An introduction to Email Marketing

Marketing to customers via email has become essential to any business model involving the internet.  But how does one get started in the world of online marketing? I recommend using a Mailing List Manager for your marketing, because outsourcing email marketing is very costly over the long run, whereas acquiring a software solution is an up-front cost.  Once you have your mailing list manager software setup, your first focus needs to be on gathering emails from your customers.  Most mailing list software will allow you to create a form and will manage your email list from within the software.  That means you are going to be gathering email addresses from your site.  I do not recommend purchasing email lists, as these tend to have a much lower rate of return than addresses gathered manually.  It may take awhile for your mailing list to grow large enough, be patient, focus on improving your site’s page rank and your list will grow.

So, software and list ready, it is time to start working on your marketing.  First things first, you need to decide how often you are going to be emailing your list.  This is important because once you pick a schedule, you should stick to it.  Daily emails are generally speaking only appropriate for specific genres of marketing, such as advertising daily updated sites with news content.  The highest frequency I can recommend is sending out weekly emails, with monthly email being the least frequent. Weekly emails are great for blogs, ecommerce sites advertising sales, and any company that wants its brand in the customers mind regularly.  If you are going to go biweekly or monthly, this is perfectly fine, especially for beginners.  It is much easier to set a schedule that is slower, allowing you to create enough content, than to set a schedule you cannot keep up with. That is the first rule of thumb for email marketing is that you have to be able to create enough content to send your email at the same date and time.

In the same vein, you should also pick a day of the week for your emails to go out. There has been a great deal of contention about this decision over the years, with various studies offering contradictory results, so I’ll summarize what I, and some studies, have found to be true.  There are essentially two different things you are looking for in your email marketing, open rates, and click-thru rates. Open rate refers to how often your mail is opened by recipients, and click-thrus are how often links in your mail are clicked.  Depending on when you send your mail, you can optimize one or the other.  Now, it may take some experimentation to find the perfect day and time for your emails, but here are some basic guidelines.  Don’t send mail on Monday, it is the day most people clean out their inboxes, and the day you are most likely to be deleted without being opened. Sending Tuesday through Thursday will maximize your open rate, with Wednesday being the highest. Friday through Sunday will maximize your open rate. Emails should be sent early in the day, before noon, to maximize exposure.  Of course, topic is important as well, sales are associated with Sundays, so that is always a good day to send out your sale advertisements, business related sites should send out during the week, but tech sites can advertise safely on the weekend, most of their customers don’t go a few hours without checking their email. The important thing is learning what works for your list.

Finally, one of the most important things you can do in advance to improve your marketing is to avoid getting put in the Spam folder.  There are a number of factors, and depending on how aggressive the particular software is, it may be unavoidable, but avoiding the spam filter will greatly improve your open and click-thru rates. First, you should make sure you are only emailing subscribers that have opted in on your email list. You may even want to instruct them to add your domain to their white list upon signup, ensuring that they receive your email.  If your mailing list manager supports it, you should also address your emails by the individual’s name, this is possible only if you gathered their name when they signed up, so make sure you are getting as much information from them as possible. Keep your marketing copy focused on your products, and don’t mention drugs, pornography, or other common spam topics. Include both an HTML and a plain text version of your email, because just sending HTML is much more likely to get you in the spam folder, as malicious code is sometimes stored in HTML emails.  In the end, it’s difficult to completely ensure you will not be relegated to the spam box, so just try your best and always have a plain text version of your email, just in case your readers don’t use HTML. Now, you are ready to start your first campaign.

Omnistar Interactive is a producer of business software, including our Web based email marketing software, Omnistar Mailer.  The Mailer is a powerful mailing list manager that can easily and quickly get you started in the world of online marketing.  Some of our features include Autoresponder technology, Advanced Target Search Technology, and the capability to easily customize your emails with the name of the sender. Our software is the perfect tool for getting into the world of email marketing.  We offer further resources at our Online Webmaster Resource Center.