Permission & marketing
E-mail marketing is a powerful tool you can use to
speak directly to existing and prospective customers.
By gaining the permission of a person who would
like to know more about a product or service, marketers
are able to send e-mail messages that provide
valuable information and special offers. Customers
and brands engage in an ongoing relationship that
benefits both parties and deepens their ties, often
resulting in increased sales.
“It’s so easy for me and for my recipients,” says
author and PR/marketing expert Ilise Benun. “The
beauty with e-mail is that it creates a dialogue in a
way that direct mail can’t. In the past, when I sent
my printed newsletter, if someone wanted to respond
to me, they’d have to pick up the phone or send me a
letter. Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t.
With e-mail, all they have to do is click ‘reply’ and
they can ‘talk’ to me.”
The important thing to remember, however,
is that recipients must give their consent to receive
these e-mails or else they will perceive your dispatches
as spam (unsolicited commercial electronic
junk mail) and immediately discard the communiqué
… often alienating the recipient, perhaps forever. It’s
a risk few brands can afford to take.
Rules & lists
Getting permission to send e-mail to people isn’t
the only critical issue to understand: Marketers
need to know the law. Under the Controlling the
Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing
Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM) legislation, marketers
must comply with certain rules. The rules state
that e-mails must contain no misleading or deceptive
information; they must be clearly identified
as advertisements; the sender’s valid postal address
must be included; and recipients must be able to
easily unsubscribe. Violations of CAN-SPAM may
mean closing your e-mail account, fines of up to
$11,000 and criminal penalties with jail time.
Even without conviction, if you are accused
of sending spam, you could find your reputation
tarnished in a way you can’t repair. Consumers may
not know about CAN-SPAM laws, but they certainly
know junk mail when they see it. Clearly, it’s best to
send e-mail to a list of people who ask to get it.
Building a great list for e-mail marketing is
worth the time and effort. The most effective way
to do this is to tap into your existing database of
customers and prospects, while further developing
the opportunity for contact by allowing people to
opt in (subscribe or choose to receive information)
on your website. By opting in, an individual gives
permission for you to send them e-mail. Simple as
that. Some marketers provide the option of having
individuals indicate exactly what types of information
they’d like to receive.
“Sign-up links on the website, the ability to forward
received e-mails to a friend and the ability for
that friend to sign up are all important if you want to
grow your audience,” says Brad Benjamin, an interactive
designer and developer in Long Beach, Calif.,
who’s served as web guru for a variety of clients,
including AIGA Los Angeles. He observes that if you
make it easy, people will sign up and build your list
for you.
“On every page of our website there is a signup
link, and these days we get about 30 sign ups
per month,” says Peleg Top of Top Design in Los
Angeles, whose eTopic newsletter covers design and
marketing for causes.
Experts recommend that the process of opting
in require a confirmation e-mail. Typically what
happens is a person sees the subscribe link on your
website, clicks the link, fills out a very brief form,
submits it and sees a message saying that a confirmation
will be sent to the e-mail address indicated.
The recipient then needs to open this confirmation
e-mail and click on a link in the body of the message
to complete the subscription process. This is called
double opt in and provides a measure of security while
helping to discourage prank sign ups to e-mail lists.
Once the data is collected, it should be put into an
Excel document format for export and use with
e-mail sending software.
Unlike traditional direct mail marketing, where
a low response rate is considered good and masses of
mail must be sent out to get desired results, effective
permission e-mail marketing is very highly targeted.
Less is more. Sending well-crafted messages to a
smaller universe of recipients will be the most effective
strategy.
The goal is to actively engage your audience in
communication. Says Top, “The results and response
we get is the proof we’ve gotten the right message
to the right people. Many times the e-mail will start
a dialog with the client or prospect, and that’s ultimately
what we want to happen.”
No matter how great your e-mail messages are,
however, sometimes people just change their minds
and are no longer interested in hearing from you. So
you must allow recipients to opt out (unsubscribe).
Making this clear and easy will show respect and
professionalism, as well as comply with CAN-SPAM
laws. Bottom line: All of this means that you are
sending dispatches only to people who really want to
hear from you. That provides greater opportunities
for you to build lasting and intimate relationships
with customers.
