Email marketing

Marketing your products or services by email can be a fast, flexible and cost-effective way of reaching new customers and retaining existing customers by encouraging repeat website visits.

It is important not to overuse email marketing. Receiving marketing emails can irritate people if it is irrelevant, too frequent or unwanted.

Advantages of email marketing

The benefits of email marketing include:

Cost-effective

The costs of email marketing can be much lower than many other forms of marketing. There are no advertising fees, printing or media space costs.

Permission-based

Your marketing list will be made up of people who have actively chosen to receive email communications from you. Customers who are genuinely interested in your products and/or services are more likely to engage with your business.

Flexible design

You can send plain text, graphics or attach files - whichever suits your message best. A choice of design options gives you scope to convey your business branding and make your email visually appealing.

Scalable

Email marketing can be used to reach large audiences or smaller targeted lists.

Personalisation and segmentation

You can integrate your email marketing with your customer relationship management (CRM) system to help you personalise messages. You can include your customer's name or past purchases to build meaningful relationships. You can also segment your marketing list so that your customers receive messages from you that they are interested in to help boost their engagement with you.

Shareable

It's easy for people to forward and share your email content, building your reputation by word-of-mouth or viral marketing. This may help influence new customers to become followers of your brand.

Conversions and increased sales

If you have a new promotion people can click on links and follow your call-to-action immediately. Email marketing is also effective at every stage of the buying process. For example, you can influence someone to choose your product, nurture the customer relationship post-transaction and also encourage future purchases.

Measurable

You can evaluate the success of a campaign by tracking bounced emails, open rates, and click-through-rates. You can easily test different copy, subject lines and designs to see which is most effective. This allows you to optimise future campaigns.

Benchmark

You can compare your results against others in your industry. There are many free email marketing benchmarking reports available - you will find these by searching online. Benchmarking data can help you to evaluate and prioritise improvement opportunities.

Test before you send

A/B testing of subject lines, calls-to-action, personalisation, email copy, images or messages ensure your email content is as effective as it can be before you send it.

Less intrusive

Unlike telephone marketing, recipients can read your message at a time that suits them. Customers can also update their preferences if they would like to receive different messages from you or unsubscribe if they feel they no longer want to receive your email communications.

Environmentally-friendly

Email marketing is better for the environment than direct marketing by postal mail because nothing is printed.

Time-saving

Through automation you can trigger emails to be sent to customers based on an action they have performed on your website - eg. send a welcome email when a user signs up to your website, or issue an email offering a discount incentive if the user abandons an online shopping cart. Once you have developed a template you can reuse it for numerous email campaigns.

See what email data should I monitor?

Real-time marketing

Through email marketing you can connect with customers in real time. Using automated triggers, such as website activity, recent purchases or shopping cart abandonment, you can reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right place and with the right offer.

Disadvantages of email marketing

Some of the potential problems of email marketing include:

Spam

Commercial email or 'spam' irritates consumers. If your messages aren't targeted to the right people, the recipient may delete your email or unsubscribe. You need to make sure that your email marketing complies with privacy and data protection rules, and that it is properly targeted at people who want to receive it. The 'click through rate' for untargeted emails is likely to be very low. See email marketing and privacy law.

Undelivered emails

Poorly designed emails may not get delivered. Emails that use certain spam keywords or characters in the subject heading or content of the email are likely to be filtered out by email software and internet service providers. If you don't keep your marketing lists up to date, you will find incorrect email addresses mean your messages won't reach the right person.

Design problems

Your email must be designed so that it appears as it should across multiple devices and email providers.  You may encounter a trade-off between design and functionality. Some people opt to receive text-only emails, consider how your message will look if this is the case.

Size issues

Files need to be small enough to download quickly. Emails containing many images may take too long to load, frustrating your audience and losing their interest.

Resources and skills

For a successful email campaign you must ensure that you have the right copy, design and marketing list. If you don't have the time or skills in-house, consider outsourcing some of these elements.