what is Email Marketing?
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is when an organisation uses email to promote their products or services. It is a form of direct marketing. It can be used to build customer relationships. It is one tool in the online marketing mix, alongside other channels such as social media and pay-per-click advertising.
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Importance of email marketing
Email marketing is a cost-effective way to reach your audience. It can have a high conversion rate, encouraging users to take an action on your website, eg make an online purchase. It is quick and simple to use. Large and small businesses across sectors run successful email marketing campaigns.
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Email marketing allows you to connect with your audience directly. You don’t need to rely on them coming across your ad. You have complete control over the format and content of your messages — unlike social media and other online channels.
Email marketing is measurable. You can use success metrics to compare and optimise campaigns. It is easy to target and personalise email marketing messages.
Types of email marketing
Your business can send different kinds of email communications to promote products or services. This could include:
- Welcome — introduce your business to new customers or users who have registered on your website.
- Newsletters — these could be monthly or weekly.
- Seasonal — suggest products, services and promotions relating to events such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s day.
- New product launches — inform customers about new products and services.
- Special offers — inform your audience about discounts and price promotions.
- Abandoned cart — When a customer adds product to their online shopping cart and does not complete the purchase, you can send them an email reminder. You could automate this through your e-commerce platform.
- Re-engagement — a reminder to a customer who hasn’t made a purchase in a while or has cancelled a subscription. You could use Customer relationship management (CRM) software to send these automatically. This could include special discount to entice the customer back.
- Event invitations — boost attendance at events with email marketing. You could link to an online registration page. See organising events in Northern Ireland.
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Options for email marketing
While you could send promotional emails from your standard email provider (eg Outlook or Gmail), there are a number of downsides. These services aren’t designed to send bulk emails. Most businesses use a specialist email marketing service.
Email marketing services offer a number of benefits:
- Design — email marketing services allow you to create visually appealing, professional designs. They often provide templates and user-friendly design software.
- Personalisation and targeting — you can often integrate the email marketing service with your CRM system. This lets you easily create targeted lists and personalise messages with the customer’s name or past purchases.
- Deliverability — email marketing providers design their service to reduce the risk of your email being flagged as spam. This can prevent bounced emails. If you use Outlook or Gmail, your emails may regularly end up in spam folders and your IP address could be permanently blacklisted.
- Evaluation — email marketing services allow you to track bounced emails, open rates, and click-through-rates in your email communications. You can use this information to improve future campaigns.
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Advantages and disadvantages of email marketing
Marketing your products or services by email can be a fast, flexible and cost-effective way of reaching new customers and retaining existing customers by encouraging repeat website visits.
Email marketing can allow you to create targeted and personalised messages. This can help you to build meaningful relationships with your customers. It can also improve response rates to your direct marketing campaigns.
However, it is important not to overuse email marketing. Receiving marketing emails can irritate people if it is irrelevant, too frequent or unwanted.
Advantages of email marketing
The benefits of email marketing include:
- Cost- effective — the costs of email marketing can be much lower than many other forms of marketing. There are no advertising fees, printing or media space costs.
- Permission-based — your marketing list will be made up of people who have actively chosen to receive email communications from you. Customers who are genuinely interested in your products and/or services are more likely to engage with your business.
- Flexible design — you can send plain text, graphics or attach files — whichever suits your message best. A choice of design options gives you scope to convey your business branding.
- Scalable — email marketing can be used to reach large audiences or smaller targeted lists.
- Personalisation and segmentation — with email marketing you can personalise messages. You can also segment your marketing list, so that your customers receive messages from you that they are interested in — this will help boost their engagement with you.
- Shareable — it’s easy for people to forward and share your email content, building your reputation by word-of-mouth or viral marketing. This may help influence new customers to become followers of your brand.
- Conversions and increased sales — if you have a new promotion people can click on links and follow your call-to-action immediately. Email marketing is also effective at every stage of the buying process. For example, you can influence someone to choose your product, nurture the customer relationship post-transaction and also encourage future purchases.
