The GoMyEmails.com Email Marketing team have produced a best practice check list for you to use when creating your email marketing campaign. So lets start with the essentials:

Email Marketing Check List

Email Marketing Legal Requirements

• 1.An obvious unsubscribe policy, thats clear and easy to understand for your reader.
• 2.Your business details including your company registration number if you are a limited company, of LLP – thats name, address and contact details are clearly displayed within your email.
• 3.Your email data, has come from a legitimate source. Take a look at our post entitled How to collect email addresses legally.

Email Campaign Look and Feel

Example of email marketing branding

• 1. Your email campaign should reflect your companies brand identity, for example a reflection of your logo, and company website.
• 2. Links within your email should either specific for this campaign, or you should at least be able to monitor the traffic from each individual campaign using something like Google analytic’s as well as the statistical feedback we provide via our secure login area. See our article entitled Understanding and using your email marketing results
• 3. Your email should have a clear theme throughout. Find out more about What should your message say in your email here.
• 4. Engage your readership with great copy for more information about copywriters read our article.
• 5. Sent from address – from our experience it is best to send it from your own domain, and preferably from an individual within your organisation that your readership can relate to.
• 6. Personalisation of email marketing – make sure that your email doesn’t start with “Dear Sir” or just “Dear blank” make it personal. Take a look at our blog post all about the email marketing personalisation issue.
• 7. Subject Line- remember this is often the first thing your readership will see. In fact it is so important we have dedicated a whole post to the subject. The Importance of headers that get noticed.

8. SPAM proof your email before you send it. Deliverability of email is one of the key reasons for using email marketing and failing to SPAM Test your email pre send is one way of making sure that your email will NOT be delivered, even some everyday words are filtered. Take a look at our article from May 2011, entitled How to Pass Email Spam Filters

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it should give you enough of an idea, when planning your email marketing campaign. If you would like our help on any of the points raised simply complete the form below and we will call you back.

Bluetooth marketing or proximity marketing is a form of digital customer relationship marketing, aimed at the mobile phone user.

1. Although this technology isn’t new, let’s face it we have been using Bluetooth to connect to wireless hands free kits for years, but when you consider that there are nearly 33.1 million mobile phone subscribers* in the UK there is a huge marketing potential to take advantage of.

2. Bluetooth marketing is currently one of the most innovative tools for engaging customers in the UK. Bluetooth can be used to engage customers in your immediate area, generally within a fixed radius of where the access point is based.

3. Your access point could be based at your office, showroom, shop or place of business, or if you were looking for business further afield, in a major town, such as Manchester, Liverpool, Blackburn, Burnley or Preston, you can be as creative as you want.

4. Bluetooth or proximity marketing is permissions based marketing activity, based on the opt-in marketing system compliant with CAN-SPAM. Individuals must first confirm to accept your message before they receive it, should they decide not to receive your messages, and they will not be offered them again.

5. Bluetooth marketing can be used to send a number of different types of messages to multiple recipients at any one time, for instance if the system is used to its maximum you could reach up to 24,000 recipients in just one working day.

Messages content and design can vary, from, Get 50p off the price of coffee, Here’s my business card, Visit our event or exhibition, or just to visit our website (bear in mind that 91% of the adult population has access to a mobile phone and with 33.1m 3G service*contracts in existence that’s a lot of people that can access the net on their mobile phone).

Bluetooth marketing is a cost effective, flexible, measurable method of engaging with potential customers. If you would like to know more about what Bluetooth marketing could do for your business arrange a call back using the form below:

*Facts and figures from Ofcom

Email marketing is an extremely effective way of engaging with your customers, clients and prospects, and much of email marketing through the customer lifecycle can be automated to maximise impact.

Road to good emails

By using the customer lifecycle to trigger emails, based on the recipients responses to previous email marketing campaigns, you can increase your chances of generating sales by sending personally relevant offers based on this information.

Send timely information based on your chosen rules: You can organise the delivery of your email, according to your rules and triggers, the ones that best suit your individual business.For instance, you may want to send a welcome message when someone subscribes to your website or service, a birthday, anniversary or congratulations message.

Become reactionary to your customers responses: Remember to send messages that encourage your customers to buy higher quality items or services. Don’t forget the Amazon website check out moto and other customers also bought – extras, extras.

You may not get the right strategy the first time, so monitor your progress, analyse your results, and make subtle changes till you get the right approach for your business, don’t be afraid to ask the GoMyEmails.com team for some tips and advice on how best to make the most from your email marketing.

One of the most difficult parts of putting together any email marketing, is getting the right content or copywriting. Copywriting is essentially the use of words or ideas to promote a business, although the origins of the word comes from printing.

Email Marketing Copywriters

Copywriters, (people who write the promotional material) are often freelance and can be used on a per project basis helping reduce the overall costs of each campaign, and freeing up your time to run your business.

