In these cash strapped times, frugality has never been more fashionable. So it should come as no surprise that (according to a Juniper Research survey) 3 million people are now using mobile coupons in the UK. And with a redemption rate 6 times higher than paper, giving out mobile coupons is a marketing trend set to continue, even when we’re back to maxing out our credit cards.

Hunting around for discounts is already popular on the web. In fact, Hitwise estimated that searches for discount vouchers went up 47.5% in the past year. Coupons are great for email marketing too, with reports that open rates for emails with coupons average 25% compared to 16-18% for emails without.

So, as the figures show, coupons can be a great way of attracting people to your website and getting your emails opened. But when it comes to mobile, coupon marketing offers so much more…

Mobile – the ultimate personal marketing channel

Let’s just consider some of the benefits mobiles offer to marketers:

• Most people have one (many have two)
• They offer a direct route of contact
• They’re normally switched on and close to hand
• People can use them to respond impulsively to marketing
• The success of campaigns can be measured to the exact text message
• They have a built in payment mechanism

And all these benefits without the need of a touch screen!

When you consider the immediacy of mobile it’s no wonder coupon campaigns can be so effective. Here are two great examples:

Coca-Cola’s 200k giveaway

Coca-Cola recently ran a promotion (comprising of point-of-sale advertising, door posters and shelf blazers) letting people know they were only a text message away from a free drink. Participants simply had to text ‘YES’ and their date of birth to receive a promotion code for a free bottle of Fanta, Sprite or Dr Pepper.

The promotion helped distribute 200,000 free bottles to 100,000 people, without the need to fill in a form or cut out a coupon. The campaign had a very high redemption rate of 87%, and provided Coca-Cola with valuable data on coupon hotspots.

Planet Funk’s 377% campaign ROI

Uber trendy US clothing retailer Planet Funk is currently the poster child for mobile coupon marketing. In the run up to Christmas last year it sent 2000 coupons to text subscribers and people who’d texted in response to posters and ads on its website.

Planet Funk’s campaign received a 91% redemption rate – contributing 28% to their December sales and a 377% return on the cost of the campaign. As an added bonus, 15% of coupon redeemers (not wishing to look a gift horse in the mouth) opted into future Planet Funk mobile campaigns.

As these two examples show, coupon marketing, whether by email or mobile, can be a very effective way of attracting a burst of sales and filling your database for future campaigns.

So, instead of Christmas cards, consider sending coupons to your favourite customers this year. It’s a gift many will be happy to receive.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Email services provider Campaigner recently surveyed 259 small businesses of which 46% said they used email marketing and 36% plan to start in the next year. So am I impressed by these findings? Does nearly half already using email sound a lot? Well, to be honest, it should be a lot more.

If only 36% plan on starting email marketing campaigns that leaves 18% who’ll continue to miss out on one of the best marketing tools around. Whether you’re a landscape gardener or an international retailer, email is a great tool for relationship building, attracting people to your website and notching up sales.

So for those 18% of small businesses who don’t see the need to use email (and anybody else’s who’d like some advice) here are a few tried and tested types of email marketing:

Informational

Arguably the most effective use of email (well, we certainly think so) is as a relationship building tool.

Sending out a newsletter packed with useful advice, product tips and industry insight is a great way of building rapport and trust in your brand, and, dare I say it, ‘thought leadership’. These typically receive high open rates and click throughs (but only if you’re providing great content, of course).

Newsletters can be quite time consuming to put together. But the beauty is that you can reuse the content in other marketing materials, such as your website’s blog (here at bda we do it the other way round).

Inspirational or entertaining

Consider sharing customer success stories and case studies of how your product/service has helped solve a problem. If you can write it in an interesting way (rather than like a backslapping press release) you can show off your expertise and reflect your business’ personality at the same time.

Promotion

Another popular way of using email is as a quick fire sales tool.

