically have given permission to receive your mail they did not actually request it.

In the example they provide they show that the sender required users to give permission to be on their mailing list before allowing them to carry out a primary function on their website (effectively a forced opt-in) and thus the sender experienced a large number of complaints and delivery problems.

So, here's a few points you should remember:

• Recipients should always request to receive your mailings (for example a sign box on your website or a tickbox shown next to other forms on your site)
• Make sure that potential recipients know what your mailings will be about, how often they should expect to receive them and re-affirm that they can unsubscribe at any time.
• Don't force a recipient to sign up to your mailing list before being able to achieve some task on your site.
• Don't assume that just because somebody has given you their email address that they want to be on your mailing list.   You must always provide a mechanism (ie; tickbox) for them to indicate they want to be on your mailing list.   Adding your entire address book from Outlook is not an option!
• Ensure that recipients can unsubscribe from your mailings with one click and that you honour that unsubscribe from that day forward (Suite26 will do this for you automatically but you must ensure any further back-end databases you may have honours the unsubscribe too)

Finally, the AOL article touches on the topic of engagement.   AOL, among others, keep statistics on how many users click on your mail, how many click to display images, how many click the spam button, how many reply, how many click the not spam button along with other metrics to figure out how engaging your mailings are.   If you regularly get a low engagement score then you could find your mails ending up in the spam folder or maybe not even being delivered at all!   We will be writing more on engagement and the future of deliverability in some upcoming blog posts.

You can read the full article on the AOL blog here: http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2009/12/03/p/

However tempting it may seem, just don't go there. We're not just talking here about the dodgy providers who offer millions of addresses for peanuts, but the more professional looking ones who will provide you with a segmented, opt-in list from people who have agreed to receive "3rd party" marketing about your chosen subject.

The main problem here is that the recipients on these lists will not have the slightest clue who you are. No matter what permission they gave to receive "3rd party" mailings they have not given you their permission to email them. Sending mail to these people will have many of them hitting the Report Spam button in their email client and if too many do that your domain is going to end up on spam blacklists. Can you afford for your brand to become blacklisted and have your reputation tarnished?

The next problem is you have no idea when and where the address was collected - it could have been added to the list years ago and may no longer even be in use. Sending email to non-existent or dead addresses will also count against you and you could again end up on one of those blacklists. What's more, if you receive a complaint and are asked to prove where you got the address, which site they opted in on along with date/time/IP address - could you provide that information?

Then you run into the relevancy issue. The recipients who do actually receive your mail, don't report you for spamming and open it up may not even find the content relevant to them (after all they have no idea who you are) - they'll just delete it.

So, you spent all that money on buying/renting a list then money on sending it out only to find most did not arrive, the ones that did weren't opened, you've got a ton of spam complaints and your domain is on a number of blacklists - now it doesn't seem like such a tempting idea after all!

Oh and finally using a purchased/rented list will break the Ts and Cs and anti-spam policies of almost any ESP - us included. So just don't bother - we can see purchased lists a mile off.

Suite26 is the newest addition to the Global Gold product portfolio, it is the latest Email Marketing application with integrated CRM system and Survey Manager to be launched. This web-based application allows companies to send personalised communication to their clients by combining THREE powerful web applications in ONE, thus helping companies grow their business.

Below are 5 key ways that Suite26 will allow companies to get closer to their clients and provide effective email marketing to them:

1. Identify and Listen to High Value Customers

Don’t just send customers your company’s messages - listen to customers closely and address their needs, wants and interests directly with personal one-to-one email communications. Suite26 will help you to identify high-value customers by proactively engaging them with surveys, so you can gather more detailed profile information. Review what your most valuable customers want and then you can adapt your messages to better target opportunities with highly personalised email campaigns.

2. Leverage your Customer Database

Suite26 also allows you to use your customer data to segment email lists, which can then be used to improve your email marketing campaigns. For best results, your email database should contain as much customer information as possible, including demographic, behavioural and transactional data. The application comes with a vast number of options for collecting your customers information, but if you require more, you can add custom fields to enable this. Use this data to segment your lists and personalise your campaigns for best results.
 
3. Integrated CRM

Your CRM system will contain valuable demographic, behavioural and transactional information about your customers over time. Use this data to personalise campaigns to make them more relevant to them, you can then add in your Google web analytics code, which can indicate how your customers might react to future campaigns, enabling you to better tailor your messages.
 
4. Automate Email Personalisation Efforts

Follow-up messages can be sent automatically based on consumer behaviour. These event and action-triggered emails - allow marketers to not only improve content targeting and personalization, but also the timing of email message delivery, so you can reach customers at the right time in their buying cycle. All of which can be managed effortlessly in Suite26.
 
5. Keep an Eye on Stats

Think of your performance statistics as the pulse of your email campaign. It is essential for you, as marketers, to watch the numbers and changes in them.  Alter campaigns when seeing a change in customer behaviour.  Marketers who regularly test and measure results, have a better understanding of what interests their customers, and is one of the quickest ways to begin improving email communication and building stronger, profitable relationships with them.

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