You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t already know that marketing via email is an incredibly powerful way of communicating with your customers and prospects. With it, you can help customers engage more closely with your products, your services and your organisation. You can make purchase transactions significantly easier – for you and your customers. Boost loyalty. Gather information. With the right approach, you can achieve your objectives remarkably quickly.

So before you next hit send, take a look at these brief guidelines intended to help you get more from your campaigns, whatever your commercial goals. If you’d like to know more about any aspect of email marketing please get in contact.

Your list is everything, everything, everything.

Our first point, and we can’t be more emphatic. As with any form of direct marketing, you can’t start without a list. What you say is important – but who you say it to is vital. Your own list will always out-perform any list that you buy in. Every time you email, try to gather more data: use simple forms to ask your recipients to sign up to a newsletter, enter a competition or prize draw, or complete a survey or poll. The more dimensions you can add to your list, the better you’ll know your customers.

BUT – what you say is more important than how you say it.

If you’re selling green apples, say so. It’s all too easy to get caught up in all the facilities that the web has to offer like complicated animation and graphics, and then find yourself with an email campaign that looks like a trailer for a Hollywood movie. Keep it simple. Does your design enhance the message? Or does it, in fact, obfuscate it?

Are you legal?

It’s tough but, when it comes to sending emails for marketing purposes, the recipients have all the rights. Apart from giving a clear route to unsubscribe or ‘opt out’, if you’ve bought or rented lists to supplement your own data, you need to make sure that they too are legally clean. We can’t cover all the legalities here but we do have experts on hand who can help you. The rule is: if in doubt, check it out. Read more about email marketing legislation.

The good news about being legal

People – whether at home or at work – will only give you permission to market to them via email if they are potentially interested in what you might have to say. If you think about it, they are the only people worth talking to. Although getting permission might reduce the size of your list, the list that you do have will almost always be more effective and, ultimately, profitable. Ask us for more details on how this can be made to work for you.

Data collection and collation: just think of the possibilities

Email itself is just the beginning. With the right tools, you can tailor website content and give your customers and prospects the material they really want to read. If they’ve shown an interest in a particular product, you’ll know – so use this to your advantage and commercial benefit. It goes further: with a professional email solution you can see which customers clicked which link on which particular email. Imagine being able to see the results and then use that information to adjust your messages to best effect. We can help.

Integration is the key to the most profitable results

Experience has shown that the best results are to be had from integrated direct marketing campaigns. smartFOCUS DIGITAL's solutions can easily synchronise with your existing sales and marketing databases making it convenient for you to track responses and results across multimedia campaigns. Contact us for more information on this functionality.

Want to know more?

To discover more about how smartFOCUS DIGITAL’s solutions can help you achieve your marketing objectives, click here and we’ll call you back.

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