Whether it’s announcing a new product or offering a discount on an old one, email can be used to quickly spread awareness on your special offers. Email is also great for sending out coupons, which you can track to gauge the success of your campaign.

However, with many people weary of the amount of salesy emails they receive these days, response rates for promotional emails are typically low. You can, however, dramatically increase response if you can personalise your messages.

Personalisation power

Thanks to modern one-to-one marketing techniques, the days of carpet bombing the same message are over. Now it’s possible to personalise every email for each recipient.

And I don’t just mean changing the name. An email’s content can be customised based on all sorts of criteria, such as the recipient’s company’s size, their industry, purchase history and any other nugget of info stored in your database.

You can then create a flexible template in which you can drop customised content with a single mouse click. Personalising emails means you can cross-sell offers based on a customer’s purchase history, deliver case studies relevant to their industry and increase the value offering of each message.

With email fast becoming a mainstream marketing tool, it’s vital to ensure your messages are more relevant and valuable than your competitors. Personalisation (and great content) is what can make your emails ‘must reads’, rather than banished to the junk folder.

Offer a mixture of the above

So which type of email do you think is best? Well, they all certainly have their merits. But the best strategy is to mix all three.

Email marketing can take time to bear fruit. But one of its benefits is you can track every open, click through and sale. Watching how people respond to your messages helps you to identify what they’re interested in and which types of emails work best. You can then adjust your campaign accordingly.

Golden Rule = Get permission. Don’t spam

But before you run off to start penning your first email, whatever you do don’t buy a list of email addresses. Sending unsolicited email is akin to door-to-door selling in many people’s eyes. As well as being blocked or deleted, your message risks being flagged as spam, which will leave your credibility and campaign in tatters.

So do the honourable thing and start your own list by asking for email addresses at every opportunity. It might take longer to build your database. But you’ll have a list of permission based leads keen to hear what you have to say.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region

Next month everyone will be able to start playing around with Google’s snazzy new app: Google Wave. It’s already being billed as the future of email and revolutionising the way we collaborate on the web, as the hype machine pumps out superlatives.

So is the hype justified? Does Google Wave truly offer marketers new opportunities for starting a real dialogue with customers? Or will it be another niche tool few will use outside the web savvy crowd?

What is Google Wave?

Imagine the love child of email and instant messaging and you’re not far away from picturing Google Wave.

Instead of emails you send ‘waves’, to which recipients can reply, edit your message or chat in real time just as you would on messenger. Members of the wave can also drag and drop photos, videos and links into the conversation, as well as go back and edit earlier posts.

The ability to build a group conversation in this way obviously offers great potential for collaborating on projects. But does Google Wave offer anything new to marketers?

Is Google Wave the future of email?

You’ll often hear email marketing being described as an ‘ongoing dialogue with customers’ or a ‘one-to-one conversation’. But marketing emails often seem more like infomercial broadcasts than a two way dialogue.

Well, Google Wave could change all that with its welding together of email and instant messaging. And it has the potential to offer email marketers the level of engagement they’ve been striving for.

If Google Wave becomes a success, instead of asking website visitors for an email address you’ll ask them to join your wave. As well as receiving your latest promotional offers, members of your wave will be able to ask questions in real time and interact with other members in an open format.

This level of interactivity means marketing messages will have to be about more than just encouraging clicks to buy your products. They will, in fact, be more like sitting around a table having a chat with your customers, than making a speech to a captive audience.

But how can you have 100s of conversations at once?

Google Wave offers great potential for greater customer engagement with your brand. But it also presents a challenge: how can you manage conversations with 100s or 1000s of your customers at once?

Well, if Google Wave does prove to be the success its creators hope, and starts to replace email, marketers will have to find a way of using what could be the ultimate conversational marketing tool.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Microsoft might have been named the UK’s most popular brand earlier this year, but it’s not going to be on many email marketers’ Christmas card list. Its decision to continue using Word to render emails in Outlook 2010 has had web developers and email marketers up in arms in recent months. Despite the best efforts of the Email Standards Project, fixoutlook.org, 100s of blog posts and 1000s of Tweets to rally support against its decision, Microsoft has refused to change its mind.

