To highlight the importance of getting it right let’s take a look at some recent research into business-to-business selling costs and customer retention.

• The number of sales calls required to sell a product to a new account was more than twice the number required to sell the same product to an existing account - Sales and Marketing Magazine

• It costs 133% more to sell new accounts than existing ones - Sales and Marketing Magazine

• A 5% increase in customer retention can yield profit increases of between 25 to 100% - Bain and Company

• Repeat customers spend, on average, 67 percent more than new customers - Bain and Company

Effective use of email can save a business a small fortune in mailing and print costs, but it is precisely this reason that causes so many mistakes to be made. If you want to produce a direct mail campaign costing £000’s then you would probably bring in a specialist agency, which will employ a copywriter, a designer, a list broker and a mailing house. But you have an email application such as MS Outlook, you have the email addresses of your customers, why do you need to go to that expense? Well, you can run your campaign in-house, but you need to introduce some checks and measures before you hit that ‘send’ button. You need to ask yourself some straightforward questions before you embark on any email marketing activity:

• Why am I going to contact my audiences?

• What do I want to say?

• What do I want them to do when they get my email?

• Do I have the email addresses of the people I want to reach?

• Do I have their permission to send messages to them?

• How can I stand out from the crowd?

1. Why am I going to contact my audiences?

It sounds obvious, but just why is it that you are going to contact them? If it isn’t clear to you from the outset, how can you create a truly meaningful message? On the other hand, if you want to remain at the forefront of your customers mind, then you need to communicate with them on regular basis. There are many different types of message that you could send: press release; newsletter; promotional offers; product announcements and updates; product usage tips; seminar announcement & invites and I’m sure you can think of others.

Each of these messages needs to be written in a different manner, and the different information needs of each audience must be carefully considered.

2. What do I want to say?

Less is more. There are three key things to bear in mind.

• Don’t try to get more than 3 messages over in the course of your communication.

• Think about your audience and how they will use the information you send them, this will help you to create clear and concise pieces that deliver results.

• Make it easy to read and obvious to the reader as to the next steps they should take, this is also known as the Call to Action.

3. What do I want my customer to do when they get my email?

The Call to Action needs to be clear and simple, so often you see examples of advertising and marketing that fail for the simplest reason, quite simply the audience doesn’t know what to do next.

A couple of years ago a large North American telecoms equipment company ran a global TV ad campaign. The adverts were great, they appeared everywhere, and they even had the company’s dot com address at the end of the advert. But when you visited the web-site there was no reference to the advertising at all, consequently, very few leads were generated because the prospect found it too difficult to interact with the company.

Here are some simple tips.

• If you are sending your existing customers a special offer, make sure they know how to claim it and when the offer runs out.

• If it’s a general newsletter, make sure they have the option to reply with a comment.

• If it’s a press release make sure the journalist knows who to contact for a quote.

• If your contacting a prospect, give them clear options of how they can respond, and make sure that you can handle that response.

You need to have a ready made plan for handling those enquiries, make sure everyone knows that these responses can come in and that they know what to do. This will also help you to measure the success of your campaign.

4. Do I have the email addresses of the people I want to reach?

The chances are that you do, it’s just that you might not know that you do! Hopefully you have built up a database of existing customers, this might be stored in MS Outlook, your customer billing software, or you might have a stack of business cards.

If you are trying to capture more contacts - i.e. prospects, then you need to consider how you can use your web-site to encourage people to give you their email address. Perhaps you might encourage them to sign up to a newsletter, or to receive news of special offers. But don’t over do it, most people are happy to give their email address in return for something useful or interesting, but are not happy to simply register as soon as they reach your web-site.

There are many other ways to capture email addresses: data capture at exhibitions, your personal network of contacts etc. However, whatever you do you need to ask yourself the following question.

5. Do I have their permission to send messages to them?

So, you now have their email address. Are they going to allow you to contact them? How can you avoid spamming someone?

The EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communication (DPEC) came into force in 2003 and sets out what is and is not acceptable and lawful activity.

