E-mail marketing is the 21^st century marketer’s star turn. It can be done for zero cost, nought pounds, nought pence. You can fulfil it sitting at your desk. You can use it as a mass campaign or a regular daily activity. You can target it very tightly. You can change your message as often as you see fit. It can reach the whole world. So how come we aren’t all as rich as Croesus?

The simple answer is that many businesses do it poorly. You have to ask yourself the question: why should someone open my e-mail and then read it. In this respect it is like direct mail, but with the major difference that you know who an e-mail is from before opening it and you absolutely know there isn’t going to be a cheque in it. 

Next up come some technical issues. Don’t imagine that one size fits all. Older software like Lotus Notes doesn’t display background images, so if your words are embedded in an image recipients won’t see them. Likewise Gmail and Hotmail users see emails very differently. Without taking such issues into account, you can design an emailer that just doesn’t work for a lot of recipients. 

Then there’s our old friend spam. In the first place, spam has the potential negative impact of burying your valuable, useful message amongst a pile of digital dross and there’s zip you can do about that. Happily, most people use a spam filter which helps solve that problem, but in the process creates another. By their nature, spam filters are a blunt instrument and there are many words and phrases they block such as free, please read, no strings attached, no obligation, once in a lifetime opportunity. 

An adjunct to the spam problem is the simple fact that some people receive a huge number of emails that they need to look at, all mixed up with that half tonne of spam. I regularly come across people who hardly dare leave their offices for two days because they’ll come back to well over a thousand emails which take half a day or more to deal with. Regardless of how strong your marketing message might be, you need to be a premier league optimist to think that it will survive immersion in that lot. Therefore it is important to know whether this is an issue in your target audience and if it is you might want to try a different approach. 

ExactTarget have undertaken research which shows that although 80% of marketers want to communicate with customers how they wish, only 12% ask how often they want an email. You’ll be pleased to know that we’re ahead of the game in the UK compared to Europe, as in twice as likely to use email marketing well.

Don’t assume that, because almost everybody has broadband, you can merrily send out 5 megabyte emailers. In the first place, those who are still using dial-up will loathe you and in the second, a shorter slicker message to open a conversation with a client delivers better results. 

Probably the biggest failing is not paying enough attention to the ‘subject’ line. If your email address is unknown to the reader – as it typically will be – that subject line has to do all the work of persuading the reader not to hit delete and to read your words. But just have a look at the emails you receive and see how unstimulating the subjects are. 

OK those are a series of don’ts. Here are some dos. We’ll start with getting that subject line right so the message gets opened. A nice simple solution is to put the recipient’s name in it. This is friendly and stands out in a long list of emails. It also helps avoid spam filters. Here are some other examples. One contact sent ‘we miss you and we want you back’. Nice. Pity I’d never done business with them. My home insurer sent ‘£650 worth of savings this summer’ and I know they’re trying to sell me insurance, but I opened it. A broadband supplier asked me to ’take a quick peek at what we can do for you’; apart from ‘peek’ being horribly cute, the tone was right. Incidentally, the message was duly short and snappy. One regular contact of mine has used amongst others, the following: ‘marketing myths exploded’, ‘5 good reasons to consider xyz’, ’30 seconds that will make you more profitable’, ‘3 business ideas that definitely work’. In each case these lines are intriguing, but more than that they answer the question ‘why should I open this e-mail?’ Note, too, that most of them promise to take a short amount of time. 

Timing is a factor. Avoid Monday morning and even moreso Friday afternoon. There is some anecdotal evidence that the best time is 10.30 on a Tuesday morning. 

Build your own list of recipients. While it is very tempting to buy in lists it is also dangerous. You can have no certain way of knowing that the named person has given permission for their address to be used. It is far more valuable to contact 100 people who are interested than 1,000 who are irritated by getting your e-mail. A list of people who visited a relevant exhibition would be appropriate but a list of marketing managers gleaned from the trade press would not. 

Tight targeting is not just a nice feature of email marketing it’s an essential. Let us say you are approaching tradesmen. ‘Product x is very popular with plumbers because…’ will bring home the bacon far better than ‘very popular with tradesmen’. If possible, build in something directly relevant. Telling a carpenter that you can wash epoxy glue out of a recommended material will not only represent a useful benefit, it will tell him you know what problems carpenters face. 

In the same way do your best to get the size of business right. Granted this is more difficult, but communicating with a sole-trader as if he was a multi-national is as pointless as the reverse. 

How often do you e-mail a customer? There is no magic answer although as I have said here before you can send far more messages than traditionally thought wise. There is a nice easy solution – ask customers! Especially if you promise to feature new and relevant material, you may find that you can send very regularly. 

Experts recommend that you treat email differently to traditional direct mail. A traditional mailer that lands on the wrong desk may well end up in the bin, but it could also be passed to a more appropriate person. By contrast, a mis-directed email will almost always be deleted and will often result in alienation of the recipient. It appears that business people regard email as a more personal issue than the postal service. It is therefore extremely important to ensure that you don’t just fire thousands of messages out into the ether and that the messages you send are tightly targeted.

Do you need an expert? Surely not! We all know how to create emails, don’t we? Yes, we do and that’s why so much email marketing is next door to garbage. Interestingly, it’s not just the marketing consultants specialising in this area who say that a properly designed e-mailer works far better – the same advice comes from suppliers of data services and associated technology. In particular, the advice is to get a copywriter to create the words and especially the subject line. 

If you doubt this, have a look at the website for Campaign Monitor and check their design guidelines. They are actually written for professional designers and the extent of the technical glitches you need to overcome is eye-opening. Look too at their examples of inspiring campaigns and ask yourself if you could achieve that quality on your own. The combination is likely to have you running into the arms of a designer. 

In any case, if you are serious about email campaigning, you will benefit from the rest of Campaign Monitor’s services. The core of this is reporting. You can establish who is opening your email, who deleted it, which parts of your message they are studying, who unsubscribed. All of those features add dramatically to email marketing when compared with normal direct mail. 

They include a huge range of services in addition, not the least of which is campaign testing. In particular it enables you to see what your email looks like when opened on the various providers’ formats – they can look significantly different, so beware. I make no apology for focusing on this service, not least because every designer I spoke to recommended it. 

Author Paul Clapham is a marketing consultant with over 25 years’ experience covering a broad range of business sectors and a full spread of marketing disciplines. He works with small, medium and large companies alike to increase their profitability through marketing.
 

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