Email marketing is still one of the most effective media communications devices. It has taken the place of Direct Mail as the main form of direct response marketing. Email does have it’s detractors who constantly announce its demise, but it continues to thrive. Our experience of email marketing has been developed since before most people had an email address.
We use techniques that owe a lot to the art of direct response marketing in the offline world. The Be Different team developed these over many years, whilst working on some very well known mail order and eCommerce brands. Permission email marketing principals are the same for email marketing.
How does GDPR affect Email marketing?
Now that the EU GDPR regulations are in force all data is subject to its regulation. For email marketing GDPR means that you can only contact people who have “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous consent”. That means you cannot contact someone who has not specifically given their permission for you to contact them. There are lots of little exceptions to this though. For instance if a customer has previously asked for monthly statements about their account you do not need their explicit consent. They have paid for your communications as part of the service. Therefore if becoming a customer involves receiving product updates that does not require any additional action. People who are not your customers have a different set of rules. You must reactivate them in order for you to continue to contact them.
This effectively means you should clean your prospect lists. You must manage them to learn the level of commitment and interest that prospects have. We don’t think that is a bad thing. Up to date, clean and engaged prospect lists make it easier to match offers to prospects. This is covered by a key competence of ours called segmentation.
Preparing for an email marketing campaign
We look at the lists that we are going to use very carefully. We then segment the data to ensure that the campaign produces the maximum impact and increases the likelihood of return.
Next we look at the offers which are going to have the best chance of success. This is matched to the segments and we build an email layout around it. It is a design and development process with copy, and images all added for maximum impact. We use best practice HTML to package everything up into a multi part mime message. This caters for the various email clients and browser based email solutions. We do it to ensure each email we create looks its best for every recipient. It also increases the likelihood of a positive response for the campaign.
Then we match the offer and the segments to the layout in order to create a touch point model that personalises the emails to the recipient. We aim to present a relevant and timely offer to every prospect. All marketing activity is governed by how much you stand out, not how much you fit in. When you do this there is a high chance your communication will be welcomed by the recipient. It therefore has a much greater chance of producing higher open rates and click through rates.
We then test our assumptions through a series of test emails before rolling out the wider campaign.
It is worthwhile taking the time to do this. Employing these techniques together, we increase the overall effectiveness of the campaign. Quite often we produce results which double industry averages.
Email campaign broadcast
We are familiar with all the major email broadcast platforms to execute our campaigns. These include:
AWebber
Campaign Monitor
Constant Contact
DotMailer
Mailchimp
Pure360
There are also others. Each has its own strengths, and Individual campaigns suit different platforms. It is a good idea to talk to us about which is best for you.
What is our secret for great results?
It’s a combination of science and artistry which makes this possible. We have both available to our clients in great abundance. This is why we consider ourselves to be experts in this field and would love to talk to you about how we could increase the effectiveness of your email marketing and direct marketing campaigns.
