Email marketing, or e-marketing, can be one of the most effective forms of direct marketing in communicating your news plus your business’ overall sales message to your market database.

Unlike Search Engine Marketing, which ‘pulls’ visitors, clients and new business to your site, with e-mail marketing you have greater control and can ‘push’ your company to the front of their mindset.

Whether enhancing your relationship with clients and looking to build loyalty, or attempting, through a call to action, to drive new immediate new business, it can be a highly cost effective campaign - but ONLY if sent professionally. Poorly designed and constructed emails can not only reflect badly on your company but more than likely don’t even reach your recipients or in the way you intended.

Put yourself at your computer and think about the types of emails which catch your attention as a recipient. How often do you take an interest in well designed and impactful emails? and how often do you instantly delete scrappy looking emails even if from companies you know well? – and then think about whether your impression of these companies has altered, probably negatively.

Time and time again at Think we hear from clients who have tried to cut costs by self-creating and sending emails to their collated database only to hear from their own clients sometime later how bad they are. In these frugal times the motivation is understandable but like most well planned and delivered marketing your investment should bring a true reward.

Of course, we recommend you ask Think to look after your e-mail marketing. Experience and resources are the essential elements but below is some initial guidance for initially thinking about your campaign or email communication strategy:

• Your outcome – what are you looking to achieve? Keep this in mind at all times and don’t get distracted from this.
• Your message – make sure it is simple and well thought through. Keep your text to the minimum and your statements/headings simple and to the point – remember you may only have seconds to get across your message and draw them in.
• Your call to action – again simplicity is the key and you should make the process as straight forwards as possible. Too many steps and sales jumps will put people off.
• Will imagery work or is ‘less is more’? – as with most clichés the saying that ‘a picture can say a thousand words’ is true and its certainly accurate where emails are concerned. With just seconds to draw in your recipient a well chosen image can save unnecessary text.

Managing Your Email Campaign

Part of our service to you, should you wish, includes Think’s marketing team helping you construct the content of your email, decide the style and composition, manage the design and build, organise the campaign database with you, test the email (ensuring it will not be JUNK filtered by email packages) and finally track its success.

Think’s in-house e-mailer system (Think Mailer) allows us to send your campaign with full confidence that it will arrive thanks to our ‘white listed’ status with email gateways. Our mailer tracks open rates, forward rates, destination link clicks, bounce backs from unavailable servers and automatically deals with unsubscribers.

We’ll work with you to build a trusted long-term email campaign which your clients pay interest and attention to, helping you build awareness and increase your business as a result.

To speak to us today about your email campaign ideas as part of your digital marketing strategy, just fill in the form below or call us on 01227 808040.