The Relevance of Email Marketing in 2010

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Whether you inform, invite conversation or entertain – regular newsletters are a handy way to maintain contact with potential & existing clients, employees, shareholders and industry groups.

Email marketing is relatively inexpensive when compared to traditional marketing techniques and a few features will need to be considered before assessing the relevance of email marketing to your company.

Assessing the Potential Success of your Newsletters:

Do you have the time and resources to develop consistent content?
Does company have a Marketing Plan and can any specific goals be achieved via email marketing?
Do you have a list of email addresses available to start your efforts? List building in itself can be time-consuming if you do not already have a CRM, client or leads database.

Let’s say you have identified email marketing as a viable marketing medium for your company, what comes after? The next step is to decide whether you are going to build and send your newsletters inhouse or contract a marketing company to coordinate your email marketing efforts. This will be based on staff availability and computer literacy of available staff as well as the time availability. As with most outsourced services you will find that hiring someone to build and manage your newsletter will cost more but will include a faster, more professional final result.

Newsletters can seem impersonal if they are not written with the recipient in mind. Keeping content useful and to-the-point is the best way around this. Information excerpts with links to expanded articles on your website are a great layout technique to both keep a newsletter short and generate traffic for your website. It is often a good strategy to synchronise your email marketing updates with website content updates.

Regardless of whether you choose to manage your email marketing inhouse or to outsource it you will need to choose a reliable email platform from which to build and send your newsletters from.

Features of a good Email Marketing system/platform

Simple interface
Detailed reporting (deliveries, links clicks etc)
Logical database and subscription management
Flexibility in terms of managing templates
Technology that delivers the correct formats for multiple environments (Apple, Microsoft, freeware, browser-based)

It is usually cheaper to get a system that does not charge you for every email sent. Yearly subscriptions with uncapped email send are a fairly common occurrence in these days. While you are shopping around and find out if you can get technical and design support for your newsletters.

Time and money can be wasted struggling with a layout or database list management when a single phonecall can put you on track.

Inspiration offers a comprehensive email marketing service which includes the software platform for email delivery and the expert design, technical and marketing services to support a professional communications programme.

We have worked with a huge range of clients, including local and multi-national businesses and active email clients include the Royal College of Surgeons, Sunway, Allianz, Enterprise Ireland and many more. Contact us to find out more.