E-mail Marketing

Md. Rashidul Hasan

Associate Professor
Department of Agribusiness and Marketing
Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University
Dhaka
 E-mail Marketing

The new information technology, internet and e-mail, have practically

eliminated the physical costs of communication (Peter Drucker)

E-mail marketing has been called the original social networking tool
and I could not agree more. If you think about social networks in
general, email plays a large role in them. (Simms Jenkins, author of The
Truth about Email Marketing)
 The new direct mail

E-mail marketing is one of the most powerful elements in your digital

marketing toolbox. It lets you communicate easily with your customers
on a personal level through a universally accepted digital medium.
Choosing the right approach for your e-mail marketing communications
is, of course, key.
 The new direct mail

Naturally, as e-mail started to become integrated into our business and

personal lives, so the mass marketers turned their attention to the new
medium.

Despite the proliferation of spam and the fact that most people’s
inboxes today are bursting with irrelevant and unsolicited messages,
email can still be used as a beneficial and effective marketing tool that
delivers real value, both to your customers and to your business.
 Customers will still open your e-mail

The truth is, many customers will welcome regular e-mail

communications from your business, in the same way as they may
welcome the occasional traditional or ‘snail’ mail offering a money-off
voucher for their favorite store.
 Customers will still open your e-mail

They will open an e-mail containing a newsletter or promotion from

you, as long as they recognize your brand, are expecting to receive
communication from you, and are confident it will contain something
of value to them. The key is to make these messages relevant and
interesting for your chosen audience; fail in that, and unfortunately
your message is destined for the virtual recycling bin.
 Customers will still open your e-mail

E-mail marketing can be a tricky field to navigate effectively. You have

to simultaneously respect your customers’ right to privacy, protect your
brand, and ultimately maintain your value proposition over time. It is
very easy for your carefully cultivated e-mail prospects to unsubscribe
from your mailing list, and once you have lost them they’re probably
gone for good.
 What exactly is e-mail marketing?

E-mail marketing is a fusion of marketing knowledge and imaginative

copy. In its simplest form, it is an e-mail sent to a customer list that
usually contains a sales pitch and a ‘call to action’. This could be as
simple as encouraging the customer to click on a web link embedded in
the e-mail. Some examples of e-mail marketing campaigns are:
 What exactly is e-mail marketing?

• a hotel promoting a special summer discount;

• a recruitment company informing business clients about a free
seminar;
• a gadget store offering a money-off code to be used at its online
checkout;
 What exactly is e-mail marketing?

• a fitness center offering members a special printout voucher that

entitles the bearer to bring a friend along for free;

• a beverage company encouraging people to download a game that

integrates into the user’s Facebook or MySpace profile
 What exactly is e-mail marketing?

You can also use e-mail when you don’t have anything specific to
market, as a mechanism to maintain consumer engagement,
strengthen your brand and add credibility to your business.
E-mail newsletters are still incredibly popular and offer a very effective
way to get your brand out in front of your list of prospects on a regular
basis. Examples might include:
 What exactly is e-mail marketing?

• an accountancy firm keeping in touch with its clients by informing

them about changes in tax legislation
• a daily digest or breaking-news alert from an online newspaper;
• a young-adult book publisher using e-mail marketing to promote free
and exclusive screensavers, ring tones and wallpapers to its young
readers.
 What exactly is e-mail marketing?

Because e-mail is an incredibly cost-effective communications medium,

when used effectively it can deliver an excellent return on investment
(ROI).
 E-mail marketing tools

When it comes to managing and sending your marketing e-mail, you

probably won’t want to rely on your standard desktop e-mail client to
do the job. While it is a perfectly feasible approach for very small lists,
as more people subscribe to your e-mail offering it will quickly become
cumbersome and unmanageable.
 E-mail marketing tools

What you need instead is one of the many customized e-mail marketing
systems out there. These can be software you install on your local
machine, software you run on your own server, or a software-as-a-
service (SAAS) offering hosted by an online service provider. These
systems let you manage your e-mail list and craft your design templates
for your messages and, most importantly, help you to track your e-mail
campaigns.
 E-mail marketing tools

Some of the functions e-mail marketing tools can provide include:

• easy-to-use tools that let you create and work from e-mail templates
without having to be a technical expert;
• testing tools that allow you to check that your message will make it
past major spam filters;
• tracking tools that show how many people have ignored, opened or
responded to your e-mail
 E-mail marketing tools

• Personalization tools that let you modify the content dynamically to

individuals or specific target profiles on your list.
 Customer relationship management

It is no good using e-mail marketing tools if you don’t know who you
are sending your e-mails to. Customer relationship management (CRM)
is a business concept that has been around for about 25 years. It’s the
art, if you will, of keeping your customers happy and maintaining an
ongoing personal relationship with them. Let’s say you run a small
grocery shop in an equally small neighborhood.
 Customer relationship management

Over time you will get to know your regular customers, their likes and
dislikes, and what other products they might be interested in trying,
etc. Larger businesses struggle to maintain that sort of personal
connection with consumers, and that’s where CRM comes in.
 Customer relationship management

