Email Marketting O/T

[Cleggy the Spyder Man]

Being a bit behind the times I still do not have email marketing for my company

 

I am sure there are some wizz kids out there who know there stuff

 

What you guys using?

[Norman Verona]

That's a huge question.

 

What do you sell?

Who do you sell to?

Do you have the emails addresses of potential clients?

What can you offer in an email that you can't elsewhere?

Do you know the age profiles of your potential clients?

 

That's without thinking about it.

 

I use mailshot letters. Not to sell anything in itself but just to keep our name in front of potential clients. One huge advantage we have is that we can easily identify our potential customers right across the UK.

 

However having said all that, there are software packages available that will allow you to design a professional email and send them out without mailing charges from your ISP.

 

 

ed to add the most important question. Let's say you get a 5% return on your marketing campaign, can you cope with the increase in business?

[AdamR]

We use Mailchimp. The effectiveness is... limited in my opinion. We always attach at least 2 or 3 discount codes to the monthly newsletter and they rarely (literally a handful a month from a mailing list of 12000 - more on that later) get used. I guess it does drive traffic to the website, but direct sales I am not sure it's effective, certainly for my company.

 

That's not to say it won't work for you Cleggy - I am guessing you have quite a few competitors so reminding your customers you are still doing well and shoving them the odd special offer here and there might work wonders!

 

Back to the 12000 thing... You MUST collect any email addresses in the correct way, eg. people have actively consented to receiving your mailshots. If you gather them elsewhere, there's a good chance people will just hit 'report spam' and the legitimacy of your campaign will reduce - meaning it'll get caught by spam filters next time.

 

Then, you end up with a bounce percentage - emails that have full inboxes, are no longer valid, people have made typos, etc. Typically this isn't too large, but depending on the age of your list could be fairly high. For example, our data had been gathered over about 6 years, so the first campaign's bounce rate was just over 10% (and Mailchimp automatically remove these emails from your list for the next time). After that, it dropped to ~3% for all the remaining ones.

 

Obviously not all of the emails get opened either, we are hovering around 24% (but the first one was higher at 38% - guess people were more interested as it was new) which is apparently pretty high for our sector. There is more info here: http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks-by-industry/

 

Then, the amount of people actually clicking on the content is even lower, typically 2.5% for our sector (eCommerce) according to MC. We are hovering just above that, but it ends up that from 12000 emails sent (about £100 a month) we are getting ~275 clicks through to the site. That's a traffic increase of 0.31%...

 

Personally I think my business isn't very 'aligned' with this sort of marketing (our average customer age is under 20) and therefore it isn't very effective - it could certainly be worth a try though! If you want to chat more feel free to give me a shout matey, it's a fairly recent addition for us so it's still fresh. Obviously I won't have as much experience as some but a newbies take on it can often be useful IMO

[Andy Banks]

Technically - there are plenty of products out there to design and manage a mailing list, you probably have something already with your hosting deal for your website.

 

As to the effectiveness - really does depend as others have said. I have had limited success on many occasions but once, just once mind, I was involved in a combined email and website mailshot and we took it down a week later as it was too successful!

[John Williams (Panda) - Joint Manchester AO]

We use Mailchimp. The effectiveness is... limited in my opinion. We always attach at least 2 or 3 discount codes to the monthly newsletter and they rarely (literally a handful a month from a mailing list of 12000 - more on that later) get used. I guess it does drive traffic to the website, but direct sales I am not sure it's effective, certainly for my company.

 

That's not to say it won't work for you Cleggy - I am guessing you have quite a few competitors so reminding your customers you are still doing well and shoving them the odd special offer here and there might work wonders!

 

Back to the 12000 thing... You MUST collect any email addresses in the correct way, eg. people have actively consented to receiving your mailshots. If you gather them elsewhere, there's a good chance people will just hit 'report spam' and the legitimacy of your campaign will reduce - meaning it'll get caught by spam filters next time.

 

Then, you end up with a bounce percentage - emails that have full inboxes, are no longer valid, people have made typos, etc. Typically this isn't too large, but depending on the age of your list could be fairly high. For example, our data had been gathered over about 6 years, so the first campaign's bounce rate was just over 10% (and Mailchimp automatically remove these emails from your list for the next time). After that, it dropped to ~3% for all the remaining ones.

