E-mail marketing is a growing practice as companies realize that it is not only less expensive than traditional direct marketing but it is also highly measurable. The growth of the e-mail marketing industry has brought with it a proliferation of e-mail service providers.

Most companies benefit greatly from being able to easily send out targeted and timely messages to its customer and prospect bases. Such direct marketing has the following advantages:

• Speed of being able to create, send and receive responses for messages. Email marketers can typically receive response with 48 hours of sending an e-mail campaign.
• Reduced costs. Aside from the subscription or other costs associated with software, email service provider subscriptions or server costs, the only other costs are internal (i.e. the time for you or your personnel to help with the creation of the content and its review for compliance) and the cost of the creative process.)
• Ability to brand e-mails. It is very important that you maintain and build your corporate identity through the consistent application of its brand values through marketing communications messages. An email template can be created for email messages and this can be used consistently in all bulk e-mailings. In this way your clients and prospects will gain an ever deeper vision of your design identity.
• Tracking and analysis. With email it is possible to track how many people read a message by adding links that a recipient is encouraged to click on for more information. In this way you will gain a clearer understanding about which messages and formats garner the greatest response. It is also possible to do A-B testing where one message and or format is sent to one group and another to the second group. In this way it is possible to gain an understanding of which approach gets the best response.
• Open rates. Over half Internet users check their mail at least once a day. This statistic combined with trust in your brand will ensure that messages get though to intended recipients.
• Ability to drive traffic to your Web site.

There are also several pitfalls that you must be aware of. The CAN-SPAM act puts several obligations on bulk mailers such as providing the ability for people in your database to unsubscribe from receiving future messages. It also mandates that you include a physical address in your e-mail.

Another potential issue relates to ‘phishing’ schemes where unscrupulous e-mailers create facsimiles of your official e-mails and then send them to large numbers in the hope of obtaining private information such as account numbers, user names, passwords and social security numbers.

In Target Marketing magazine, Regina Brady provided a good analysis of the types of e-mail communications that a company could use, for example:

• Newseletter
• Surveys
• Press releases
• Third party marketing
• Product updates
• Customer service
• Product promotions
• Acquisition
• Trade show announcements

She then went on to suggest who, internally, should be responsible for creating and sending the email, the target of the email and how often. For example, she suggest that survey e-mails could be sent quarterly to both customers and prospects¹.

Options for e-mail marketing

There are 5 main e-mail marketing options available:

1. Using a desktop based e-mail program such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora or Thunderbird.
2. Using a web based email product (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo! mail or Hotmail)
3. Using a desktop based bulk e-mail program.
4. Using a Web based solution (such as Constant Contact or Exact Target)
5. Using a Web based solution running on your own server (e.g. phpList)

Using a desktop based e-mail program

Probably the most familiar way to send e-mails is desktop client software. Obviously this is a great way of sending one-to-one or one-to-a-select group of recipients.

It suffers from several shortfalls:

• A group e-mail sent to a ‘blind carbon copy’ list (bcc) does not look very personalized, not is it possible to add things to e-mails like the recipients first name.
• It is difficult to measure open and action statistics when using an ordinary e-mail client.
• Sometimes people inadvertently put their list of e-mail address in the ‘carbon copy’ (cc) field rather than the bcc: field. This results in everyone who gets the email getting a full list of everyone’s e-mail who also received the message. This list could be used by unscrupulous recipients for spamming purposes.
• The maximum number of recipients may be limited by the company providing SMTP services.
• It is difficult to manage people wishing to opt-in or opt-out of your list.
• If you had complaints from recipients with an email from one of the major ISPs, your IP address could be blocked by that ISP which would mean that any e-mail from you to anyone with an e-mail address from that ISP would be blocked.

Its big advantage is that most people have an e-mail account set up and hence it is quick and easy to send this sort of message. In situations where personalization is not important and the speed of sending e-mails to personal acquaintances, is important, then a desktop based e-mail program may be the best option.

Using a Web based e-mail service

Many people use aol.com, gmail.com, hotmail.com or yahoo.com e-mail addresses. It is possible to send bulk e-mail using one of these accounts, however there are some major disadvantages:

• You are limited to the number of email addresses that you can send an e-mail. Gmail limts you to 300 recipient e-mail addresses per e-mail sent, at the time of writing.
• Some of these free e-mail services add their own marketing messages to your e-mails.
• Using a free e-mail service looks unprofessional. People expect you to have an e-mail address within your domain, e.g. your-name@your-domain.com. This appears far more professional.
• As with using a desktop client, it is far more difficult to manage opt-ins and opt-outs.
• If you are judged to have been spamming by the free e-mail service, you will most likely lose your e-mail address. If your are also using this address for general business purposes, this would be disastrous.

Using a desktop based bulk e-mail program

A desktop based bulk e-mail program works a little bit like a mail merge within a word processor. In other words, you create an e-mail and in it you add variables from a database (e.g. first name, second name or location). You then merge the e-mail with the database and send personalized e-mails to all the addresses in your list.

