Email Marketing Done Wrong

If you're not experienced in email marketing, it may seem tempting to put together a promotional email in your favourite email programme (such as Microsoft Outlook) and send it to everyone in your address book. Afterall, it's free, right? You may even get a bit fancy and jazz your email up by adding your business logo to the top of the page and a couple of product images further down.

And even if your email campaign's not a stunning success, your investment will have only been the time you spent writing the email so isn't it worth a go? Well, no. And here's why:

New Zealand Anti-Spam Laws

Legislation regulating commercial email was passed through the New Zealand Parliament at the end of February 2007 in the form of the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act. This act prohibits the sending of commercial emails to anyone who hasn't explicitly agreed to receive them (with a couple of specific exceptions that are outside general email marketing scenarios).

How many people on your contact list have given you written permission for you to send them promotional emails? Aside from the fact that this shotgun approach is just plain illegal, EVERYONE hates spam. It's likely that you'll damage to your business brand and customer relationships.

Ok, so, bad idea.

Blacklist Danger

Sending out many hundreds (or thousands) of emails from your personal email account in one go can have various other adverse effects too.

Firstly, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) will typically limit the number of emails you can send in one go anyway. Fancy having to divide your address book into groups of contacts then having to manage the sending of your promotional email in smaller batches? And be careful not to include the same recipient at the end of one batch and the start of the next. Things are getting fiddly already.

Sending bulk emails like this could also get your email address added to a global spam blacklist that results in your outgoing emails being marked as spam and filed in the recipients' spam folder or, worse still, being blocked before it ever reaches the recipient.

Adding images to your email, if not done correctly, can also increase the chance of your email being blocked by spam filters.

Email Client Compatibility

Of all your customers who receive your promotional email, how many use the same email programme as you? They may use Microsoft Outlook, or possibly, Apple Mail or another desktop email programme. Or maybe they have a web-based email account like Gmail or Hotmail. What difference does this make? Well, unless you test the design of your email in all these different email systems it's likely that those viewing your email design will see a different email from the one you intended them to see. Missing images, incorrect fonts, colours and all sorts of layout problems.

The reason for these problems is that for an email that includes more than just plain old black and white text, layout instructions for the email programme are included in the email and not all email programmes follow all the instructions the same way. The results displayed by different email programmes can be surprisingly varied (e.g. missing images, different fonts and colours etc) and you risk making your email difficult to read and your business appear amateurish.

Subscriber Management

Managing a list of recipients for your email marketing campaigns is fine if you're only sending emails to twenty subscribers. But you should be aiming to get your subscriber list well above a mere twenty recipients. And how are you growing your subscriber list? Are visitors to your web site signing up? These are people who have arrived at your web site because they are interested in your products or services. You need to grab them then and there so you have an opportunity to continue to market to them.

And what if you're getting several new subscribers each day? You'll need to take some time to add them to your contact list. And what about the ones that choose not to receive emails from you any longer? Do you have an efficient way to remove them from your subscriber list and provide them with confirmation that they've been removed from your list?

The point is, if you don't use a subscriber management system you're in danger of spending considerable time simply looking after your subscriber list. And I'm sure you have better things to do.

Keeping Score

One of the wonders of marketing on the web, if done right, is the unprecedented amount of information a business has at its fingertips relating to the reach of its advertising, how it was accessed, whether people responded to it and much more.

Without an effective email marketing system in place such valuable information is, for the most part, unavailable. Imagine you've just sent out an email campaign to 2,000 subscribers. Here are some questions you might like answers to:

• How many addresses in your subscriber list did the email reach?
• How many addresses were invalid?
• How many people actually opened your email instead of just deleting it?
• What links did people click on in your email?
• What links didn't people click on?
• How many people (and who) unsubscribed from your list after receiving your email?

All this information can be super valuable when you come to write your next promotional email!

The Solution

Yes, I'm happy to say there is a solution to all this. A solution that makes it easy to create new email campaigns, that makes managing your subscriber list a complete walk in the park, that prevents having your emails flagged as spam and gives you detailed feedback about the performance of your email campaigns.

It's email marketing done right and it's called Think Mail.

Find out more about Think Web's email marketing service.