Software & service
Finding the right e-mail partners is also critical to
the success of your marketing. Several great choices
for software and service companies—e-mail service
providers (or ESPs)—exist to serve your needs.
There are huge organizations like Epsilon and
Axiom, but their programs will be cost prohibitive
for most small businesses. The self-serve e-mail solutions
currently used by most designers are Constant
Contact, ExactTarget and Emma, the last of which
is an AIGA national sponsor and very designer
friendly.
Constant Contact Do-It-Yourself Email
Marketing is a web-based e-mail marketing service
used by more than 70,000 small businesses and
associations. With Constant Contact, you can create
e-mail newsletters and announcements that get
immediate and measurable results. Emma is also
a web-based service that includes everything you
need to manage e-mail marketing and communications
from start to finish. It’s a unique platform that
combines easy self-serve features, a custom-designed
brand template and personal assistance whenever you
need it. Exact Target provides a similar service with
several options depending on size and scale of the
business served.
“We design our e-mails in Photoshop, handcode
them in BBedit and write them in Microsoft
Word. We use Emma for sending, account management
and reporting,” says Rob Bynder of Robert
Bynder Design in Westlake Village, Calif., who
provides e-mail communication services for several
clients, including a large insurance company, an
international packaging design firm, a well-known
business author, and AIGA. (See “Rob Bynder’s Keys
to Success in E-mail Marketing.”)
Larsen, a communication design agency of
50+ professionals in Minneapolis and San Francisco
serving over 140 clients nationwide, uses a similar
process with a different e-mail provider. “We custom-
design our e-mails in Photoshop and hand-code
them in BBedit. We send them via Exact Target,”
says Gwyneth Dwyer, Larsen’s director of Writing
Services and editor of Larsen inSights newsletter.
ESPs provide their services for a fairly low
setup fee and a base monthly cost for sending a
set number of e-mails per month. Additional emails
can be sent, usually subject to a per-dispatch
cost. “An Emma Pro account starts at $250 for the
setup fee—this includes a custom design for your
template—then monthly costs for 1000 e-mails
per month—our minimum—for $30 a month or
3 cents per e-mail,” says Annie Kinnaird of Emma.
“The per e-mail rate drops as the volume increases:
The next tier is 2500 for $45. Most ESPs have a
similar model, but the tiers and costs vary. We also
have an agency platform, which is priced for an
agency to resell to a client.”
All of these ESPs have good products, many
useful resources and lots of information about e-mail
marketing on their websites. “Find software that suits
your needs and has a relationship with the big e-mail
houses,” notes Benjamin. “Accept the fact that you
can’t run a successful e-mail marketing program out
of Outlook or mail.app, as some initially ignorant
people assume.” The key is to research the options
and choose what works best for you.
Content & the web
Some of the benefits of using digital e-mail versus
printed direct mail that is delivered through the
U.S. Postal Service are obvious—e-mail is fast,
intimate and cost effective. As in traditional direct
mail campaigns, it’s all about designing and delivering
the right messages to the right people so that
they will read and respond to them in a positive
way. “The trick is capturing attention in a crowded
inbox—and then building trust with readers,” says
Larsen’s Dwyer. “We’ve been successful because
we work hard to create original content that brings
value to our readers. Perhaps most importantly, we
value our readers’ time by creating a visually interesting,
easily scannable e-mail that, we hope, is a
pleasure to receive.”
The e-mails themselves should be subject to
the “less is more” adage as well. “Keep it short and
simple for best results,” recommends Bynder. A few
concise stories, a couple of intriguing visuals, and
links from the e-mail to a website for more information
are recommended.
Make sure to present content that’s relevant,
valuable and timely. Bite-sized, easily digested, yet
information-rich messages that recipients can’t get
from other sources create the impression that you
are an expert worth reading. “People get bombarded
by e-mails, so for them to take the time and read
what you have to say it has to be a quick read. Focus
on them and don’t make it all about your greatest
accomplishments. People don’t care about what
award you won or what project you just finished.
They want to know ‘How will this info improve and
help me?’” advises Top.
Content can be expanded using links to your
website. Provide a “Read More …” link so stories
jump to the web, and link each visual to a specific
web page as well. “People are more likely to click an
image than a similar text link,” says Benjamin. This
is a great way to build traffic on your website and
expand opportunities to connect with customers.
