email marketing step by step guide

Email marketing, when done well, can be a very cost-effective way of reaching your target audience.

It can help you to build and maintain good relationships with prospective customers, existing clients and partners, and spread the word about your products and services.

This article guides you through the process of starting an email marketing campaign, step by step.

Step 1: Decide what your campaign is for.

The key to a successful email marketing campaign is getting your aims and objectives right from the start.

You need to decide:

What the purpose of your campaign is

To find new customers?

To get additional business?

To build on your relationships with clients or prospects?

Who should receive the emails

Who are you targeting?

What are their interests? What would they be looking for, and why would they be interested in hearing from you?

How often should you send them

Generally speaking, there are not many situations where it is advisable to email people more than once a fortnight. Once a month is quite a good frequency – any more often, and you may annoy people – any less often, and they may have forgotten who you are in between.

Step 2: Get your mailing list together

When compiling or purchasing a mailing list, it is essential to make sure you stay the right side of the law.

If you’re collecting email addresses yourself, you must get consent from the person to whom the email address belongs before mailing them. If you’re collecting email addresses via your website, you need to make sure that people are asked to opt in to receive your emails rather than fail to opt out. So, for example, you should say:

“Tick this box to join our email mailing list”
rather than
“Tick this box if you don’t wish to join our email mailing list”.

Make sure your user knows what they are signing up for, and what you are going to do with their data.

For more information on data protection, visit the Business Link website:
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk

Step 3: Decide what software to use

It is perfectly possible to use an everyday email package such as Outlook or Outlook Express to conduct an email marketing campaign, and you may wish to start off this way if you only have a small mailing list and/or very little budget.

However, there are certain limitations to this approach:

• You will not be able to do anything sophisticated with graphics in your emails
• It may be difficult to manage unsubscribes. You must provide an easy mechanism for your users to unsubscribe from the email. If you are using a standard email package you will then have to remember to remove them by hand from your mailing list
• You will not be able to get statistics showing you how many people have opened your emails / clicked on links and so on.

You must make sure that subscribers’ email addresses are concealed from fellow subscribers. If you’re using a standard email package, this means putting them into the “bcc” field, rather than “to” or “cc”.

As an alternative, you could choose to use an email marketing software package, which would enable you to send out emails laid out like web pages, containing graphics (‘HTML emails’), make it easier to deal with unsubscribes and obtain useful statistics to help you measure the success of your campaigns. This software is usually either paid for on a monthly or annual subscription basis, or with a fee per message sent, or a combination of both.

Step 4: Decide the content of your first message

First impressions count, and therefore getting your first message right is crucial. You are going to need to think about:

• Giving the email an arresting title that induces people to click on it
• Creating some compelling content – either in terms of interesting articles, or good products or special offers, depending on what you are aiming to do
• Making sure that you can live up to your first email in subsequent messages!

You can choose either to put all of the content into the email itself, or look at including ‘teaser’ paragraphs which lead on to the full articles on your website. If you haven’t got any other way of tracking the success of your email campaign, this is quite a good route to go down, as you should be able to see from your website statistics how many people accessed those particular pages on your site.

Step 5: Giving your email a visual impact

Even if you’re not using HTML emails (emails with graphics in them), you still need to think about the layout of your email.

The key here is simplicity – make it easy for your visitors to find what they’re looking for, and make sure the information is easy to read.

Space out paragraphs and separate articles – with a simple line of dashes, for example, if you’re not using HTML.

If you do have the ability to use graphics, don’t go too over the top. Remember that every image you add increases the time it will take for your message to download in your user’s inbox.

Make sure that you have a good reason for including each image, and make sure you compress that image to as small a file size as possible.

If you’re trying to build a personal relationship with your subscribers, a photo of yourself can be a good (if slightly embarrassing) idea.

Step 6: Measure your success

If you don’t put in place a way of measuring your success, you won’t know whether or not your campaign has achieved its objectives.

If you are using an email marketing package, you may well have access to statistics about your emails as part of the service. This may give you information such as:

• How many people have opened the message
• How may have clicked on the links to your website
• How many have unsubscribed
• …and so on.

If you’re using a standard email package, you may be well advised to use the technique described in Step 4, of sending subscribers through to specific sections of your website – enabling you to track them through your website statistics.

By following these six steps, you should be able to construct an email marketing campaign that works for you – or at least know whether it works for you or not!

This article was provided by Helen Mitchell of Ascendancy Internet Marketing. If you need help with any aspect of email marketing, contact Helen on 01952 676809 orhelen@ascendancyinternetmarketing.com.

Please note that this article is not written by WiRE but by a third party company. Whilst WiRE have made every effort to ensure that the information and details are accurate, we are unable to guarantee that they completely and WiRE are therefore unable to accept liability for any loss you may suffer as a result of omission or inaccuracy,