Why is using Word a problem?

Prior to Outlook 2007, Microsoft used Internet Explorer to render emails. This suited email marketers because they could create attractive newsletters in the same way as they’d create a web page. But in 2007 Microsoft decided to switch to using Word. This didn’t just put the brakes on email newsletter design but put it in reverse.

CSS is a popular coding language for creating web pages, and would be the language of choice for most newsletter developers. But the problem is that Word struggles to accurately render CSS code, leading to CSS emails appearing broken, with images ripped out, fonts changed and the layout messed up. So instead developers are forced to stick to the antiquated design methods Word allows.

Microsoft’s decision to use Word infuriated the web developer community in 2007, but many hoped Microsoft would listen to the complaints and reverse its decision for the 2010 edition. However, with the release of Outlook 2010 imminent, it looks as though email marketers are going to be stuck with Word for another five years at least.

Possible reasons

So is Microsoft’s decision to continue using Word due to laziness? To lock people into using its products? Or just pure arrogance in refusing to listen to web developers’ demands? After all, why is Microsoft going to pay attention to 16,000 complaints on Twitter when it has a subservient user base of over 300 million?

One of the reasons given by Microsoft has been security because Word won’t run the web scripts used by spammers. But Outlook has been plagued with security issues in the past and Microsoft has always been quick to praise the protection offered by Internet Explorer. So security is unlikely to be the real reason.

The most logical explanation is that Microsoft is simply trying to provide the most consistent experience for Outlook users.

Looking after its users

If Microsoft were to use Internet Explorer then when emails are first received they’ll be rendered accurately. But if the recipient then replies or forwards the email on, any changes they make will be done using Word. Using two different rendering engines in this way was leading to inconsistencies between what people created in Word and what was received.

So to ensure emails appeared consistently between Outlook users, Microsoft decided to just use Word for both rendering and creation to remove the possibility of these inconsistencies occurring.

So Microsoft might be the UK’s most popular brand. But their decision to continue using Word to render emails means there are plenty of web developers hoping Google and its new email application, Google Wave, knocks Microsoft off its perch next year.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Recent research by E-Consultancy has highlighted how valuable email continues to be for lead generation. In its study, E-Consultancy found that, along with natural search (SEO), email continues to be one of the most popular methods of generating sales on the web, with 74% of companies using it regularly.

Whilst other budgets are suffering in the recession (e.g. 12% drop in the use of paid search in the last year), email’s cost effectiveness has secured its position as the ever reliable workhorse of digital marketing.

To help you gain the maximum benefit from your email campaigns, here are 15 tips for creating emails that are opened, read and responded to:

