Email Newsletter Marketing

Why should I Communicate with my customers with engaging powerful email newsletters?

Email Marketing Will Grow Your Business.

Many businesses devote a lot of time, budget and resource to lead generation when there’s a far more cost effective and rewarding way to boost sales; keep in regular contact with the customers you already have, even those who have not purchased from you yet, just because they haven’t does not mean they won’t. Not everybody is ready to buy on first contact. Research suggests that only 2% of deals are struck at first contact. The other 98% only happen once a certain level of trust has been established. Contacts that are not turned into sales straight away are often lost but this is an opportunity on potential missed business.

Be patient, if you keep in contact regularly in ways people appreciate and find useful they will reward you with their business.

Benefits of email newsletter marketing:

Cost effective.
Maintain a relationship with customers.
Turn unconverted leads into customers who buy from you.
Distribute informative engaging content relative to your market.
Go Social – people can share it.
Email newsletters compliment your website.
Track and measure, giving you ‘insight’ into your customers’ behaviour.

Stand out from the crowd and include valuable content in your email newsletters

Keeping in touch with valuable content means your customers will receive information they value and can learn from. You get an opportunity to build relationships, prove your expertise and stay in contact, so they will remember you when the need arises. The sales side of the information should be 40% of the actual content itself. Include engaging articles, images, videos, surveys, competitions, offers, news, links to blogs, and your website.

Where do I start?

First you need to register to collect personal data.

Why?

The Data Protection Act 1998 requires every organisation processing personal data to register with the ICO, unless they are exempt. (URL link: www.ico.org.uk/for_organisations/data_protection/registration)

Tips to collect data: Permission based e-mail marketing

Why do I need permission to email market people?

By having permission from your customers allows you to build a list of potential customers who want to hear from you so your newsletters will not be regarded as SPAM. Customers who opt in want to hear from you and what you have to say.

To get permission you will need a domain page, a capture page and an auto-responder.

The best way to collect data is online through your website. You can do this by having a registration area or a capture page. A capture page is the place on your website where your customers register their data and sign up with you.

Ask website visitors to sign up for:

Email newsletters.
Knowledge hubs.
Online surveys .
Competitions.
To sell or buy items from your website (e-commerce websites).

What information should I collect online?

Name: so you can personalise your direct mail campaigns (email and postal).
Address (including postcode and country): so you can contact your customers for a postal direct mail campaign.
Mobile phone number: for mobile phone marketing campaigns.
Email address : for email newsletter marketing campaigns.
Gender – female or male and age if possible (in age brackets is more effective).

You may want to collect more information at these collection points, such as occupation, hobbies, but remember the more questions the less likely people are to register due to time.

Be honest and build the trust with data collection

Once people have registered their details ask them to opt in to receive email newsletters – this means they actually have asked to receive communications from you, therefore more likely to open and read. Tell people what they are signing up for, for example you are signing up to receive regular email newsletters. These will contain free marketing tips, tactics and valuable information to help you grow your business. You can unsubscribe at any point.

Once a person has registered and opted in then it’s a good idea to send an auto responder thanking them and asking them to confirm their email again – two layer policy.

How to motivate more sign-ups?

Ask existing customers to opt-in, makes sense to start with the people you already know.

Make sign-up easy. Joining up your blogs with your website via social media should get a stream of interested people who like what you say. As well as a retweet button to help customers share your valuable content with their followers, include a sign-up to your newsletter. Make it really easy for people to subscribe with a clear and accessible sign-up form.

Use an ethical bribe – You can use your valuable content as a lure for newsletter sign-ups. The promise of a free download written on key subjects will temp some people to want to hear more from you .

Promote your list widely. Whenever you meet people or speak to new contacts, in the real world as well as online. Invite every valuable content contract to opt in with an automated invitation.

Cross-promote. Encourage sign-up from you Facebook account, through Tweets, etc. Engaging headlines that offer little snippets of the stories can temp people to sign up and read more.

Responsive e-newsletters – why optimize your email newsletters for mobile?

If you send email newsletters, it’s likely that a growing percentage of your subscribers are reading messages on an iPhone, Android, tablet or similar.

Research conducted in 2011 found almost 20% of email opens occurred on a mobile device, rising dramatically from a mere 4% of the market in 2009. IOS devices accounted for over 90% of these reported opens.

We design email newsletters to display optimally on mobile devices, this is just as important as ensuring it can be read on long – standing email clients like Outlook and Gmail. In fact, mobile email client usage is soon set to eclipse both that of webmail and desktop clients, meaning that providing a less-than-optimal reading experience on the small screen may not only inconvenience a few recipients but eventually the majority. This could lead to diminished opening rates..

We can help you register, set up, and collect data following UK guidelines and procedure. We can also:

Prepare the digital marketing communications plan including goals, budget, brand guidelines, key message and KPIs.
Identify market segments using customer insight.
Prepare the brief for the campaign.
Production: schedule and prepare produce deadlines; communicate to teams.
Plan the best times to contact your database using customer insight.
Creative development: source content, write copy, subject line, source images, critique design.
Develop and code the HTML newsletter.
Update website if necessary.
Test.
Send the email newsletters to your mailing list.
The campaign is measured using key performance indicators/reports: so you can see who opened, when and where, what they clicked through, using Google Analytics you can look at the conversions.
Evaluation.