Email marketing: Getting it right

The email newsletter is a useful addition to the small business' marketing arsenal but isn't always easy to crack. Verity Gough gets practical and discovers how to give your campaigns some va-va-voom.

The best e-newsletters share many of the same qualities as a good blog: they engage the reader at a personal level, encourage them to link back to your site, help validate your brand identity and eventually create more business. But in a world fraught with data protection issues, opt-in/opt-out clauses and spam filters, how do you stop yours from ending up in the junk folder?

Before you get carried away with the creative aspect of a newsletter, the most important part of any campaign is the planning. What are your objectives? How often are you going to send it out? Who is going to receive it and how do you get subscribers interested in what you have to say?

"A good way to get customers on board is to offer them something interesting and tempt them to your website," says Bryan Black, managing director of digital communications company SmartFocus. "It could be a freebie such as an iPod or a competition. You want to give them a reason to be there."

In the first instance, you need to compile a list of all your customers' email addresses – something many small businesses may not have been doing on an active basis, advises James Miller, Business Solutions Consultant at Premiere Global. "At every touch point with the customer, remember to get their contact details and give them an option to opt-in to an email newsletter," he says.

"You could start by adding a flyer to your invoices or make sure the literature you hand out at a trade show has a link to your website, or at the very least a form to opt-in," says Miller. "Even get your sales people asking prospects whether they are happy to be entered into the monthly newsletter. This counts as an opt-in, providing you record it in some manner."

One simple way of doing this is to put a newsletter sign-up form on your website which also asks for preferences such as how often the customer would like to receive the newsletter and which product areas are they most interested in.

The opt-in option

Opt-ins and unsubscribe links are essential to email marketing. Get it wrong and not only will it turn your customers away in droves but it can land you in hot water. "One of the key things is to get a double opt-in," says Black. "You send it to them, they send it back and then you are in. This way you are really certain that they want to receive your emails."

The same goes for unsubscribe methods. "I am horrified by the amount of companies that send newsletters that are not clear how to unsubscribe. It's really bad practice," he adds. "They can be quite complicated as well. If you are a company that has multiple newsletters then your customer might want to unsubscribe from one or two but not all of them, so the unsubscribe process needs to be clear, prominent and easy to use."

Getting personal

If your brand strategy hasn't been very well defined, then planning the content of your newsletter can become tricky. Ellie Beasley, a strategic planner at digital communications company Underwired, works with clients as diverse as Zaavi, Virgin Holidays and McCain's. She believes that good e-newsletters should put across the essence of your brand or personality.

She advises small businesses to invest in good copywriting rather than spending lots of money on email creating software. "It allows you to get your personality and message across without all the logos and imagery that typically communicates brand," Beasley explains. "Keep the content punchy, precise and succinct but, most importantly, make it personal."

She recommends looking at other companies' newsletters as examples, such as clothing firm Fat Face. "Their newsletters are quite copy heavy, which ordinarily you wouldn't think would be a good thing because you want people to click through from the email to the website. But because the copy is interesting, engaging and relevant to me as a consumer, I open them and go to the website," she says.

While many companies will be used to seeing the all-singing, all-dancing HTML emails from well-established brands, keeping it simple is the key. "For small businesses, text-only emails are cost-effective and can look just as good as HTML," says Beasley.

The right frequency

The last thing you want to do is bombard your customers with emails, so deciding on how often you send them out is fundamental. But it cannot be decided without carrying out a test - something which many small businesses fail to do. "Small businesses often have a better relationship with their customers so when it comes to researching their market, the chances are they won't mind answering a few questions," says Beasley.

Testing on a small sample of customers will give you lots of information as to what they are interested in, how often they want to receive news and what type of content they want to read. It is also useful to see what subject lines will be caught by the spam filters.

Of course a lot of this is dictated by industry sector. For example, fast-moving consumer goods such as consumables, music, financial service products and electronics can afford to send out weekly newsletters. However, if your business is in archaeology, the chances are you will be hard pressed to find wildly diverse content on a monthly basis.

"Committing yourself is one of the dangers," warns Beasley. "A lot of people will say on their websites 'join our monthly newsletter' and then think that someone has to come up with the content each month."

Similarly, clever timing can really push sales up, says Black. A good example of this is EasyJet's newsletters. "They send out one email with offers telling people to buy flights by next Tuesday, then send another saying offer ends midnight. It's a very effective strategy which clearly works for them."

Analyse this

After you have tested your market, decided on your format, written your content and sent out your newsletters, the final stage is monitoring the results. The best and cheapest method is by using an email service provider.

Beasley recommends Campaign Monitor, which doesn't charge any set up fees or monthly costs, just delivery fees. "Its post campaign analysis is brilliant so you get lots of granular detail about who has opened the emails, who has responded and you can feed that data back into your database. Even a simple programme like Microsoft Access allows you to do post campaign analysis," she says.

So there you have it. Email marketing need not be a complicated and expensive exercise. The key to success is keeping it simple, relevant, personal and interesting. Communicate the benefits and incentives quickly and make sure you listen to your customers.