For instance, if you keep a record of the products or services customers

have bought from you in the past, what they have looked at on your
website and how often they have contacted you, you can merge that
information with the relevant demographic details and then, using CRM
technology, you can track and anticipate what those customers are
likely to be interested in. The result? Relevant, targeted marketing that
is much more likely to convert.
 Customer relationship management

When it comes to e-mail marketing, CRM can help you segment your
list, allowing you to focus highly targeted campaigns to the customers
most likely to respond. You can fine-tune your e-mail offering and align
it with your customers’ purchase history. The possibilities are virtually
endless.
 Customer relationship management

If your business already uses CRM systems for more traditional

marketing, then you should be able to incorporate that information
into your e-mail marketing strategy. Some CRM systems cater for e-mail
campaigns as part of their feature set, while others integrate with your
chosen e-mail marketing solution.
 Customer relationship management

Ultimately e-mail marketing tools will prove effective only if you, as a

digital marketer, spend time developing the right e-mail strategy for
your business and execute it in the right way.
 Before you start

Before you begin planning your e-mail marketing campaign, there are a
number of things you need to consider from practical and legal
perspectives.
 Gathering your e-mail list

As we mentioned earlier, people do not respond to seemingly random

email communications: they do not even open them. So before you can
do any e-mail marketing you are going to need to build up a list of
customers who are willing to receive e-mail communications from your
business. The best way to do that is to encourage them to opt in to
receiving your e-mails at every opportunity.
 Gathering your e-mail list

Different websites are the hub of your digital marketing world. It is also
the ideal place to capture e-mail addresses for your opt-in mailing list.
You can place a simple, prominent form on your website encouraging
visitors to sign up for regular e-mail updates, the latest special offers or
any other value proposition that will resonate with your audience.
 Gathering your e-mail list

You can rent e-mail lists to try to recruit new customers, but make sure
that the organization providing you with the list is a member of your
country’s direct marketing association or similar, and ensure that its
antispam and privacy policy is clearly outlined. Anyone on these lists
should have opted in to receiving third-party e-mails from companies
like yours. You will also need to check whether anyone on that list has
previously asked to be taken off your own mailing list.
 Gathering your e-mail list

Another way to attract opt-in is when a customer completes some kind

of transaction on your website, like purchasing a product, downloading
a whitepaper or requesting additional information. By making an e-mail
address a mandatory component of the transaction you can add to
your e-mail list.
 Gathering your e-mail list

Legalities vary here, but in many cases, including in the UK, it’s fine to
send marketing e-mails to people once they have completed a
transaction with you – as long as you have given them the option to
decline. This is referred to as a ‘soft opt-in’. And remember, every
marketing email you send out must provide the recipient with a
straightforward way to unsubscribe from your mailing list – an opt-out,
if you like.
 Legal requirements

Another crucial factor is, of course, to be familiar with the law in your
jurisdiction. Sending unsolicited e-mail out to random consumers will
breach spam legislation in most Western countries.
 Legal requirements

Anti-spam laws are there to enforce ethical e-mail marketing practices

that respect customer data and privacy. Legitimate businesses will
follow the laws, but spammers are hard to trace. They will typically use
underhanded techniques to harvest e-mail addresses and send large
volumes of unsolicited e-mails.
 Legal requirements

Astonishingly, about 80 to 95 per cent of e-mail traffic today is spam.

The practice continues because: 1) it costs practically nothing to send a
marketing e-mail to millions of people on a list; 2) even the tiniest
conversion rate turns a profit for the spammers; and 3) most spam
can’t be traced, and originates outside the relevant jurisdictions.
 Legal requirements

Spam is bad. It’s against the law, and what’s more it annoys the very
people you’re hoping to connect with – your future customers. When
you’re just starting out and don’t have much of an opt-in list, it can be
tempting. Don’t do it!
 Anti-spam legislation in the United States

In the United States, the CAN-SPAM Act came into effect on 1 January
2004. The Federal Trade Commission has a fact sheet, accessible at
www.ftc.gov/spam, outlining legal requirements for businesses sending
emails. The main points include:
 Anti-spam legislation in the United States

• Recipients must be able to opt out of receiving future e-mails, and

such actions must be processed within 10 business days.
• The source of the e-mail must be traceable.
• Subject lines must not be deceptive.
• Your full postal address must be included.
 Anti-spam legislation in the United States

Apart from fines of up to $11,000 for violation of any of these terms,

there are additional fines for using spammers’ techniques including
automatically generating e-mail addresses or harvesting them from the
web.
 Anti-spam legislation in Europe

The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations

2003 are the overriding anti-spam legislation. You will find that
individual countries will interpret the law in their own ways, and you
will need to take data protection legislation into account too.
 Anti-spam legislation in Europe

In the UK, you can download a fact sheet for marketers from the
Information Commissioner’s Office website at www.ico.gov.uk. This
clearly outlines, in Q&A form, what digital marketers can and can’t do
with e-mail.
 Anti-spam legislation in Europe

