Email Marketing How-to Guide for Small Business

Email marketing includes...

 

Email newsletters

A regularly scheduled email newsletter can be more effective than a printed customer newsletter.  You can avoid mailing and printing costs, and make last-minute changes to your newsletter just before sending.  People can click into your website to buy, request a price quote or get more information.  You can also easily personalize the message to specifically address each person.

More sophisticated email marketers might even create a "mail merge" email newsletter that provides specific information based on the recipient's preferences.

Newsletters should have a consistent format and be delivered only to those customers who have subscribed, or "opted in," to receive them by email.

• Learn how to create and send email Newsletters
  

Email alerts

These are short-and-sweet email updates sent on an as-needed basis depending on what the recipient's expectation is.  If you're a restaurant, for example, you might use an alert format to send your daily specials by email to those customers who've opted-in to receive  that. If you're a personal trainer, you might send a daily fitness tip by email.

Alerts are also used to tell people about an upcoming sale, new product/service introduction, and to alert people about a customer service problem and how to prevent that.  The intent of an alert is to be short and sweet. No fancy graphics or wordy paragraphs. Just the facts. These can also be done via text messaging.

Important cautions about email marketing

1.  You should never use your personal email account to send the same message to more than 15 people.

You may be thinking "I have an email account (Gmail, Comcast, etc.) that I use for my personal email. Why can't I just use that to communicate with my customers and handle all of my marketing?" 

Know this: If you send the same email out to lots of people, the Internet service providers (ISPs - company's like Yahoo, Google/Gmail, Hotmail, Comcast, etc. who are the "gatekeepers" for email and deciding what makes it into their customers Inbox), will view your email(s) as highly suspect and potential SPAM.   Once you are tagged by the ISPs as a potential or certain SPAMMER, your emails will be blocked.

2.  Personal email accounts are not intended for the delivery of nicely formatted and branded "html" emails. HTML emails are emails that include graphics, logos, photos, etc.  To best present your brand, you'll want to use and send html messages. That requires understanding email design.  Many people consider email design the most difficult part of email marketing.  Why?  Because what you see won't be what most people see in their inbox. 

3.  Email marketing service providers offer a number of things that personal email accounts don't

• Upfront (and built-in) testing to ensure your message is delivered to an inbox, and looks good when it gets there regardless of what email system the recipient uses
• Sophisticated reporting to know who received your message, who responded to it, and who has asked to be removed from you mailing list.
• Ability to customize the "from" field and return email address, so it's not coming from you, or a generic name like yourcompany@gmail. While this might be acceptable for one-to-one communication with specific customers about specific issues (e.g. to change an appointment time, discuss a return, ask a question, etc.), it's not appropriate for marketing use and will make your company appear small and unsophisticated in your subscribers' eyes.

TIP:  When selecting an email marketing service provider, know what features are available and which ones are important (and not) for your needs. 

• For explanations about the features available for email marketing software and services, see Selecting Your Email Service Provider.
• Top email Marketing Suppliers
  

4.  Always remember that SPAM (unwanted email) is bad for you too.

If you're tempted to just put your customer list into your Gmail account and start sending bulk emails from there, don't.  All of the Internet Service Providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc.), are watching for this and will flag any mailing that includes more than 15 - 25 recipients.

Deliverability of mass messages from personal email addresses is highly suspect to most of the personal email providers, who may block your messages in order to comply with federal laws. Most importantly, it's likely that the provider Terms of Use that you agreed to when you set up your email address prohibit you from sending bulk emails.

Once you've crossed the line from an individual emailer (using email for your personal use) to a commercial use of email for marketing purposes, you too are bound by the Federal CAN SPAM act of 2003. This law is intended to protect individual consumers from receiving unwanted messages, especially those that are akin to the dreaded telemarketing phone call. Any reputable email marketing company will have CAN SPAM compliance at the top of their list. If they don't, move on to the next one.

• Email Law
• Delivery Options for Email Marketing

5.  Obeying the email laws takes time and effort.

Email marketers who are communicating with lists larger than 20 people or so must comply with the Federal CAN SPAM act, as well as any relevant state laws. The fundamentals are straightforward, but many marketers choose to overlook them. This can result in fines and, more importantly, the "blackballing" of your website and perhaps even server shutdown.

6.   Sending an email newsletter doesn't = someone seeing your email

You could think you're sending your email newsletter to 10,000 people and not know that it's ending up in he junk mail folder or worse be rejected altogether. Unless you proactively seek out this information, you may never know who really received it.

With email, unlike other marketing tactics, a marketer can easily and quickly calculate ROI (return on investment).  Unlike more traditional marketing vehicles, email's underlying technology allows you to quickly see who opened your message, who clicked on a link, and even which link they clicked on. You can begin seeing and analyzing results almost immediately. Direct mail, by contrast, usually takes weeks to see any meaningful results.

• Measuring Email Marketing ROI

7.  Getting someone to subscribe doesn't mean they'll stay on.  You have to keep winning their trust and their willingness to accept emails from you. 

Know this:  54% of consumers say they have unsubscribed to a company's email list because of excessive email.  Don't over contact someone!

 

8.  What you see may not be what they see

Different email providers will "render" email differently. That means they'll display the message based on their own set of rules and algorithms based on the recipient's settings. That may mean they won't show any photos or graphics, only text. 

Individuals can also set their own parameters for the type of emails they will receive.  They may block all emails with any graphics.  That means if you've sent a fancy looking email newsletter, they won't be able to see or read it. 

You need to design your email marketing newsletters and alerts to work for both people who can only see/read text messages as well as for people who can view graphics and HTML (computer code used for web pages).

9. Homegrown email lists take time to build

The most effective email marketing is done with your "house" list (a list you create by asking customers for their email address), which is built up over time. It is possible to "rent" an email list, which is one strategy for building up your "house" list, but you need to be very particular about which vendor you choose to ensure their list is compliant with CAN SPAM.

• How to Build Your email List
  
• How to Buy an email List