What the law requires (UK only)

1. You cannot transmit unsolicited marketing material by e-mail to an individual subscriber (a consumer) unless the recipient has previously notified you, the sender, that he or she consents, for the time being, to receive such communications.

Exceptions to this rule …

a) The recipient has actively invited the communication via a third party.

b) The recipient has been made aware he or she is likely to receive marketing messages but has not, for the time being, objected to receiving them (through a simple and clear method).

2. You cannot transmit any marketing e-mail (whether solicited or unsolicited) to any subscriber (whether corporate or individual) where:

a) the identity of the sender has been disguised or concealed, or

b) a valid address to which the recipient can send an opt-out request has not been provided.

Useful link for further information - http://www.marketinglaw.co.uk/links.asp

6. How can I stand out from the crowd?

When the people you are contacting receive dozens of emails a day, how can you get your message read? Well, if you follow the tips in the first five sections then your more than half way there. You now have message with meaning that the audience can understand and react to in a positive manner. You also have the right audience to send it to and they want to get your message. The final piece is how are you going to dress up that message and deliver it?

Finally,  address the points detailed in our Email Marketing Checklist to give your campaign every chance of success.

This might seem pretty obvious but there are actually a lot of ways you can go wrong with this, even if you have only one mailing list that you never segment in any way. The most common problem is when you send a test or targeted message to your entire list.

Check twice before you click the send button. When you send duplicate or irrelevant messages, you increase the chance that you’ll annoy your audience and that they will report you as spam or simply click on the Unsubscribe option.

If you have taken the trouble to segment your lists, then the risk of getting it wrong increases in line with the degree of segmentation.

So, why is segmentation important? If you can identify groups within your data, then you can start to tailor the messages that they receive, making your offer or story appear more relevant to them.

The first challenge is to get past the spam filters. Nearly everyone is using some type of filter, many of these are using a set of parameters based around the content of the email. So, you need to make sure that you write your message with the filters in mind. Two words to avoid like the plague are:

1. free - as in ‘register for your free place’
2. click - as in ‘click on this link….’

You should also avoid the following:

WORDS IN CAPITAL LETTERS

You might want to check out this resource for more words to avoid: spam alternatives

Having read the full report, here is my take on the key findings.

1. 74% of all opens occur within the first 24 hours
Whilst this is great for measuring an instant response, don’t fall into the trap of removing relevant links, images and landing pages from your site, some recipients will still save your email for reading at a later date.

2. Best days to send are Mondays and Tuesdays
Try and plan your communications activity around these solid facts. Rather than force out a mailing on a Friday afternoon, it’s better to hold off until the following Monday. We are also seeing from our own stats that emails sent out in the afternoon have a better response rate than those sent in the morning. Therefore, try and plan your campaigns to run in the early afternoon and ideally at the beginning of the week.

3. Subject lines less than 35 characters long significantly outperform emails with longer subject lines
Previous best practice advice was to put the company name at the beginning of the subject line. This latest research shows that there is a marked difference in the response rates of emails with shorter subject lines (see below) so, try putting your company name in the From box. This will leave you with 35 characters to play with for the compelling, benefit laced, subject line.

4. Personalised emails receive higher click and open rates.
Personalising the email is good, and we have the ability to do this qucikly and easily, but avoid personalisation in the subject line as this is seen by many as a sign of a spammer, and subsequently will affect your open and click rates.

5. Emails sent to fewer people are clicked on and opened more.
Size doesn’t always matter. A mailing to a smaller list is more likely to be better targetted, contain more relevant content and use a more focussed call to action. So think about your data segmentation and how you can use this to your benefit.

Email statistics

Unique Open Rates = 15.045%

Click Rates = 3.04%

Opens by subject line length

less than 35 characters = 20.10%
more than 35 characters = 15.28%

Clicks by subject line length

less than 35 characters = 3.28%
more than 35 characters = 2.05%

If you need a little bit of bedtime reading, the full report can read online here:

MailerMailer report available here>>

I hope this helps you in planning your future email activities.