Accessing professional copywriters

GoMyEmails.com now have a professional freelance copywriter, available to assist our clients in creating new, fresh and interesting content for their email marketing campaigns, for more information on using a freelance copywriter contact us using the form below:

Market Research into Small Business Attitude to Email Marketing 9.2011

GoMyEmails are always striving to improve their products and services to the small business community and to this end they commissioned a market research study into the Small Business attitudes towards email marketing in the UK, with the help of the Unite programme and the University of Bolton.

Initially we looked at whether small business makes best use of email marketing in their daily activities.

Below is a pie chart of the results , illustrating whether small businesses use email marketing

When you consider the amount of email we all receive, what suprised the GoMyEmails team most was that 28.6% of the business surveyed do not send any email marketing at all and of those that do send email marketing, a third of respondents send bulk email once a month.

How do business use email marketing?

The results are below, illustrating the different purposes that business uses email marketing.

Although not the most surprising of results, especially as our clients tend to regularly use us for sending monthly newsletters (58.3% of respondents also use bulk email for newsletters), we would of expected to see more than 16.7% using bulk email to promote discounts and membership benefits.

Does your business maximise its use of email marketing?

We asked respondents when thinking about your current usage of email marketing… Do you think you are maximising the potential of email marketing? and Are you interested in expanding your email marketing in the future?

As you can see from the results, small business in the UK, are confident that they are making the most from e-shots, and are still looking to increase their email marketing in the future.

Do small businesses in the UK use SPAM as an email marketing tool?

With the issue of SPAM always around email marketing and business we looked at what types of contact business are willing to send email marketing to.

We are pleased to note that only 9.1% of respondents send email to recipients that they have no business relationship with. It is nice to see that the CAN SPAM laws are starting to take effect on the way UK businesses use email marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy.

If you are unsure whether to use email marketing within your business take a look at our earlier article titled 6 reasons why you should use email marketing.

Conclusion

Email marketing is an in-demand service for small to medium sized businesses in the UK, providing many ways for your business to engage with its clients, customers and prospects. To sum up using one of the comments received during our research.

I was initially against the idea, but your questions made me think about it. I think I have been the recipient of too many bad email shots. Used properly, this could be of benefit to me and my business I will have a go and start to measure the reaction. Annon.

Click here to take our new survey

Since the 1990’s email has taken over as the electronic choice of communication, pushing fax and snail mail into the background, have you ever considered how many ways your email can be viewed, and whether it displays in the way you most expected it?

As part of our services to our email marketing clients, we currently take care of cross email client fixes.

A recent study by a leading email software provider has broken down the popularity of different email client platforms. Below is the most up to date email client market share.

Email Client Popularity Graph

As you can see there are many desktop, webmail, and handheld types of email client, that we take account of when designing and creating your email marketing campaign.

Webmail

Although there are no official statistics in comparing web based mail providers the top three are easy to guess, as Hotmail, Yahoo and Google mail.

Mobile email

Google commissioned a study in April this year to find out about the users of handheld smartphones, the study showed that 82% of them regularly check, receive and send email using their hand held devices.

Desktop email clients

There are numerous desktop based email clients, ranging from Microsoft’s Outlook, Apples Mac mail, and Mozilla’s Thunderbird just to name a few.

One of the things to remember, when sending HTML email is that not everyone is on the latest version, just taking Outlook alone, there are numerous versions, 2011, 2007, 2003, XP, 2000 and 97. All of which deal with HTML in slightly different ways generally using a scaled down version of Internet Explorer (I.E) apart from 2007 which uses Word.

So as you can see when taking care of cross email client fixes, there is a lot to consider. For more information on getting the most from your email marketing contact the GoMyEmails.com team.

Something light hearted

What is the @ sign in morse code?

Despite the rise in popularity of email since the 1990’s the @ sign didn’t appear in the morse code until 2004.

Morse Code for the "@" sign

Making sure that you collect both individual and business email addresses in the proper manner is a vitally important part of managing your email marketing campaign.

Especially as the CAN-SPAM Act makes certain types of email address collection illegal and requires permission from your email subscribers before you send an email.

We have put together some of the best practices for complying with the CAN-SPAM Act.

As part of our agreement with you, when you choose to use GoMyEmails.com for your email marketing, we recommend that you only send to email marketing lists that:

Have Consent Obtained

(A) gave or give you written (including electronic) permission to send Emails to them, without subsequently withdrawing such permission and either:

(i) Consent Given Recently gave you the permission within the prior 12 months; or

(ii) Consent Given More Than One Year Earlier you sent them a promotional email, which was not objected to, within the prior 12 months; or

Sold or Negotiated to Sell Product or Service

(B) gave or give you their name and email address in connection with their purchase, or negotiations to purchase, a product or service from you, have not opted out from receiving your emails and either:

(i) Recent Sale or Negotiation such sale or negotiations occurred within the previous 12 months; or
(ii) Sale or Negotiation Occurred More than One Year Earlier you sent them a promotional email, which was not objected to, within the prior 12 months.

For a more detailed description of SPAM take a look at Spamhaus.org. If you are unsure about how best to approach email marketing call one of the GoMyEmails.com team today for a free confidential chat on 08444 123 173.