Email marketing strategy

I now offer MailChimp training via www.mailchimptraining.co.uk which includes open courses and in-house training.

Email is a highly effective promotional technique, in terms of awareness building and response rates. Key elements include your list, copywriting ability, scheduling and metrics.

Email marketing is a promotional mix category.  It includes person-to-person emails, autoresponder messages, newsletters and e-shots.  Here is a list of promotional mix categories.

You should send out a monthly newsletter to customers (dormant, current and prospective), suppliers and other relevant contacts.  A newsletter (sometimes referred to as an ezine) should provide useful, helpful and interesting material about your enterprise. There should be a number of links from the newsletter to your website.

MailChimp and ConstantContact are popular newsletter production platforms. They include newsletter templates and metrics, so that you can see open rates, click through rates, hard bounce rates (i.e. dead email address), soft bounce rates (temporarily unavailable), spam complaints, etc.

An e-shot, on the other hand, is selling something (i.e. a product, service or seminar place). Here is a checklist for writing an e-shot.

You can buy email address lists, for sending e-shots to. However, be aware that the recipients may not be aware that they are on these lists. Therefore, make it easy for them to unsubscribe from your list. In addition, you need to be aware that if you are not careful, your domain can be blacklisted if your ISP thinks that you are a spammer.

By the way, MailChimp doesn’t like ‘generic’ email addresses (i.e. ‘info@xyz.com’), so you need to avoid these.

The best email marketing list you will ever have is your own list, built one subscriber at a time, using an opt-in approach. Here is an article entitled ‘How to get more newsletter subscribers‘.

Strategically, it is a good idea to have all of your contacts in one place: your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Ideally, this should be where you keep your newsletter subscriber list (otherwise, you end up with multiple lists, which can be a real challenge). It is possible to connect systems like MailChimp to various CRM platforms (you can ask about this, via our website).

Written by MailChimp trainer Nigel Temple.