As most of our clients know, we are big fans of email marketing here at eMedia Worx. For a small company that is just getting started, or even a medium company looking to increase sales, there are few more effective ways to target your clients than by an email straight to the inbox.

Unfortunately, here lies the problem. Because it is so easy and cheap, marketers tend to not really think about what they are sending and how effective or relevant it is going to be. They just queue it up and blast it out. (I hate the term eBlast, for this reason)

Louise often says that when you are designing a site you should answer “So what? What is this page for?”, and this rings true for email campaigns. If you don’t have a clear reason for why your readers will actually read your email, then there is a very high chance that it will get skipped over, or even worse, deleted.

I think that is it getting more and more important that marketers think about the relevance of their message. Web based email services, especially Gmail and Windows Live (Hotmail) are becoming more and more advanced when it comes to filtering out spam and unwanted email messages.

Gmail’s Priority Inbox sorts out all the messages from senders that are most commonly opened and replied to, and bundles the rest in a lower “priority” list. This means that if you don’t engage your customers early in the delivery cycle, then chances are you will never get the chance.

I will hopefully give a few more tips on how to go about this, but at the moment I just want to give you all a bit of a heads up. I have just read the article on ClickZ entitled Preparing for the Future of E-mail Marketing which pretty much sums it up. Because people are so busy now and are bombarded with junk, the email marketers that think about their approach to email marketing will be the ones that get their message through above the competition.

I am personally looking forward to this case study, as it means that I will be spending more time on the Ballina Info newsletter, as well as showing you just what we do and what can be done to improve an email marketing campaign.

Setting the Scene – Determining our Goals

Because Ballina Info is mainly an informational site targeting the local area, the main goals of the whole operation is to generate good traffic numbers to sell online advertising. The newsletter has two main goals:

• to generate traffic to the site – especially repeat traffic to help build our online community
• to attract enough newsletter subscribers to become an attractive  form of advertising for local businesses.

We know already that the site generates good traffic numbers, so we are a little disappointed in the subscriber numbers. We see this goal as being the most important, so we will mostly try and focus on the goal of increasing the number of subscribers.

Subscriber details

Breakdown of subscriber list (from Email Marketer)

We currently have 644 subscribers, with 580 confirmed contacts. Email Marketer automatically keeps track of the subscribers who have confirmed or who have unsubscribed. The list is attracting on average about 10-20 new subscribers a month. Considering that the site has between 10,000 – 20,000 visitors per month, this is a very low conversion.

Our aim is to have at least 1,000 subscribers before we can consider it a viable entity, so as you can see, we have a fair bit of work to do. On the positive side, we do have the traffic already coming to our site, we just want to send them to the places we want them to go.

How we collect email addresses

Screenshot of Ballina Info displaying the subscribe button

Currently we collect email addresses solely through a form on the website. If you click on the screenshot you will see the button that is placed on the side navigation throughout the site. This links through to the subscribe page.

This could possibly be a key factor in the low subscriber count. On most screens and on most key pages, this is down low (below the fold) and not really eye catching. Even with the red arrow next to it (which is just for the screenshot in case you are wondering) it doesn’t jump out.

This will be one of the elements we will test. Getting potential subscribers get to the subscriber page will be a very important part of the process.

The next step – the subscription page

The form on the subscription page of the site.

The Ballina Info Newsletter subscription page uses one of the forms straight out of Email Marketer, placed into one of our pages. Email Marketer allows you to create a customised form to place in your site to extract as much detail as you need from your subscriber. The forms also handle all the stages of the double opt-in process to make sure you have a fully legitimate list.

One of the problems that you face is the more detail you extract, the more flexible and targeted your campaign is, but the downside is that people hate filling out long forms. Ballina Info currently asks for First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Preferred format and the security code.

We will also test the effects that this has on the subscriptions, as well as work out how to extract as much detail as possible.

I guess at this stage, that gives a pretty good idea of the actual sign up process that we use to get our subscribers. In the coming weeks we will document our efforts in refining the process of signing up, then we will move on to the actual content of the newsletter. If you have any questions, please feel free to post a comment below and I will be happy to answer them.