1. Offer something for free to attract subscribers – A common tactic is to offer a free eBook, discount voucher or podcast to entice people to register their email address
2. Make it easy to subscribe – Have a clear subscription box on your website, with details of what they can gain from registering for your email newsletter
3. Use an eye catching subject line – When your email arrives you have half a second to catch your reader’s attention before they decide whether to ignore it or delete it altogether. So use an intriguing headline that offers a benefit and a promise of what they’ll gain from reading what you have to say
4. Feature interesting content ‘above the fold’ – Recipients will often glance at your email in the preview pane before deciding whether to open it or not. So position interesting content, such as an eye catching image or list of the featured topics, in the top visible part of your message
5. Make it personal – People’s inbox is a private place closely guarded against unwanted visitors. So make sure you come across as a welcomed, polite guest by using your database to address recipients by name. This can dramatically improve your open rate
6. Make it conversational – Your email should feel like a one-to-one conversation, rather than a single message broadcast to 1000s. So use an informal, conversational style of writing as though writing to a friend with some great information you want to share
7. Make it relevant – Use what you know about your customers to make your emails more relevant to their interests. So send them details of products related to what they’re bought before or expressed an interest in to help improve your response rate
8. Create a persona – A tactic used by many large organisations to make their messages more personable is to use an imaginary character as the email’s author. This can help their messages to come across as the viewpoint of another customer or independent commentator, rather than a drone towing the corporate line
9. Don’t try to overtly sell – Save the sales copy for your corporate brochure. People register to receive emails from you because they want useful information, not a sales pitch.
10. Offer to solve a problem – Sell through education, offer useful information that helps to solve a customer’s problem or offers them useful insight they won’t find elsewhere. Providing great content of value will build trust, demonstrate your expertise and increase the likelihood of the reader wanting to buy your product
11. Keep it short – Your emails should contain nuggets of information readers can quickly consume, rather than longwinded articles. If you do have a lot of information you want to share then offer a summary or snippet in your email with a link back to the full article on your website
12. Make it easy to unsubscribe – It’s good manners to make it easy for people to leave your email list, with a clear ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of your email. Otherwise you risk damaging the relationship if the recipient feels they’ve been tricked into an agreement they can’t get out of
13. Be timely – Send your emails at the same time, whether it’s weekly or monthly. Then people will have the expectation of receiving your messages and are more likely to be preconditioned to open them
14. Be consistent – Adopt a familiar layout, design and style of copy in every message. Then your readers will know which parts they like to read and will recognise the emails are from you. Being consistent also helps maintain your branding and the positive impression your building with every message
15. Use a clear call to action – Generally speaking, the aim of your email is to persuade the recipient to click through to your website and buy your product or service. So make sure you’re providing a clear call to action which tells your reader exactly what you want them to do
16. Test your messages – Send different versions of your email to different segments in your email list, with different titles, layouts and content, to see which generate the best response. Through testing what works best you can learn how to improve your emails’ effectiveness and increase the number taking action and buying your product at the end

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Despite all the fuss over Twitter and Facebook, email continues to be the workhorse of internet marketing, and one of your most potent tools. It’s great for maintaining contact with prospects, building relationships and turning leads into customers.

But there’s more to email than just sending them out and waiting for the sales to roll in. First you have to get your messages delivered, which is why deliverability continues to be the email marketer’s top priority and challenge.

A recent study in the US found that 1 in 5 emails fail to make it into people’s inboxes, which is a large chunk of your budget wasted. So to help you improve the odds of your messages making it through, here are 15 tips for improving the deliverability of your emails:

1. Avoid spammy gimmicks – Emails are blocked or junked because they’re regarded as spam. So you should avoid the stylistic tactics used by spammers, such as all caps, big fonts and lots of exclamation points!!!
2. Avoid excessive use of hype words – Spam filters are constantly being updated to look out for the words and phrases used to sell dodgy pills and money making scams. So avoid using words and phrases like free, limited time offer, amazing and bonus
3. Screen with SpamAssassin – Give your emails a quick health check with this free tool. SpamAssassin will check your messages and then inform you what changes are needed to improve the chance of them being delivered
4. Use an email service provider – Specialist email marketing service providers maintain good working relationships with internet service providers to ensure a high percentage of their emails make it through. Popular services include Constant Contact, AWeber and iContact
5. Delete bounced emails from your list – If any emails are returned undelivered then delete the recipients address from your list straightaway. If your email campaigns start having a bounce rate of higher than 5% then you risk being flagged as a spammer and your messages blocked
6. Don’t send over 200 identical emails at once – If you do need to send high volumes, send them in batches and allow a few minute gap between each batch
7. Send marketing email through a different IP address to your corporate email – Using different IP addresses will ensure that if your marketing emails are blocked it wont affect your day to day business emails
8. Implement authentication protocols (e.g. Sender ID, DomainKeys and Sender Policy Framework) – Authentication counters the problem of anonymous phishing and spoof emails by identifying the sender
9. Use verified opt-in – When people first subscribe to your email newsletter they’ll be sent an introductory email with a unique link. When they click on the link it authenticates their email address and that they’ve given permission for you to send them messages
10. Ask to be added to their address book – This will get your sender address white listed and save your messages from falling into the junk folder
11. Provide HTML and text email formats – Although HTML emails often get a higher response rate, they can be easily mistaken for spam. So send ‘sandwich’ messages containing both formats to ensure at least one version gets delivered
12. Don’t use too many graphics – Graphics are often ripped out by corporate message filters, so don’t rely on graphics to carry the message. Use images sparingly and only when relevant to your offer as they can also slow down how quickly the email is downloaded, which can lead to recipients hovering dangerously over the delete key
13. Avoid using attachments – Attachments are often used to deliver viruses in the disguise of supposedly important documents, so people are wary of opening them. Attachments also increase the size of your email, so offer a link to the document hosted on your website instead
14. Send email at right time – The best time to send emails is around lunchtime Tuesday to Thursday. On Mondays people will be too busy to read it, whilst on Fridays they’re already thinking about the weekend
15. Segment emails for a better response – Offering content that’s relevant, timely and of valuable to your recipient is the key to email marketing. So for starters, you should send different emails to existing customers to those you send to prospects, and sending offers relevant to what they’ve bought before is also a good idea

