Carlos DaSilva is an experienced Email Marketing Account Manager for Direct Marketing Services. Here Carlos tells us more about the benefits of email marketing and the new HTML email design service from Thomson Local, aimed at helping small businesses.
What are the benefits of email marketing over other direct marketing channels?
Direct mail and telemarketing are extremely valuable marketing tools for businesses of all sizes, but email marketing does have some advantages over both.
Email campaigns are typically much cheaper than direct mail campaigns as you don’t have to pay for postage. Plus your message will reach your recipients quicker as you don’t have to wait for the post to be delivered.
With email marketing, it’s easy to see how much response your email campaign has generated by looking at the number of opens and clicks it generates for you, whereas tracking response from a direct mail campaign can become quite complicated if your recipients then go online to browse your website.
Finally, if you’re looking to generate awareness of your products and services quickly, using email marketing will be much more effective than telemarketing. Telemarketing is time consuming and can often be overlooked during busy times.
Why is the Thomson Local email broadcast service better than just buying a list of email addresses?
Buying a list of email addresses may seem cheaper at first glance, but you have to remember that you won’t know how many other companies have also bought the same email addresses or how accurate your list is until you actually contact it.
At Thomson Local our email addresses have all been verified and have also opted in to receive communications from third parties. Your campaign won’t have a high bounce rate.
In addition to this, we restricted the number of emails we send to each email address to just one email per week. By doing this, we can help ensure our customers campaign open rates remain high, plus we don’t annoy our customers by emailing them too frequently and risk them opting out.
What are the most common mistakes small businesses make when designing their email creative?
Designing and coding an HTML email so that it displays correctly across all the major email browsers is no easy task if you’re not experienced at coding HTML.
Quite a number of our small business customers think they will give HTML coding a go themselves to save on costs and then discover that they do need outside help once the campaign deadline starts approaching.
Even if budgets are tight, they would probably have been much better off engaging a professional to do the job for them from the start, so they can focus their attentions on other aspects of their business where they can have more impact.
What tips can you give for making an email creative successful?
In order to maximise your open rate you need to write a good subject line – it’s the first thing your prospect will see and often the part of the campaign that is given the least consideration. Try and create a sense of intrigue so the prospect will be compelled to open the email for more information, but don’t be misleading as you could risk alienating your audience.
When choosing the content for your email campaign it is important to consider spam filters that might try and block your email from reaching the inbox of your prospect. Don’t use words such as “Free”, “No obligation” and “Order Now”. Although you might think these words will create a compelling message they are likely to trigger spam filters and mean your message won’t be delivered into the inbox.
When designing the creative, I always advise my customers of the following basic pointers:
- Don’t make your email too image based or copy heavy. A mixture of both works best and you should also make both images and text clickable.
- Make sure your company name and logo are clear and well represented.
- Make sure your email is scannable quickly. Most prospects won’t spend longer than a few seconds reading an email before deciding to either action or delete it.
- Make sure you make it clear what you want prospects to do next. For example, call, click or request a call back.
I would say that if you find you’re still struggling to create an effective creative then speak to a professional email designer.
Tell us about the new HTML email design products Thomson Local have just launched.
Having listened to our customers, we recognise that most small businesses simply don’t have the skills in-house to be able to put together an HTML email creative, or the time to liaise with a separate design agency.
With this in mind we’ve put together four HTML email design products aimed at small to medium sized businesses. So now you can come to us for the email addresses and the creative.
Depending on the level of skill you have in-house, you can provide us with the copy you would like to use and we will put together a design around it for you. Or you could provide us with both your copy and design as a PDF and we will code it up for you.
Alternatively, you could choose to amend one of our five template designs or opt for our full design service where we take care of all the elements of your campaign and you get a completely bespoke creative.