It is possible to use OpenOffice’s writer to send e-mail in this way. My preference is a program from Infacta (http://www.infacta.com/) named Groupmail. There are four different editions including a free Edition, With this edition you may create HTML and plain text version of an e-mail, build lists and include list attributes (e.g. Dear <Firstname>) in your e-mails. The free edition requires that you have access to an SMTP server and only allows you to send to a maximum of 100 recipients at one time. The paid for versions allow you to use your personal computer as an SMTP server.

Using a desktop system has some advantages, such as it being free (or a one off cost). Unfortunately there are some major problems:

• If you use your PC as an SMTP server you run the risk of being blocked by a major ISP which would be bad news as far as your every day e-mails were concerned as well as future bulk mailing activities.
• Opt-in and opt-outs are problematic.

Web based solutions

A major growth area in the marketing services arena is in the e-mail marketing services arena. Service providers include:

• Constant contact (www.constantcontact.com)
• Vertical Response (www.verticalresponse.com)
• Exact Target (http://email.exacttarget.com)
• Experian CheetahMail (http://www.cheetahmail.com/corp/)
• Responsys (http://www.responsys.com/)
• silverPOP (http://www.silverpop.com)
• YesMail (http://www.yesmail.com/)

Most service providers work in a similar way. When you open an account on service provider’s Web site you can:

• Import databases of contacts (e.g. first name, surname, e-mail address, location etc)
• Automatically manage opt-in and opt-outs of subscribers (message should automatically include a link so that e-mail recipients can easily unsubscribe and your database is automatically updated)
• Securely manage your database of contacts
• Create an e-mail subscription box for your Web site. When someone enters their e-mail address in this box the e-mail service automatically sends them an e-mail to check that they really want to subscribe, usually containing a link. If the recipient clicks on the link he is added to your e-mail database (or a subset thereof) and will receive future e-mails from you.
• Create e-mails, including fields from databases of contacts (such as first name). This enables you to personalize e-mails.
• Easily conduct testing of different e-mails to samples of your list to determine the best options for the remainder of the list.
• Quickly create professional looking e-mails using templates provided as part of the service. These templates can often be modified to reflect your corporate identity (colors, layouts and logos). Typically HTML based e-mails (those including pictures and attractive layouts) must be developed using tables for e-mails as strictly CSS based layouts do not render correctly on all e-mail clients.
• Receive informative analytics and reports about who emails were delivered to, which email addresses resulted in bounces, who opened the e-mails, who clicked certain links within the e-mails. This information helps you determine the best day and time to send e-mails and to ascertain the potential interests of e-mail recipients, even without them contacting you.

One of the main advantages of the Web based solution is that the e-mail service providers jealously guard their ability to deliver e-mails. They tend to be rigorous in ensuring that none of their customers are involved in spamming. This means that it is more likely that your e-mails will be delivered and received by recipients. They also provide a framework so that you are far more likely to conform to the CAN-SPAM regulations (see http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm for a description of the act).

Pricing is generally based on either the number of contacts in your e-mails list or alternatively the number of e-mails that you send in a certain period of time.

phpList

A further option is to use phpList (http://www.phplist.com/), an open source PHP program that can be used for sending newsletters. The program is very feature rich with many of the same features found among the email service providers.

Having used this program I believe that its main disadvantages are that if you run it on your server there is a danger that some of your e-maisl are inadvertendly classified as SPAM. If this lead to your IP address being added to an e-mail ‘blacklist’ it could seriously hinder you abilty to send e-mails, not just from phpList but also from anyone who uses your server to send e-mail.

I also found that the software was far less intuitive to use than that of an equivalent service provider.

Recommendations

Overall I recommend Constant Contact. Its easy to use, easy to modify the templates to match your corporate identity and easy to manage databases of contacts. Constant Contact is responsible for making sure their servers stay off blacklists and you pay based on the size of your list rather than how many emails you send (although you need to be careful not to extend the patience of your house list by sending too many emails).

House list or list rental?

E-mail marketers typically get the e-mail addresses to which they send e-mails in a combination of two ways. It is possible to rent a list for a price per e-mail address (these list are typically priced per thousand emails, e.g. $300 CPM). In this case you will not normally actually receive the list of e-mails addresses, rather your e-mail will be sent for you to the list. The second way of acquiring email addresses is through the house list. This is a permission based list of opt-in email addresses that you gather, perhaps through a sign-up form on your Web site. The house list can be used to foster customer loyalty, cross sell and up-sell products and services.

Of the two ways of acquiring email addresses the house list is significantly more valuable. Not only do you not need to pay a fee when you send e-mails, but you also know that everyone on the list has expressed some interest in your business.

What is an email blacklist?

Blacklists are collections of IP addresses that have been reported as having sent SPAM emails. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) check these lists before delivering emails to their customers. There are many blacklist including:

• spamcop.net (http://www.spamcop.net/)
• SpamHaus (http://www.spamhaus.org/)
• NJABL (http://www.njabl.org/)

A very useful tool to check whether your IP is included on a blacklist may be found at: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx. You enter your IP address and the tool reports whether you ar eincluded on any of 147 DNS based email blacklists.

1Brady, Regina. “E-Mail Strategies for Corporate Governance.” Target Marketing Jan. 2008: 27-28.

Filed under: Uncategorized by Martyn Whittaker