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Whilst some might be wishing to get through this year as quickly as possible, we’re excited about the prospects for 2009 and the developments taking place in such an exciting industry (we like to think so anyway).

There can be little doubt that marketing is going to experience some substantial changes, and here are our predictions for the ones to watch out for in 2009:

- Tightening budgets mean brands will be demanding marketing that’s more measurable, and will be spending less on big TV and outdoor projects. The measurability of email and other digital campaigns, such as personalised URLs, will hasten the shift of budgets from traditional to online marketing.

- Email marketing will continue to be popular because of its familiarity, measurability and effectiveness in building customer relationships. More sophisticated data collection means email will become more targeted and can deliver personalised one-to-one marketing campaigns, rather than one size fits all mass mailings, which risk getting flagged as spam.

- The web will continue to grow as an entertainment and social medium where people spend more time watching skateboarding monkeys on YouTube and poking their friends on Facebook. In response, expect to see more marketing aimed at connecting with customers on a more personal level and to present a human face to a business’ identity.

- Print will continue to defy digital fan boys by maintaining its position as the medium in which most people prefer to receive offers. Campaigns integrating an initial print stage followed by digital activity will become more targeted, measurable and popular.

- The proliferation of the iPhone, and other true web enabled handsets, will continue pushing the growth of the mobile web at a healthy rate, and mobile marketing along with it. Advertisers will harness the popularity of social networking with the introduction of free aggregators that collect together content from different websites into one place in exchange for wedging ad messages between the Facebook updates and Twitter feeds. Brands also will rush to release iPhone apps & games, with most of them being awful.

- Yahoo’s share price will continue to plummet as it struggles to dislodge Google’s tyrannical grip of the online advertising market. Eventually it’s forced to crawl to Microsoft, with its cap in hand, and sell its search functionality at a knockdown price.

- Apple carries on calling Microsoft a nerd, infuriating Microsoft and making it try even harder to become cool, at which it continues to fail.

- Google buys Iceland (the country, not the supermarket) after the monopolies commission bans it from buying up more of the digital space.

- Disintegrating newspaper sales force the Sun and Daily Mirror to combine into a single daily. The low cost of office space in London means they’re spared from sharing the same offices, and can continue competing over who has got the best front page on their websites, which attract more views than their papers ever did.

- By June everyone owns a digibox and routinely fast forward through the ad breaks. The collapse of ad revenue means ITV and C4 can no longer afford to make their own programmes. Whilst they’ve been awarded part of the BBC’s license fee (following another campaign by ‘outraged’ Daily Mail readers), the BBC stubbornly refuses to let them onto the iPlayer. The cost of advertising becomes so low that brands start broadcasting their own TV shows. Highlights include ‘Celebrity Demolition Derby’ sponsored by Volvo and a soap opera based in a glamorous Stella Artois brewery.

