E-mail marketing is one of the last forms of direct marketing to have the potential to work. If done correctly, it can really help you build great relationships with the people that receive your newsletter. To do this, a few key things are needed:
A Great Looking Newsletter
Recipients of your newsletter will want to quickly know who it is from and whether they can trust the source. If the newsletter looks great and maintains your excellent brand then recipients will automatically trust the newsletter and will be interested to find out what information it contains. Having a newsletter that looks rushed, ugly or doesn’t look how it should due to the software they’re using to read it with then the chances that they will respond positively to it will be considerably lowered. When reading e-mails, people do not have time to work out if they need/should be reading it!
Relevant Content
Are the people receiving this newsletter interested in the content contained within? If not, you need to ask yourself why you are sending it to them. To make content relevant, you can split your database into seperate groups defined by certain criteria such as age, location or interests and then send these different groups newsletters based on this criteria so that it is relevant to them. If you can’t think of good content that is relevant to a group, then hold tight and send one out when you do have content that they will be interested in.
People to Read it (Legally!)
When sending out an e-mail newsletter, you need to obviously have people to send to. There are various legal issues to consider when building up your database but, generally, the best way to build up your database is to gain persmission during the course of a tranasaction and to have textbox somewhere on your website with a tickbox that states the person entering their e-mail address gives the business permission for them to send e-mail newsletters. A common technique is to try and trick people into thinking that they need to tick the box so that they won’t receive an e-mail but why do this? If people do not want to receive an e-mail from a business or organisation and are tricked into being added to a database, then they won’t open it when they receive it! The best policy is to be open and transparent about these things as it’s about having people who are interested in you rather than trying to get everyone to sign up. Quality rules over quantity in this case!
Above are some of the key factors I consider when working on an e-mail marketing campaign. Of course, there are several others but I find with e-mail marketing, as with all marketing, keeping things simple and sticking with the methods above leads to great results!