You may have already signed up for email newsletters, in which case you know all about what it's like to receive them. Just in case you haven't, an effective email newsletter is a personalised email sent to your prospects and clients. The personalisation may be discreet (but not completely invisible) in that the links within the newsletter may be tagged so that you can see if a particular individual responded to your marketing campaign.
Usually to generate traffic on your website, but it could also be a vehicle for encouraging a direct sale all by itself, be part of a viral marketing campaign. Another possibility is to stay in the eye of a prospect by offering something (usually advice or information) for free on a routine basis - the idea being that if you offer worthwhile advice, your reputation for expertise in your field will grow, putting you ahead of the competition.
Only if you have something to say on a regular basis. Getting a good system set up requires a fair bit of effort and expense which will be wasted if you only manage a single newsletter (this does happen).
We are not lawyers, so you may want to seek professional advice before sending out your email campaign.
There are regulations concerning bulk email newsletters covered in The Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (2002/58/EC). See also the statutory instrument.
Amongst other things, this directive extends controls on unsolicited direct marketing to all forms of electronic communications including unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE or Spam) and SMS to mobile telephones; UCE and SMS will be subject to a prior consent requirement, so the receiver is required to agree to it in advance, except in the context of an existing customer relationship, where companies may continue to email or SMS to market their own similar products on an 'opt-out' basis.
Our interpretation of this is that if you've done business with someone, you can continue to email them subject to providing the facility to opt-out. If you haven't done business with someone (ie a prospect, not a customer), then you have to get their consent to email them in the first place. This isn't necessarily a hard thing to implement - all you have to have is a 'newsletter' box on your web page that collects their email address. By clicking the button to add their name to the list, you've got their consent.
What the regulations do mean is that some newsletter management software (particularly US software) may not be compliant with UK and EU regulations.
However, like we said earlier, you should seek professional advice if you have any concerns.
Before you start considering your email campaign, think about what annoys you with other people's - too long, no real news, too often, too garish, too confusing, no means of unsubscribing, etc. This is a good start to getting it right: make sure you wouldn't bin your own email immediately upon arrival.
The steps are:
This last item requires that the web server has a database either to log visitors and/or manage unsubscribe requests. Since the web database is the one being updated, there has to be a route back to your (local) database and a means of integrating it. One thing to remember is that the web database is not keeping office hours, it's going all the time.
Although this requirement does add to the expense, the same database could make it a proper 'round trip' for you in that you should be able to track individual responses to newsletters.
All being well you should see an increase in website traffic. You will probably also get a number of unsubscription requests which will require your local database (if that's how you've done it) to be updated. Failing to update unsubscription requests could get you branded as a spammer by one of the anti-spam organisations eg www.spamhaus.org though their major concern is bulk spammers (hundreds of thousands per day).
In order to be able to begin you need the following resources:
and optionally:
Make sure that your newsletter's subject line cannot be confused with spam. We've had emails through with subjects like Congratulations, Hi! and Website.
Equally, the sender must be 'realistic' and not Sales or Administrator. The best thing is to be able to identify your organisation name from the sender (eg Caz Limited newsletter) rather than an email address (joe.bloggs@caz.ltd.uk).
Keep it short and sweet. Get your key points across and then direct them to the long version on your website. Which of course means that there must be a long version on your website. Establish a house style, probably chattier than your usual website pages.
You can add in other standard marketing techniques like coupons - but remember to put in a redemption date limit.
Perhaps consider something engaging to add to the bottom - to ensure they get there. We've seen jokes/humour used in this way (though the quality is sometimes questionable) and a sudoku has been suggested...
HTML - ie pretty, not plain text in a Courier font - newsletters will almost certainly get your message across better. However, not all email clients can read them, so you need to provide a link back to your website at the top of your email to make sure that these folk get to see it.
Make sure that your newsletter works without the images being downloaded. On many email clients (eg Outlook) external images are blocked by default unless the sender (ie you) is trusted. If the recipient can't make head or tail of your newsletter, they will take about 50 milliseconds to decide that it's binnable.
If, and only if, you have enough changing content, adding an RSS feed to your website will mean that the web pages of stories for your newsletter can do double duty. See our guide to RSS for more information.
If you have an existing web content management system from us, we may be able to borrow some of the 'stories' for your newsletter - ie we'd be extending your database rather than creating anew. Certainly the same familiar style of WCM editing could be employed.
Integrating third-party CRM systems may take a little longer - it just depends upon whether your CRM product of choice has any web tools to go with it.
With regard to template design, copy, etc, this is all normal website fare so of course we can do that.
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