- As 2009 draws to a close it’s the businesses who’ve continued marketing during the recession that’ll be best positioned to prosper as the climate improves. Along with maintaining their presence in the marketplace, they’ll also have developed their expertise in delivering targeted, cost effective marketing, whilst their rivals will struggle to regain the market share they’ve lost from remaining silent.

So those are a few of our serious predictions (and a couple less so) of what you can expect to see happening in 2009.

Perhaps the main message you’ll hear repeated everywhere is that now is not the time to panic, go into hibernation and cut back on your marketing altogether.

2009 will be the year in which marketing becomes smarter and more cost effective.

It needs to respond to the changes that were already taking place before the ‘r’ word was mentioned, and to use the tools at your disposal to deliver marketing that’s more targeted, more personalised and more effective in engaging with your customers.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

In order to bring together some of the posts from thinkbda.com, we have created an ebook of 6 of our most read blogs from Winter 2008.

The blogs contained include:

1. Marketing in a recession – can you afford not to?
2. Branding – what’s your big idea?
3. The new email marketing – talking to customers individually?
4. Discover the power of storytelling
5. Logo design tips – what does an image say about you?
6. Going tribal – two UK websites thriving from tribal marketing

The ebook is FREE and you can download your copy here.

We hope you like what we have put together and do keep reading our site.

So was Monday ‘Mega’ for you? Well, apparently it was for 2 million Brits, who preferred the convenience of a few mouse clicks to fighting for a parking space on the high st.

A few Mega Monday facts:

• Online sales were up 14% on 2007
• £320 million was spent at online retailers
• £20 million more than last year
• £13.6 billion is expected to be spent online in total this ‘Clickmas’
• For the first time in 14 years high st sales have fallen for a second successive month

What’s amazing is that ‘Mega Monday’ was only the third busiest day of the year in terms of traffic to online retailers, because the web isn’t just a virtual checkout till, but is also a valuable research tool.

Unlike a shop, people don’t visit an online retailer thinking that they have to buy something to justify the trip. Instead they might just visit to check prices, compare products and find the best deals, before clicking away to check their Facebook account.

Research earlier in the year suggested that 67% of shoppers research their purchases online before heading to a store. What this signifies is that consumers are using the web to become better informed about brands, products and services, rather than waiting to be told.

Consequently, brands and businesses need to realise that the web is now an extension to the in-store shopping experience. And if you’re not online than you’re nowhere as far as a sizeable number of people are now concerned.

Getting their information online is also actively preferred by many consumers to what they’re fed on the TV. In a survey of 30,000 people, by G2 Data Dynamics, 37% said they prefer to get information on brands and offers from websites and email than celebrity endorsed TV ads.

This could be a backlash against the fees paid to Donovan, Katona and their celeb chums, or it could reflect how people are weary of TV advertising in general, and value their attention more highly.

Giving away vouchers? Bar, humbug

With the economy continuing to sink into a quagmire, finding a bargain has never been more in vogue. And many shoppers are realising they don’t need to fight over the bargain bins in Woolworths when there’s so many offers to be found online.

Along with trawling eBay and price comparison sites, many people have been hunting down vouchers to help them cut the cost of Christmas. This year UK internet searches for vouchers have increased a staggering 133%, whilst visits to sites have nearly doubled.

Scrooge would have refused to giveaway discounts on principle, despising the thought of cutting revenue for the sake of spreading some Christmas cheer. However, vouchers are an effective marketing strategy for generating interest and holding onto existing customers. In the G2 Data Dynamics survey, for example, free gifts and discounts polled as the best way to stimulate brand loyalty.

One brand who can testify to voucher power is Marks and Spencers. Its recent 20% discount promo attracted one in 33 visits to retail sites this Xmas, and doubled visits to its real world stores.