The very first thing you should do with any campaign is work out what it is that you have that will make users go to the trouble of signing up, confirming, opening, and eventually reading and clicking your email.

If you get your basic plan in place early, then spam compliance, catchy subject lines and compelling content can help get your message accross, but it is the product or service that you offer that makes your email undeletable.

One of my favourite newsletters that I have recieved for years I would class as undeletable. The email often gets caught up in the spam folder, or marked as spam by our server – mainly due to its content – but because the information inside is such good quality I have gone to the trouble of whitelisting the email address so that I will recieve it without a hitch every week.

Some times deliverability can be a bit of a battle, but building up a reputation and relationship with you audience through quality content is the key to great email marketing.

Times have changed in a very positive direction over the past decade with the uptake of the Internet within mainstream society.  Businesses, both small and large, now have the opportunity to get their message out to their customers in a more targeted and cost-effective manner via e-mail, Web sites and social networking.

More importantly (particularly with e-mail and your website) the Internet has allowed marketers and business owners to no longer rely on a scattergun approach, they are now able to make informed decisions about their campaign performance through a vast range of tools aimed at tracking visitors and performance.  Just about anything that you can think of can be tracked and measured!

Probably one of the cheapest and most powerful marketing tools at a business owner’s fingertips is email marketing.  Unfortunately though, most small business owners do not realise just how effective it can be — for a very minimal investment in time and money.  Did you know that even at the most basic level, your email marketing campaigns will tell you:

• how many customers opened the e-mail,
• what links they clicked on within the e-mail,
• who has unsubscribed,
• how many e-mails bounced, and
• if anybody has forwarded the message to a friend.

For those of you who are then wise enough to tag your links within the newsletter will be able to use Google analytics to continue to track these visitors on their Web site to see if the desired outcome was obtained (i.e. buying something, downloading a report etc).  This is why e-mail is still the most cost-effective and targeted form of advertising that any business owner can take part in.

The Ballina Info Case Study

Over the next few months we would like to demystify some of the ins and outs of email marketing by taking you on a bit of a journey with us and our Ballina Info newsletter.  During this period we will be taking a hard look at the newsletter, which has become a bit of a neglected baby.  We will plan and employ strategies designed to increase the number of subscribers and gain a better understanding of what the subscribers are doing with the newsletter, with the overall goal of transforming a service that has been costing us time and money into a profit maker by providing an extremely useful service to our subscribers which in turn will become an efficient tool for local businesses looking to advertise to local residents.

As time goes by we will report what has been going on here in the blog and hope that you can take away some ideas that may help you with your business. If you’re a Ballina resident (or have any interest in Ballina) please feel free to sign up for the newsletter!

If you would like to follow this series you can be informed of new posts by subscribing to our RSS feed or the e-mail subscription on the top right.  If you have any questions, or if there is something that you would like us to cover as part of this series please leave a comment below.

But how do you go about it? Email has never been easier to send, but at the same time it is becoming increasingly difficult to get the message through. Spam filters will block you at every opportunity, and if you do succeed, the time restraints of the modern day consumer means your carefully crafted newsletter could end up straight into the Recycle Bin.

It may seem that this is all too much, but consider the advantages. An email list is a valuable thing, representing a highly targeted market for your product. People have actively made the choice to receive your email newsletter, so right from the start they are willing to hear what you have to say. Additionally, people don’t have to make the effort to seek out your information online or through other media. With one click, users can open your newsletter and (if done right) can quickly see all that you have available.

Another major benefit of focusing your marketing efforts on the newsletter is the direct feedback you can achieve. As with so much of your online marketing effort, analytics programs can almost instantly tell you whether your are heading in the right direction or whether you need to rethink your marketing plan. Try getting that from television or the newspaper.

In the next few weeks we will publish a few articles that will steer you in the right direction, helping you get your email marketing campaign up and running with as little drama as possible, and show you that email communications done right will help give you a competitive edge in the market place.