- Measurable — you can evaluate the success of a campaign by using web analytics software. You can easily test different copy, subject lines and designs to see which is most effective. This allows you to optimise future campaigns.
- Benchmark — you can compare your results against others in your industry. There are many free email marketing benchmarking reports available — you will find these by searching online. Benchmarking data can help you to evaluate and prioritise improvement opportunities.
- Test before you send — A/B testing of subject lines, calls-to-action, personalisation, email copy, images or messages ensure your email content is as effective as it can be before you send it.
- Less intrusive — unlike telephone marketing, recipients can read your message at a time that suits them. Customers can also update their preferences if they would like to receive different messages from you or unsubscribe if they feel they no longer want to receive your email communications.
- Environmentally-friendly — email marketing is better for the environment than direct marketing by postal mail because nothing is printed.
- Time-saving — through automation you can trigger emails to be sent to customers based on an action they have performed on your website — eg. send a welcome email when a user signs up to your website, or issue an email offering a discount incentive if user abandons an online shopping cart. Once you have developed a template you can reuse for numerous email campaigns.
- Real-time marketing — through email marketing you can connect with customers in real-time. Using automated triggers, such as website activity, recent purchase or shopping cart abandonment, you can reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right place and with the right offer.
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Disadvantages of email marketing
Some of the potential problems of email marketing include:
- Spam — commercial email or ‘spam’ irritates consumers. If your messages aren’t targeted to the right people, the recipient may delete your email or unsubscribe. You need to make sure that your email marketing complies with privacy and data protection rules, and that it is properly targeted at people who want to receive it. The ‘click through rate’ for untargeted emails is likely to be very low.
- Undelivered emails — poorly designed emails may not get delivered. Emails that use certain spam keywords or characters in the subject heading or content of the email, eg £££s, FREE, click here, are likely to be filtered out by email software and internet service providers. If you don’t keep your marketing lists up to date, you will find incorrect email addresses mean your messages won’t reach the right person.
- Design problems — your email must be designed so that it appears as it should across multiple devices and email providers. You may encounter a trade-off between design and functionality. Some people opt to receive text-only emails, consider how your message will look if this is the case.
- Size issues — files need to be small enough to download quickly. Emails containing many images may take too long to load, frustrating your audience and losing their interest.
- Resources and skills — for a successful email campaign you must ensure that you have the right copy, design and marketing list. If you don’t have the time or skills in-house, consider outsourcing some of these elements.
Email marketing and privacy law
If you want to use email to carry out direct marketing, you need to comply with the rules in the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). These rules include specific things you must say in your marketing messages — eg disclosing your identity and providing a valid email address to all recipients — as well as legal responsibilities you have as a marketer.
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What is electronic mail and direct marketing?
Under the regulations, electronic mail is any electronic message that consists of text, voice, sound or images — ie email, text, picture, video, voicemail and answer phone messages. Direct marketing is defined as a message that is trying to sell goods or services, or is promoting the values or beliefs of a particular organisation.
You need to consider email marketing list opt-ins and opt-outs. You can only carry out marketing by email if the individual you are sending the message to has given you their consent and you follow electronic mail rules contained in PECR and data protection principles under the GDPR.
Sending email marketing to other businesses
Opt-in requirements don’t apply to marketing sent to companies or limited-liability partnerships, where you are not targeting a named individual. However, it’s not good business sense to continue to send marketing to businesses that don’t want you to. You still need to give your identity and provide a valid opt-out address or unsubscribe option in your communications.
Complaints and breaches of privacy regulations
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is responsible for dealing with any complaints and breaches of the regulations. If you breach these rules when you carry out electronic marketing, the ICO will contact you in an attempt to resolve the problem.
If you infringe any of the basic data protection principles you may be subject to administrative fines of up to €20,000,000 or 4 per cent of your businesses’ total worldwide annual turnover.
