So you want to target a select market with a specific offer in order to incite a set response – surely the same rules apply no matter what your channel of communication?
Yes, I know many of you long time email marketers are probably jumping up and down right now, asking, ‘How can you be serious?’ But, many people are still approaching email marketing in the same way as they approached their direct mail campaigns.
Naturally, there are certain principles that remain the same (e.g. careful targeting, personalisation, calls to action), but there are many differences too. These need to be identified and responded to if you are to fulfil the true potential of your e-marketing campaign.
So, let’s start from the top…
Getting your emails delivered. Direct mail, or ‘snail mail’ as it is often referred to, may take a day or two to get there, but most of the time (forgetting about all the postal strikes last year) your mail is delivered. Unfortunately, there’s a little more skill involved with getting your emails delivered.
Due to the increase of spam filters, the content of your emails and how you send them has a huge impact on whether or not they arrive in your recipients’ inboxes. Trying to send mass emails out using your regular Outlook account, particularly if you’re using the CC field for the names of your recipients, can cause you delivery problems. As can sending your campaign from a server with a reputation for spamming. Using spam-like words such as ‘Free’ or writing subject lines in capitals with one too many exclamation marks, all can affect the number of emails that pass through the filters. Not forgetting the heavy rate of bounce backs and changed addresses, which are often changed more regularly than residencies. It can seem a bit of a minefield if you don’t know, and adhere to, the basic rules of email marketing.
On the up side, emails are delivered almost instantaneously; much more useful for last minute offers and breaking news than the old snail mail.
Another point to remember is that emails are much easier to unsubscribe to than direct mail. Recipients are only one click away from opting out of your updates/offers/newsletter. So, it’s more important than ever to make sure that what you send out is relevant to your target group. At first glance it may seem that this is a huge disadvantage of email marketing, but if people are opting out it is highlighting that there is something wrong with either your targeting, or your email content. Identifying a problem and rectifying it could actually help you to reach a higher response rate in the long run.
Along the same point, bombarding your customers/prospects with direct mail isn’t perhaps the most effective method, but it causes significantly less damage than bombarding people with emails. Not only will you cause people to opt out (we have just identified how easy that is), but if continuous emails are sent to large groups of the same people, there’s a chance you will be branded a spammer and your emails won’t get delivered, or worse, your account suspended.
Designing emails as against direct mail, has both its benefits and its downfalls. On a positive note, emails can be a lot easier to design, even if you don’t understand html. If like many e-marketers you use a professional e-marketing system, chances are that you will have free access to some email templates. These can be customised simply by changing colours, inserting your own text and uploading your own images, and takes minimal time and effort. Particularly cost effective when you think about the paper and printing costs of a direct mail campaign.
However, unlike a direct mail design, what you see when you design the email isn’t necessarily what will confront your receivers. If you’re designing an email campaign you need to be aware of how your email will look in different email service providers – the best method of this is through testing. It is also necessary to be aware that some of your recipients may view your email through a preview pane. Again, it is crucial that you design with this in mind.
If you think it’s looking like email marketing is more effort than it’s worth, you couldn’t be further from the truth. If you are aware of how email marketing works and abide by the guidelines, there are many benefits to be had that you won’t get using direct mail.
- For one, emails are generally much more cost effective, and arguably, often provide greater ROI [return on investment]. Perhaps one reason for this is that email makes it easier for your recipients to respond to your campaign, they’re only one click away from your landing page/website and replying to an email only takes a few seconds.
- You don’t have to wait weeks, or even days, to find out how well your campaign performed. Email campaigns can be tracked immediately and results analysed from as early as 24hours. It also makes it easy to do split testing, giving you instant feedback and helping you to inform your future campaign successes.
- There is a lot of information that you can find about your email campaigns. No longer do marketers have to wonder where their budget has been spent, you can track it religiously. Open rates, click through rates, number of web page visits, they all can tell something about your customers’ behaviour and what does and doesn’t work for them.
As with most things in this life, there are pros and cons to most things, and so a varied diet will usually bring about the best results. Direct mail and email marketing can happily work together as part of your marketing mix. Identify the benefits of each, apply them wisely, and sit back and wait for the results to come in.
