E-mail marketing of some sort is an increasingly important part of a company's e-marketing mix, along side SEO, social networking and PPC. Using your current customer database it can provide means of putting information about offers,deals and news straight into the inbox of thousands of already interested potential customers. It circumvents any time lag inherant in a customer's natural viewing habits or in producing useful search engine rankings.

This article does not intend to be a thorough description of e-mail marketing campaigns but is an overview of issues raised during a company's intial explorations into this area. This company had been sending out e-mails approximately once a month for about six months and these are some of the questions raised.

Conversion Rate. At the moment roughly 1/5 of people of who receive our promotional emails actually open them. About 20% of those that open it then go on to click through to the site. If we class this as a success, that gives us a conversion rate of about 4%.  Is this good/bad/normal? Could this number be improved?

Technical Issues. The current size of a typical email we send, including images, is about 500Kb. The HTML has about approximately 600 errors (mainly trivial or none serious, to be fair). However, there are three forms that people could receive our email in. Namely:

1. Plain Text
2. HTML without Images
3. Full HTML

Currently only full HTML will probably be received in a way such as the information we are trying to send can actually be read by the customer. The first two versions will definitely not be and we have had communication from customers to this effect. And, as we only test on a single version of Outlook, even the third version is not guaranteed. Most email clients, especially online ones, will use HTML without images by default. Anyone with connection speed issues, e.g. using email via a mobile or modem connection will view versions 1 or 2.

Extending Email Content. Depending on whether it is expected or wanted by our customers we should be looking into providing extra content in our emails beyond our normal special offers to include general music news/reviews/competitions etc. Dolphin does this already. They will have “artists of the week” or gig news, technical advice, runs competitions etc. All of which gives a reason for the receiver to open up the email and have a look, even if they were not in a buying frame of mind. All of our emails should have links to our various Social Networking sites to help improve signup rates (See specific section).
 

Lovely Blue recommended

1. Speak to your e-mail marketing solution supplier about your conversation rates to see if they are normal. If not, ask them to provide feedback or information on how we could improve them.
2. New clean email templates should be created that are free from HTML errors. The current ones have been passed through many sources (dreamweaver/word/outlook), all of which add extra unneeded code, and added to by so many different people to be dangerously unstable.
3. All emails should be validated with the WC3.org HTML validation tools to ensure completely compliant code which should be compatible with the most number of email readers.
4. You need to ensure that both plain text and HTML without images produce readable emails for users that use these formats. All staff responsible for producing marketing email needs access to online email clients such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Google and others.
5. You need to investigate how emails perform on mobile phone platforms. Smart phones (HTC and IPhone) at a minimum. If you are underperforming you need to look at minimising email sizes by using less or smaller images.
6. If our market research shows that customers would respond to it, you need to start producing emails that contain related content along with our usual special offers/vouchers. All staff with a knowledge or interest (and time) could help with this. Information on new products can come from suppliers marketing departments, news can come from many online music news sources. To start off we could supply our last few blogs as new items.