The Data Protection Act
If you send direct marketing messages electronically to individuals whose personal details come from a bought database, you must also comply with the Data Protection Act 2018. In addition, there are also certain rules about buying email databases you need to consider.
Email marketing list opt-ins and opt-outs
There are two types of procedure that can be used when signing up a new subscriber to receive your email marketing messages — single or double opt-in.
Single opt-in for email marketing
Single opt-in is when a person provides their email address and simply indicates that they would like to receive future emails from your business e.g. when a customer signs up to your email communications.
Double opt-in for email marketing
Double opt-in involves following-up the previous step by also sending the subscriber an email with a confirmation link they must click on to complete their sign up to your email marketing list.
Double opt-in is not a legal requirement, but is often considered best practice — as it eliminates the risk of someone having their email address registered by a third party. Also, instructing a subscriber that they need to respond to your confirmation email should prompt them to retrieve your email — which may have been redirected to a ‘junk’ folder by their spam filter.
Pre-ticked opt-in boxes are banned under the GDPR. You also cannot rely on silence, inactivity, default settings, or your general terms and conditions, or seek to take advantage of inertia, inattention or default bias in any other way. The best practice is to provide an unticked opt-in box, and invite the person to confirm their agreement by ticking. This is the safest way of demonstrating consent, as it requires an affirmative action and positive choice by the individual to give clear and explicit consent.
Soft opt-in for email marketing
Soft opt-in can apply in certain circumstances as an exception to the consent rule for direct marketing. This applies where:
- you have obtained an individual’s email address and details during a previous sale or during negotiations for a previous sale of a product or service to them
- your messages are only marketing your similar products or services
- you have given the individual opportunities to refuse marketing messages when their details are collected and with every future message, and they do not opt out
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Unsubscribe or opt-out option
The opt-out or unsubscribe option should allow the individual to take a positive step to refuse or unsubscribe from your marketing by replying directly and easily to your message in order to stop any future marketing. If you use text messages, you could allow an individual to opt out by sending a stop message to a short code number — eg text ‘STOP’ to 12345. If you use email, include an ‘unsubscribe’ link in your message.
By law, you must allow individuals to opt out or unsubscribe to receiving email marketing messages from you at any time they wish and in the same manner in which they provided you with their consent. You must comply with any opt-out or unsubscribe requests as quickly as possible.
Organisations must not disguise or conceal their identity in any marketing texts or emails, and must provide a valid contact address for individuals to opt out or unsubscribe (which would mean consent was withdrawn). It is good practice to allow individuals to reply directly to the message and opt out that way, to provide a clear and operational unsubscribe link in emails or at least to provide a freephone number.
Segmenting your email marketing lists
Email marketing is more successful if it focuses on people you know are interested in what you’re offering. Customers who have willingly signed up to your email marketing list are more likely to want to read your email messages. People are easily annoyed when they receive an email that is irrelevant to them and they are likely to delete marketing messages — or spam — from your business without reading them. They could also decide to unsubscribe from all your marketing email communications.
For example, if you’re running a special offer on computer hardware, it will be more effective if you promote it only to people responsible for buying IT.
Segmenting your email marketing list
Once you have built up a database with customer details, preferences and interests you can then segment your email marketing list to targeted groups of customers. Segment your customers based on the target markets in your marketing strategy. This makes your messaging more relevant and can increase open and click rates which in turn can lead to increased sales.
Some characteristics you can use to segment your lists include:
- age
- gender
- geographic location
- previous buying behaviour
- interests
- job title
- job function
- industry they work in
For example, you could segment your email marketing list on postcodes or areas of interest if you are promoting an event in a particular area. You could also segment your contacts into ‘persona’ groups based on their demographics and send targeted messages about products that may be of particular interest.
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However, to process the data in this way you must ensure that you comply with the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), namely that you have a lawful basis for processing the data in this way and have complied with all other data protection compliance requirements.