Smarter Email Marketing in 2009

With competition for credit cards a matter of survival for many businesses, you need to ensure you’re taking advantage of digital technology to build customer relationships, maintain loyalty and taking a bigger slice of the shrinking pie.

69% of business in an E-consultancy survey enjoyed noticeable improvements in engaging with their customers following email activity. This reflects why email marketing is becoming more popular, because it offers a tangible ROI, better targeting means it’s more effective and it can be used to engage customers with valuable content.

So think about how you can reward your loyal customers by emailing them some vouchers and yuletide offers, because otherwise you might receive a visit from Scrooge’s three Ghosts this Christmas Eve.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

You might think the constant siege of inboxes by spammers has tarnished email’s reputation as a marketing tool forever. However, email still remains the workhorse of online marketing and integral to relationship building. Spam is merely its evil twin.

Email can start a dialogue, enhance your credibility and generate sales long after prospects have left your website. It’s even more potent when you’re smart enough to speak to recipients as individuals, rather than bellow the same speech to the entire crowd.

Relationship building

Capturing a customer’s email address when they visit your website should be your top priority. Because no matter how much flash animation and handpicked testimonials you throw at them, less than 5% (and that’s being generous) of visitors will be ready to buy on their first viewing.

So rather than hope they’ll come back on their own accord, you need to be able to maintain a line of communication with prospects long after they’ve left.

If you can capture their email address (e.g. in exchange for a free newsletter or eBook) then you can develop the sales process over time, because email can be a potent tool for relationship building and earning your prospects’ confidence.

Focus on the prospect

As any salesman will tell you, people like to do business with those they get to know and trust, which is exactly what email marketing campaigns are all about. Your strategy isn’t to force recipients into submission by mail bombing offer after offer, but to engage their interest with relevant messages that provide valuable and useful content.

Emails which offer to solve a prospect’s problems, help them sleep better at night and feel they’ve benefited from the interaction is how you can win trust, confidence and credit card numbers.

Rather than talking endlessly about yourself and how much profit you made last year, relationship marketing emails need to be focused on the needs of your prospect and how your product/service can enrich their lives.

As well as earning trust with valuable content, email can be used in many other ways to foster loyalty, such as invitations to live events, timely promotions (such as a birthday discount) and getting feedback on what your customers want from you.

Don’t blast, listen and engage

Perhaps the biggest impact of spam on email marketing has been the speeding up of the demise of lazily blasting the same message at every customer. People now receive so many marketing messages that if your email doesn’t appear to be relevant then you’re only a mouse click away from being deleted or blocked forever.

Simply repeating the same offer to every prospect in the hope of seducing a small number is no longer the smartest strategy. People now want and expect to be treated as individuals, and I’m not talking about just featuring their name in the subject line.

Modern tracking and analytics enables you to capture an endless stream of data on prospects. Along with their buying history and demographic profile, modern one-to-one digital campaigns utilising personalised URLs are able to record data on your prospects’ interests, preferences and desires. You can then segment and customise future messages pitched to appeal to each prospect’s personal triggers.

However, the process of fine tuning emails to be as relevant and personalised as possible never ends. Even after campaigns have been launched, you need to run A/B split tests on every adjustable element, such as the subject line, layout and the call to action at the end.

Watching how people interact with every email enables you to listen to what they’re thinking and how your message can be more finely tuned in the future.

Email is about one-to-one dialogue, rather than bellowing a single message

As with every aspect of marketing, the more relevant, timely and personalised your email marketing can be the more chance of provoking the right response, or as the popular mantra goes ‘delivering the right message to the right person at the right time’.

Delivering mass untargeted emails is now more likely to get you blacklisted than welcomed into people’s inboxes. However, modern email technology means we can now build and fine tune personalised one-to-one email campaigns which are pitched to match the desires of each individual prospect, leaving lazy email blasts to the spammers.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.