Email marketing provides a great way to communicate with your prospective customers and existing ones through a personal route similar to receiving a letter through your letterbox (but in an electronic format).

Email marketing can take a very direct response style or provide your audience with engaging and valuable content, meaning that they will read and retain, and even forward to their friends.

Emails are relatively cheap to send out and costs often depend on the complexity of the email creative (pictures and text within the email) or the volume of recipients on your email list.

Personalisation

Emails can be personalised to individuals within your database to reflect a more personal message to your potential or existing customers meaning a more personal response to your marketing campaigns, although be careful with this technique and consider you target audience, many internet users find a too personalised service can lead to suspicious ‘big brother’ perceptions of your brand and marketing efforts.

Opt in

Ensuring that any users you email are opt in is nowadays an absolute and legal requirement. Any unsolicited emails broadcast will rapidly lead to complaints and reporting to online policing authorities who will clamp down on offending advertisers heavily. Many advertisers looking to acquire new customers often purchase email lists in a bid to ‘piggy back’ off a similar brands demographic, again ensure that the recipients of the list are prepared to receive your email and that the list is ‘partner opt in’. Small Business World offers free and impartial help on UK email providers and list buying, just drop us a line or email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Spam

Any unsolicited email broadcast by any organisation in the UK is classed as highly illegal and will incur severe penalties from legal authorities, always ensure your email ethics are good and never take any chances!

Expectations

Don’t expect every single one of your emails to reach their recipients and be opened! Some people frequently change their email addresses, or give spoof or inaccurate ones, by accident or on purpose, making the email marketer’s job more difficult. Emails that never reach a valid email address are known as ‘bounces’. Just because someone receives an email doesn’t necessarily mean they open it, one effective tactic to ensure they open the email is to ensure a good, attractive ‘subject line’ – if you are selling a product or service a message of price or discount usually works well.

Email marketing provides a great way to communicate with you prospective customers and existing ones in a very personal way. Just like sending a letter or a piece of direct mail to a prospective customer, recipients can easily open your email or simply move in to their dustbin so your topic and subject line must be appealing and worth viewing.

Email marketing can take a very direct response style or provide your audience with engaging and valuable content, meaning that they will read and retain, and even forward to friends your emails if you get it right.

Email marketing has developed significantly since it was first used in a very primitive fashion by online pioneers more than 12 years ago. Emails can now feature images, interactive application or even stream movies to show and bring to life products and services.

Email laws designed to police the issues of unsolicited or spam emails ensures that the channel remains a viable option for the honest marketer with a well planned email marketing campaign. Whenever you broadcast an email to anyone you must ensure that the list you are sending it from is: ‘opt in’ this means all recipients have agreed to receive an email form you and your company.

Email data is extremely valuable therefore at every point on your business website or offline you should make an effort to capture you customers and prospects email information allowing you to create a dialog with them through the use email campaigns.

It’s possible to purchase / rent other companies lists that look like they match your target demographic, this allows you to market to a completely new audience.

As with the majority of online marketing channels email yields a large amounts data about how effective your campaign has been, heres a step by step process on the important metric when broadcasting emails:

1.    Email list size (volume of email addresses on the list)

2.    Bad email addresses (number of incorrect or badly formatted email addresses before broadcast)

3.    Number of soft bounces (A soft bounce is an e-mail message that gets as far as the recipient's mail server but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the intended recipient. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient's inbox is completely full.)

4.    Number of hard bounces (A hard bounce is an e-mail message that has been returned to the sender because the recipient's address is incorrect, fake or invalid.)

5.    Open rate (the number of people that your email was broadcast to divided by the number of people that opened it) – this is where a good subject line comes in handy!

6.    Click through rate (this is the number of people that have opened your email divided by the number of people that have clicked through to the website as a result of it)

 The best solution for small business is to work with an email broadcast tool or even one of the many email service providers in the market place – check out our guide of the best for great deals exclusive to small business world.