Creating engaging content for your email marketing
Once a customer has opened your email whether they are compelled to click on your links will be determined by the quality of your message, content in your email and relevancy to them. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer — understanding your audience will help you generate emails that are more highly tuned to their needs and expectations.
Email header
Include a header with your company logo so that a customer can identify who the email is from as soon as they open it. This also adds to brand recognition and consistency. A link from your logo to your website homepage is also advisable. Keep it simple and don’t let your header dominate your email template. Be careful not to add too many distractions into the header such as your website navigation. Remember the aim of your email is to get the customer to click on the important message or messages in the main body of your email.
Amount of content
Too many messages in one email will confuse the customer and may lead them to delete your email or unsubscribe. Before constructing your email establish a clear idea of exactly what you want your message to convey to the customer and what you want them to do once they have opened your email eg if you have a number of products or services you want to promote it might be more effective having one email focusing on one specific product/service or a related collection of products/services.
Email template layout
A successful email layout will not only look good, it will also present your content in a way which guides your readers through your message and encourages them onwards to your objective, ie to click a link or links. You need to get the right balance between the email being practical and attractive. Aim to use a layout that makes the content easy to understand, navigate and engage with.
Call-to-action
This is the most important aspect of your email and is what you want the customer to do once they have opened your email. Before you construct your email template be clear as to the end goal of your email — do you want the customer to buy something, read an article, book an appointment or view a video? A single call-to-action that aligns with your end goal can be very effective as it is very clear to the recipient what you want them to eg purchase a specific product. Too many calls-to-action in one email will dilute your message, confuse your customer and discourage them from interacting with your message.
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You should provide a clear call-to-action in your email by using words that encourage action e.g. buy this product, subscribe to our service, read our review, book an appointment. You could also create a sense of urgency with your call-to-action e.g. emphasising the limit on an offer: money off offer lasts until Tuesday.
Images in your email template
You should use a combination of images and text within your email. The images should complement the text to help you get your message across. Ensure to hyperlink your image and add alt text as some internet service providers (ISPs) block images appearing as a default. This is especially important to remember if you are using images as call-to-action buttons. Optimise the size of your images so that they scale appropriately when opening on a mobile device.
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Text in your email template
Think of your email as a teaser aiming to encourage the customer to perform an action such as read more on your website or purchase a product or service — don’t try to include everything in your email. It is highly likely that a customer will skim read your email so keep text to a minimum, use headings and include key words which will support this process. Write your email copy as if you are communicating directly to an individual rather than to a large audience. You can do this by replacing words like ‘we and our’ with ‘you and your’ eg “Do you ever dream of beach holidays? Get a 20% discount off your next trip”.
Social media buttons
In order to align your email marketing with your social media you could include social sharing buttons so customers can post specific content from your email to their social media accounts. Adding recognisable social media icons will invite your customers to spread your message for you. In addition you could highlight on social media that your latest email communication is about to issue a day or two before your email is sent out. This could encourage people to sign up to receive it.
Email footer
As a legal requirement you must include details of your company name and address. You should include other methods that a customer can contact you such as your email address or phone number. Legally you must also include an unsubscribe link. Most email marketers place these details and the unsubscribe link in the footer.
Mobile optimised
With more customers accessing email through their mobile than desktop it is imperative you optimise your emails for mobile devices. Emails will render differently depending on device accessed on and internet service provider (ISP) used. Perform an inbox check across different mobile devices and platforms to ensure your design will work. Most email marketing software providers will enable you to view you email template across various email platforms prior to sending.
Consider mobile users when designing your email template by increasing font size and line spacing. Make your call-to-action(s) stand out and easily accessible e.g. the call-to-action button may need to be bigger than those displayed on desktop to compensate for the customer clicking with their finger on a mobile screen. Single column content will work best for mobile as most people are happy to scroll through content but less content to pinch and zoom. Ensure your website is mobile friendly too as a perfect mobile friendly email experience can easily be ruined by inviting customers to click through to a non-responsive website.