As we have mentioned, having the recipient opt in to marketing

messages is crucial (but don’t forget the ‘soft opt-in’, which means that
once you have collected contact details from people who have bought
a product or service from you or expressed an interest then you can go
ahead and market to them as long as they have been given an easy way
to opt out).
 Logistical problems

Sometimes the mail doesn’t get through. There is a variety of reasons

why your e-mails may not arrive in your customers’ inboxes. They may
have been inadvertently or incorrectly categorized as spam by the
internet service provider (ISP) or filtered into a junk mail folder by a
web-based or desktop e-mail client. Spam filters are so aggressive
these days that people may not even see much spam in their inbox, but
an overzealous spam filter can sometimes intercept legitimate mail too.
 Logistical problems

For customers this seems great, but it does mean that they are missing
out on potentially useful and informative e-mails – like your latest
missive! In internet dialect, whenever a legitimate e-mail is blocked it is
referred to as a ‘false positive’. For your e-mail marketing campaign
these false positives can be a real setback. Even discovering that your
bona fide opt-in marketing e-mail is being blocked can be tricky, and
resolving the problem can be difficult, especially when you have
followed the rules to the letter.
 Logistical problems

Your best bet is to avoid the spam trap problem from the start by
making sure your e-mails don’t look and read like spam. If your e-mail
software has an option to test how well your message will fare with
spam filters, use it, and change anything that it flags as suspect. You
should also make sure that all of your e-mail can be traced back to a
valid IP address from a reputable host. If you do that, there’s no real
reason for your e-mails to be blocked.
 E-mail formats

Another reason your e-mails may not be seen is that you are sending
them out in a format that your recipients’ e-mail clients – the software
or website used to read and reply to e-mails – don’t recognize. This is
not as much of a problem as it used to be, because the adoption of
internet standards has improved significantly, and almost all mail
clients today will handle rich text or HTML e-mail unless the user has
specified otherwise.
 E-mail formats

When you send out your marketing e-mail, you can normally choose to
send it in its most basic plain text form (with no formatting). You can
then be pretty certain that all clients can read it. One step up from
plain text is rich text format, which allows you to format the text with
font sizes, colors, bold and italics, and allows recipients to click on web
links. This looks better than plain text and can be very effective for
simple informational newsletters.
 E-mail formats

The most sophisticated e-mails are built using HTML (the same code
that developers use to build web pages). This essentially means that
your e-mail can look exactly like a regular web page, complete with
images, web links and all the rest. Images are not sent with the e-mail,
but are usually pulled in from a web server when the e-mail is viewed.
HTML emails can tie in with the look and feel of your website, which is
great news if you are looking for brand continuity and a seamless user
experience when your prospects click through to a landing page!
 E-mail formats

Some e-mail clients (and web-based e-mail like Hotmail and Gmail fall
into this category) automatically block external images for security
reasons, but allow recipients to override the setting for mail from
people that they trust. Even so, you will probably want to make sure
that your message is clear without images, just in case. Use images to
augment the main message of your e-mail, but make sure your value
proposition and call to action are clearly outlined in text form.
 Planning your campaign

You need to know what you want out of your overall digital marketing
campaign. Specifically, when it comes to your e-mail campaign, you will
need to define who you are targeting, why, and what you want out of
it. Do you want to generate more sales? Or are you looking to maintain
a relationship with your customers by keeping them up to date with the
business? It is important to be specific here and to make sure that your
e-mail marketing strategy feeds into your overall business goals.
 Planning your campaign

Digital CRM can help you to segment your customers and to target a
specific group of them with a certain offer if that makes sense. You can
also deliver personalized content to them, and you should endeavor to
personalize all of your e-mail marketing as much as you can. At its most
basic, this involves using the customer’s name at the start of the e-mail,
but more sophisticated software will allow you to pull in tailored
dynamic content based on a particular user’s profile.
 Planning your campaign

For example, an email from an airline could highlight the number of

frequent flyer points a particular customer has left to spend before
they expire, or an online bookshop could recommend new books based
on what a customer has recently purchased.
 Planning your campaign
Good e-mail design is also important here. It makes sense to establish
some brand continuity between your e-mail templates and your
website design, so that every aspect of your digital marketing campaign
works together seamlessly. Remember though that the content is
paramount, and while your design should look good it should
complement rather than compete with your content for the readers’
attention. Make your content punchy, scannable and engaging, and
don’t forget the all-important call to action.
 Planning your campaign

You should also take the frequency of the e-mails you send out as part
of a campaign into account. People don’t want to be bombarded with
marketing e-mails – even ones they’ve opted in for. Sometimes it can
be hard to predict exactly how often you should send out marketing e-
mails and when, in fact, is the best day or time to send them, which is
why it’s so vital to track and analyze how your campaign is progressing.
If you notice people suddenly starting to unsubscribe from your mailing
lists, ask yourself what’s gone wrong.
 Planning your campaign

Perhaps you have been sending out too many e-mails or have changed
their format. Whatever it is, keep a close eye on your e-mail campaigns
and try to rectify any problems quickly. If you don’t, your marketing e-
mail may be perceived as spam, and that’s damaging not just for your
e-mail marketing but for the broader online reputation of your
business.