Perhaps most importantly, do not be intimidated
by the concept of creating full-blown printstyle
publications. “Lots of designers don’t feel they
are good writers, so they resist the idea of an e-mail
newsletter,” Benun notes. “But a newsletter doesn’t
have to be lots of writing. It can be a few words with
a few images. Or a link, an image and one line of
text. It depends on who your market is and what
they care about.”
Measurement & analysis
Another highly desirable aspect of e-mail marketing
is that the results are measurable, so you will know,
nearly immediately, if you are providing content of
interest to your recipients. “We use Emma, and they
track results,” says Benun. “They can tell us who
opens the messages, who clicks through to some of
the links and who forwards it to a friend.”
There are two primary response rates that email
marketers look at to measure success. One is
the open rate; the other is the click-through rate (see
“Anatomy of an E-mail”). “The open rate is less reliable
with regard to the recipient actually ‘reading’
the e-mail, because an open can register if the e-mail
is displayed in a preview pane,” says Kinnaird. The
click through is the golden ticket, she explains.
“Industry averages for open rates and click-through
rates vary slightly according to the nature of the message
and its audience, i.e. B to B, B to C and mixed
audience lists. Good open and click-through rates
also vary by industry, the quality of the list and following
best practices.”
These tracking features allow results to drive
creative, maybe more than in other media. With
this unprecedented level of feedback, actual recipient responses can inform text and imagery choices
and can allow designers and writers to make modifi
cations that will cause future e-mails to be even
more appealing.
“We use our intuition and experience to help
craft campaigns,” says Bynder. “We also rely quite
heavily on reporting features provided by our software,
which helps us test, focus and improve.”
Testing variations on layouts and subject lines by
splitting the list of recipients in a single e-mail dispatch
can be an eye-opening experience. Over time,
the reports from service providers constitute feedback
that allows marketers to deliver the right message to
the right people—again and again.
Flexibility & results
E-mail is a versatile marketing medium that can
provide immediate results. Innovative creative content
that is appropriate for the target audience really
works. “It’s about understanding the technology,
using design sensibility to create well-executed campaigns
and using business sense to create brand-on
communications. Design firms and agencies are
actually positioned to do this better than technology
companies or marketing organizations,” says Bynder.
All of these factors make e-mail marketing the perfect
new service to offer clients.
SIDEBAR: Rob Bynder's Keys to Success in E-mail Marketing
Partners
- Find an e-mail service provider that you trust,
like and can work with. Believe it or not, some
can’t deliver on their promises.
- If you don’t have them already, find and work with
writers, coders, designers and/or marketing strategists.
It’s important to use the right people for the
right job. Just because you can easily do something
on a computer doesn’t mean you should be
the one to do it. Collaborate with experts.
Landscape
- Research the e-mail marketing industry, find the
important players and become familiar with best
practices and trends. There’s a lot happening in
this young, niche industry and some really good
lessons to learn from those that are willing to
share. Subscribe to e-mails and read the blogs
from these organizations.
- Start a collection. Collect e-mails from other
agencies and from your client’s competitors.
Collect e-mails and then read the blogs from the
e-mail marketing industry players.
Business practices
- Target your messages and campaigns. Smaller,
focused campaigns are almost always better
than large, mass e-mails.
- Focus on appropriate and targeted marketing.
Don’t get too caught up in the technology. If
you’re an in-house organization doing e-mail
communication, make sure you have a design,
branding or marketing player involved. This is
not an IT project.
- Experiment and learn. It’s only an e-mail. The
whole industry is still fairly immature. There’s a
lot of bad and mediocre e-mail marketing out
there and a lot of room to do good work.
- Offer interactive services that include web
design and e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing
services include more than just e-mails;
they also include websites and landing pages.
Knowing click-through rates on e-mails is great,
but in many cases that’s only the first half of the
desired result. The other half is designing a website
or web page that enables a visitor to follow
through on the desired action.
- As professional communicators, we are well positioned
to successfully penetrate this medium. We
(generally and hopefully) understand branding,
visual communication and marketing practices.
That said, e-mail marketing is not appropriate for
every studio or agency, so figure out if it fits into
your strategic business plan before you invest
the time and energy. Partner with another organization
when appropriate rather than integrating
e-mail services into your core functions.
