Email Marketing

The New Year is here, and now is the perfect time to take a close look at how you’re marketing your brand via email. Read on to discover some great hints and tips that will help you reach out more effectively and efficiently in the year ahead. 

It doesn't matter how well-maintained or new your mailing list is, there will always be bounces and unsubscribes. It's a standard – and legal – requirement that any email marketing activity sets up rules for bouncing and unsubscribing that removes the recipient from the mailing list.

We often get asked by new clients how much we charge per email for sending a campaign. The simple truth is, GGMR Ltd does not advocate a 'per email' cost base for email marketing. We believe it is an antiquated costing model that is not in the clients favour in this age of dynamic communications and often results in a false economy.

Welcome emails are those sent out to new list subscribers. They’re designed to not just introduce your brand or service to your new reader, but also to establish a strong connection with them so they’re conditioned to accepting your emails in their inbox. There’s strong evidence that welcome emails help reinforce subscriber lists while also providing an opportunity for increasing sales, making them an essential component of any mailing list.

With spam now making up more than 95% of all the world’s email, the task for genuine email marketers is harder than ever. In our last blog post we revealed how ISPs determine if an email is spam or not – their tools are increasingly sophisticated, but not foolproof, so the first task is making sure your emails get delivered. But even if your mail does get delivered, that’s not necessarily the end of the story. A further hurdle messages have to overcome is the spam-complaint system, whereby a user manually flags an email they’ve received as spam.

These days, spam is a catch-all term for any form of bulk, unsolicited mailing that is sent via an electronic delivery system to an indiscriminate set of users without their express permission. Although it’s most universally associated with the trillions of spam messages sent via email each year – around 85-90 per cent of all email sent – spam is now increasingly distributed to other mediums too, such as mobile phones via SMS messages, social networks and via instant messaging tools.

Social media – in particular Twitter and Facebook – might be generating a lot of buzz right now in marketing circles, but that doesn’t mean email is dead. Statistics continue to show that there’s a still strong preference for email among customers and subscribers as a means of contact. Email continues to play a critical role in online marketing – it’s accessible offline, and it still generates higher rates of return and positive feedback than campaigns driven purely through social media channels.

In one of our recent articles we outlined the importance of effectively getting your message across whilst embracing the differences between your subscribers' email viewers. It's vitally important to see how your finished email will look to your clients, customers and subscribers.

All email newsletters suffer from "list churn", the term used to describe the number of subscribers lost. Lost subscribers occur for a number of reasons: the email may bounce back, they may choose to unsubscribe, or report your mailshot as spam. These measurable factors are joined by other factors that can’t be measured easily: unread emails, and emails that don’t generate any clicks.