What is it?
Email marketing is, as the name suggests, the use of email in marketing communications.
In its broadest sense, the term covers every "commercial" email ever sent by an organization to a customer, donor, member, subscriber or website visitor. The commonest forms are:
- Short promotional emails alerting recipients to new products or services, events, projects, special offers, coupons, discounts etc.
- Information-rich email newsletters designed to inform, educate or entertain readers.
Of course, hybrids of the two approaches exist. As the email marketing industry has matured, so has the variety of ways of using email for marketing.
More advanced forms include, for example, so-called trigger emails[1], where you might receive an email reminding you to finish buying a product if you put an item in an online store's shopping cart but didn't complete the purchase process.
The commercial perspective
Email marketing is popular with organizations because[2]...
- It is relatively low-cost when compared to other marketing approaches such as direct mail
- Many organizations report a high return on investment through email marketing
- It allows you to send targeted messages to specific individuals or market segments
- It drives visitors (and sales) to websites, but can also support sales through other channels (for example by notifying customers of an event at a store in their neighborhood)
- It reinforces relationships, loyalty and trust when emails deliver valuable content to recipients
Successful email marketing is, however, dependent on many factors. Paramount among these are the concepts of permission and value.
Permission means that legitimate email marketing involves sending commercial emails to people who have explicitly requested them. This is the main area where email marketing differs from spam[3].
Value reflects the need for organizations sending commercial email to understand that success depends on delivering valuable, relevant content to recipients[4].
Poor-quality email marketing has a much stronger downside than most forms of marketing. Organizations that send commercial email without permission (or who fail to send valuable, relevant emails) end up disenchanting recipients, who may then report these emails as spam. The sender's future emails could then be blocked from delivery by many ISPs.
Practical issues
There are many aspects to email marketing, but important ones are:
Strategy: deciding what kinds of email to send, when, and to which subscribers.
List building: persuading people to submit their email address to you so you can build a list of subscribers for your email communications.
Infrastructure: there are hundreds of companies offering specialist email marketing software or services that automate or manage many of the tasks involved in developing, sending and analyzing email campaigns to a list of recipients.
Design: determining the format (plain text or coded using HTML to allow images, color etc.), layout and creative design of your emails. A big issue here is that webmail services and email software (like Outlook) display the same email in different ways, depending on how you code or format that email[5].
Copywriting: understanding how people read emails so that you craft messages with the best chance of getting the required response.
Deliverability: the anti-spam technologies used to block or filter out spam can also inadvertently catch legitimate commercial email. Ensuring email reaches the inboxes of subscribers is an important task which has spawned its own specialist industry.
Analysis: an email campaign generates a lot of data which needs careful analysis to be of use as a guide to future changes and tactics.
Competing technologies: as one of the early Internet technologies, email is not typically treated as cutting edge by the media and is often compared unfavorably with alternative marketing opportunities presented by social networks and other Web 2.0 technologies. While such technologies are not set to replace email, they do impact how email is used.
Resource issues: email has a reputation as a low-cost method of marketing. As such, it can be difficult for those using email to persuade others of the value of investing more heavily in email, even though such investment has proven to bring increased returns[2].
Legal issues
No introduction to email marketing is complete without considering legal aspects. Most countries now have anti-spam or email legislation which places certain responsibilities on those who send commercial email. Typical requirements are that senders include their physical name and address within the email and offer a simple mechanism for recipients to remove their details from the mailer's address list.
Most national laws also require those sending commercial email to get permission (an opt-in) from recipients before doing so. A notable exception is the USA's Can-Spam law, which does not require this opt-in[6].
Further reading
Online communities
References
- http://www.getelasti
c.com/trigger-email/ - http://www.email-mar
keting-reports.com/b asics/why.htm - http://www.email-mar
keting-reports.com/b asics/permission/mar ketingemails.htm - http://www.adotas.co
m/2006/03/are-you-sp amming-your-customer s/ - http://www.email-sta
ndards.org/clients/ - http://www.ftc.gov/b
cp/conline/edcams/sp am/business.htm
Asep Onde
Invite as author
Very well intro on permission marketing through email
Very nice and logical info on permission marketing.
I blogged on your knol - http://www.knoltoday
Thanks :)
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Let's say I have a directory, where people can list their sites in. Of course, suggesting their sites lead me to capture their emails.
Do I have the right to keep them updated with any related issues, or should I ask for their permission first?
Thanks :)
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If you want to send promotional emails to these folk, you need to get permission by giving them the opportunity to tick an appropriate box during the submission process.
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Quite logical and probably the best way to go... Thanks for the advice!
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