 

Obviously not all of the emails get opened either, we are hovering around 24% (but the first one was higher at 38% - guess people were more interested as it was new) which is apparently pretty high for our sector. There is more info here: http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks-by-industry/

 

Then, the amount of people actually clicking on the content is even lower, typically 2.5% for our sector (eCommerce) according to MC. We are hovering just above that, but it ends up that from 12000 emails sent (about £100 a month) we are getting ~275 clicks through to the site. That's a traffic increase of 0.31%...

 

Personally I think my business isn't very 'aligned' with this sort of marketing (our average customer age is under 20) and therefore it isn't very effective - it could certainly be worth a try though! If you want to chat more feel free to give me a shout matey, it's a fairly recent addition for us so it's still fresh. Obviously I won't have as much experience as some but a newbies take on it can often be useful IMO

 

we use mailchimp aswell.

 

cheers

 

john

[Plays-Kool]

This is very interesting as its something that I would like to do too, the one thing that worries me is making sure that I don't pee people off by sending them emails when they don't want them. So I'd be interested to know what people do about this. Do you guys that are using this have an option on your website that says you don't want to receive emails or does mail chimp have an option that people are able to click to unsubscribe?

 

Hope you don't mind me butting in on this Cleggy.

 

Cheers

 

Luke

[AdamR]

Do you guys that are using this have an option on your website that says you don't want to receive emails or does mail chimp have an option that people are able to click to unsubscribe?

 

Both - I think it might be a legal requirement, and if not certainly a 'moral' one!

 

To be fair, the system is much more 'clever' than I had imagined, whether we will use a lot of the functionality remains to be seen though.

[John Williams (Panda) - Joint Manchester AO]

yes... mailchimp seems very up on this... aslo they dont want to get black listed.

 

cheers

 

john

[Cleggy the Spyder Man]

This is very interesting as its something that I would like to do too, the one thing that worries me is making sure that I don't pee people off by sending them emails when they don't want them. So I'd be interested to know what people do about this. Do you guys that are using this have an option on your website that says you don't want to receive emails or does mail chimp have an option that people are able to click to unsubscribe?

 

Hope you don't mind me butting in on this Cleggy.

 

Cheers

 

Luke

 

No problem Luke - glad I am not the only one who is slightly behind the times

[Blatman]

the one thing that worries me is making sure that I don't pee people off by sending them emails when they don't want them.

As a receiver of my fair share of email shots from suppliers, nothing pisses me off more than when I get "special offers" outside of work hours. I'm sure many of us have push email to our phones so I expect to receive email BUT at half ten on a Saturday night or in the small hours of a Tuesday morning, I want it to be work and not advertising! It's doubly maddening when the "special offer" isn't as good as what I can get on Amazon...

[housebeautician]

I personally hate them.

Rarely look at them.

And delete them even quicker as most of them are full of crap and a waste of time.

Just my opinion of course 

[dombanks]

I personally hate them.

Rarely look at them.

And delete them even quicker as most of them are full of crap and a waste of time.

Just my opinion of course 

quick poll around the office....

 

as a bunch of scientists we are bombarded with crap loads of advertising email, then when your realy feeling fed up with it all their reps "pop" in cos they are in the area.

 

frankly most of us either send it straight to the trash, set up a rule that moves it to a directory where we will look at it (we never do) then delete it or just ignore them.

[Wile E. Coyote]

This is very interesting as its something that I would like to do too, the one thing that worries me is making sure that I don't pee people off by sending them emails when they don't want them. So I'd be interested to know what people do about this. Do you guys that are using this have an option on your website that says you don't want to receive emails or does mail chimp have an option that people are able to click to unsubscribe?

 

Hope you don't mind me butting in on this Cleggy.

 

Cheers

 

Luke

 

As has been said, you need to give people the choice.  Useful summary here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/10/uk_antispam_law_goes_live/ , detail here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi?title=The%20Privacy%20and%20Electronic%20Communication 

 

More significant though, in practical terms, is the quality and quantity of the emails that come through.  One relevant email a month and I'll probably read it.  One a day and you'd end up filtered to my spam mailbox...

 

Don't forget that lots of people have image blockers - one of my suppliers sends out emails that are sometimes relevant but I can't tell if they are until I choose to download the images (which I only do if it's a slow day and I'm curious).  If you go "image heavy" on the design, then suspect adding enough text is important if you want to encourage people to download the associated images.