Introduction to Email Marketing

Purpose

To provide an introduction to Email Marketing techniques and raise awareness of the Law governing this field.

Why you need to use email marketing as a core part of your business strategy

To grow your business and be truly successful you must keep in touch with your customers. This develops a level of awareness that ensures your business is at the front of their mind each time they consider buying the type product or service you offer. Failing to do so means a competitor may have had the last contact with your customer and be the first point of contact for new business.

Research shows the cost of acquiring new customers can be as much as five times greater than to retain existing customers so it makes sense to concentrate on generating further sales and referrals from them. The first step to achieving this is keeping in touch.

There are several methods to do this and one of the most effective, cost efficient and far reaching is opt in email marketing. This has been shown to be up to ten times more effective than using a traditional direct mailing strategy.

UK Email Marketing Law

As with any business activity, it is important to stay on the right side of the law. To help control the use of email for direct marketing the EU issued a directive on privacy and electronic communications in 2002. This was brought into force in the UK by the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 which apply to all businesses and organisations that market by telephone, fax or email [and automated calling system, SMS, MMS or using any other form of electronic communication].

The regulations dictate that email marketing communications cannot be sent to individuals without their explicit prior consent, however there is a partial exception relating to existing customers [see points 2 and 3 below].

In short the following points summarise the UK Regulations:

1. If you have had no prior contact with the intended recipient you must ask for permission to send marketing email
2. You can send emails to individuals with whom you hold an existing business relationship as long as point 3 is applicable and until they request to opt out from receiving such emails
3. To send email under point 2 the products or services must be similar to those offered under your existing business relationship
4. All emails must clearly identify the sender and a valid reply address
5. An option to 'unsubscribe' must be included

Email Marketing Solutions

There are a number of tools that can be used to manage your email marketing strategy. The table below summarises the features of the three main types of tool:

	Dedicated Mailing List Management Software	Software on Own Server	Email Client
Example provider	Constant Contact	PHPList	Microsoft Outlook
Features
Automated Stats / Reports	Yes	Yes	No
Automatic single click opt out	Yes	Yes	No
Subscriber manages own subscriptions	Yes	Yes	No
Tech support from provider	Yes	No	No
Build own templates	Yes	Yes	Yes
Automated duplicate email detection	Yes	Yes	No

Maintaining a clean list

Your mailing list must be kept as clean as possible. If you use an online service such as Constant Contact they will monitor bounce backs and spam reports and generating an unacceptable level of these [currently 1 spam report per 1000 emails] will result in your account being suspended until the list is cleaned. This sounds fairly harsh but the end result is a mailing list that is full of qualified, healthy leads.

The ideal way to start a mailing list is to email an opt in link to each of your contacts. Constant Contact provides a link that you can include in a personalised email to encourage contacts to commit to receiving regular mailings. A paragraph explaining the benefits of being on the list should be provided and you may wish to include an incentive such as a discount voucher or offer for those who opt in. The goal is to achieve quality of subscribers over quantity.

It is important to understand that a number of subscribers will fall off the list over time. There are several reasons for this:

1. Email address half life – people change their email addresses and do not always update their subscription to your list. Reasons for people changing their email address include changing job, leaving university, getting a new ISP etc. Statistics published by Constant Contact show that the half life of email addresses is 3 years i.e. If your list now has 1000 addresses, in 3 years half of the original addresses will no longer be in use
2. Subscriber is no longer interested in your products or services
3. Subscriber receives your information in another format e.g. RSS feed

It is important not to worry about this turnover of subscribers; it is natural and does not necessarily reflect badly on your list and if your Management Software is fee based this will reduce costs if the fees are based on number of subscribers.

Cleaning an existing or old list

You can clean your mailing list by:

1. Emailing customers individually to seek permission to send email marketing
2. Use software such as eMail Verifier by Max Prog to attempt to establish if an email address is valid
3. Sending your list to a specialist company to be cleaned

Cube Webworks only recommend the first of these options, the rest have been included for completeness.

How to get subscribers

Purchasing lists from a company selling email addresses is strongly discouraged as the recipient has not specifically opted in to receive mail from your company. Legitimate methods of building a list of subscribers include:

1. Drive people to your website to use an opt in box or email existing contacts with a link to the opt in box on your website
2. Link to the opt in box on your website from your email footer
3. Collect opt in addresses in store or at exhibitions but must the signup form must explicitly state that the customer’s email will be added to the company email list
4. Include a tick box with any contact forms on your website worded ‘I consent to receiving email about your products and services’. It is good practice for this not to be ticked by default. If someone does not tick the box you should not view their decision as lost business, it is their right to choose and this helps maintain a clean mailing list

It is worth considering offering an incentive for signing up such as entry into a monthly prize draw.

Links

PHP List – A newsletter manager which allows you to add and manage users along with creating and email newsletters. (PHP, MySQL) www.phplist.com

Constant Contact – Email marketing software that makes it easy to create professional HTML email campaigns with no tech skills www.constantcontact.com

Vertical Response – Easy-to-use, web-based marketing tools that help you grow your business through email marketing newsletters www.verticalresponse.com

Legal Issues – Nobody wants spam or wants to be labelled a spammer. These issues are covered by UK law firm Pinsent Masons www.out-law.com