Why you need to send email via an ESP for your email marketing to be effective

Email marketing has an extremely high ROI compared to most other forms of advertising. A seven-to-one return on investment is considered standard for an advertising campaign. Email based advertising beats the seven-to-one ratio with a stunning forty-five-to-one, this according to data published by the DMA (Direct Marketers Association). In a study they published that examined email marketing’s returns in the past three years, the conclusion was that Email marketing campaigns have been generating an average ROI of over 45$ for every dollar spent.This stunning ROI has led many businesses to take a stab at doing some in-house email marketing using a wide range of unsuitable tools with outcomes that range from limited success to catastrophic failure.

Email marketing the amateur way
is playing “Email Russian roulette”

Many SMBs and NPOs are currently using their Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc, accounts for sending out their email campaigns.

Besides being an unwieldy method for sending out massive amounts of email this practice is akin to playing Russian roulette with your email box.

Why?

Because when you send out large amounts of email to groups of people inevitably some of these people will either purposefully, or inadvertently, mark your email as spam. When this happens enough times at the very least your email address will be blacklisted.
In more severe cases your domain may be blacklisted. This will effectively prevent you, and everyone else sharing your domain, to use email. In today’s world, where email is a primary form of communication for many people and businesses, this situation will have a devastating effect on both your reputation and your business.

Using an ESP is an excellent email reputation insurance policy

The entry level email marketing packages offered by most ESPs are very low-cost to run and maintain, and fit the needs of most SMBs perfectly. When weighed against the potential damage that blacklisting can cause your business it is well worth your cost to use an ESP just as a form of email “insurance policy”. The low monthly fee that most services charge is money well spent when weighed against the catastrophic damage that getting blacklisted can cause you.

Monitor your email campaign’s effectiveness

One of the most fundamental rules of marketing is “Information = Power”. The more you know about your market and clientele the more power is at your disposal to market to them effectively. The Internet as a whole and email in particular allow you to know more about your clientele then was ever possible before. When you use an ESP to deliver your email marketing campaigns you will have data at your fingertips that you were never aware of before. Most mass email service providers can tell you what are the opening rates for your email campaigns, how many times your message was forwarded by the recipients, what links were clicked within the email and how many times and for what reason your email bounced. When collected and monitored over time this data will help you generate ever more effective messages and tip the ROI scales more and more in your favor.

Email list building and management for effect

The best way to capitalize on the high ROI’s that email marketing generates is to effectively build and manage your email mailing list. Most ESPs include powerful list creation and management tools that allow you to effectively segment your email list into sets and subsets according to demographic information and response rates.

The better you manage your list, the more exact your segmentation, and the more you focus your messages specifically to each segment, the higher your ROI will be for each of your email marketing campaigns.

Making sure that what you see is what they get

The lack of any binding standard for email has unpleasant implications for most amateur email marketing campaigns. Although they look fine on the sender’s machine they will appear messy and jumbled at the recipients end. This is especially true if the email has many image components. Many email clients (gmail, yahoo, msn and the like) have “images off” as their default setting. The implication is that if the email is composed mostly of graphics then the recipient will be entirely unaware of its contents. Most ESPs help you avoid the pitfalls of creating garbled or illegible messages by offering you customizable templates that will render reasonably well on most email clients. Furthermore ESPs often allow you to create and send a plain text version of your email to send to recipients that are unable or unwilling to accept heavy graphic HTML emails. With more and more people reading their email on the move, from their PDAs and their cell-phones, rather then from their computers, text-only emails are becoming an ever more important component in the email marketing toolbox.

ESPs are to email what the postman is to mail

Finally, using ESPs is a good choice because email is their job.
A good ESP maintains relationships with all major email clients and monitors its listing status on a daily basis. For email clients that provide the service, the ESP will ensure it is “white-listed” with the email client, to ensure that mail sent via from its servers gets through. A Good ESP will guarantee that your message is getting out and is being received by your audience. And getting your message to the right audience on time is what effective advertising is all about…

Found this useful?

Why not read these articles as well

Email ethics and legality

The ethics of email marketing are founded on a simple single understanding. People’s in-boxes are as much part of their private domain as are their bedrooms.

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I’m new to email marketing campaigns and advertising – What Impact can I expect?

Email Marketing is being used by businesses and organizations to increase their profits and enhance their image.

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Email from Non Profits and Charities have high Impact

The credibility and authority of an organization makes readers more receptive to their email efforts.

---

Business Email: Send for Impact

In the Email Game, the finish line is not the inbox. You must reach the reader’s mind.

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What factors are distracting your readers from your Email Campaigns’ messages?

Your reader’s poor response may have nothing to do with your email.

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Readerimpact Glossary

A glossary of terms relating to email and online marketing

Email Marketing Tips. Part 1 – Building and maintaining an effective email address list

This article is the first in a series of short articles each dealing with a certain aspect of email marketing and meant to help you, dear reader, to improve your email marketing campaigns. I chose to begin the series with a few tips relating to the most fundamental prerequisite for any email marketing campaign – the email address list.I hope you find these tips interesting and useful and you are more than welcome to contact me with ideas of your own that you think we should be adding here.

A word of caution before we start:
Never buy an email list

Purchasing emails is unethical to say the least and in many cases it is illegal as well. Beyond these two very good reasons why you should avoid engaging in this practice, there is another reason you should take into your consideration:
It is doubtful at best that a person who signed up for a newsletter related to some other product, service, or organization, will respond positively to being solicited by you.
It is far more likely that your solicitation will be at best ignored, and at worst flagged as spam…

A good list grows organically

1. Build you list yourself and start as close to home as possible.
   You already have dozens, hundreds or even perhaps thousands of clients and contacts. These people may well have donated to your cause or purchased from you in the past. It is safe to assume that unless you mistreated them, they remember you fondly and will be happy to receive emails, offers and news from you. They are also very likely to do business with you again…
2. Start collecting email addresses from visitors to your website and locations.
   Whether your organization has a physical location, or is entirely online, you should be collecting your visitors email addresses and getting their permission to send offers and news.
   A wise man once said: “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time to plant a tree is NOW”.
3. Guarantee privacy and promise benefits.
   People today are bombarded by so much spam that they are often reluctant to hand out their email address. Signing people up to your list is much easier when you guarantee that their privacy will be respected and their email will never be passed on to any third party. Most importantly assure people that by signing up they will gain access to special content, benefits, and offers that are available only to members of your subscription list.

Gratitude goes a long way

1. Give people something in return.
   We all love getting gifts. Beyond promising people future benefits for signing up to your list give them some immediate token of your gratitude that they can benefit from directly after signing up to your list. It doesn’t really matter how significant your giveaway is as long as it’s something that is delivered immediately following the sign up.
2. Easy does it.
   All too often I encounter sign up forms that are so complicated and invasive that I give up on completing them midway. Your sign up process should be as easy, hassle free, and simple as possible. In most cases all you need from people initially is their email and perhaps their name.
3. Develop relationships over time.
   Once you start an email relationship with people, and that relationship becomes positive and meaningful, it is much easier to ask them to divulge more information about themselves than it is at the initial contact, especially if you promise them some special benefit as a token of your gratitude for their cooperation.

What’s the secret of success? A well organized list!

1. The better your information the greater your success.
   We all enjoy feeling important and special. We appreciate people who remember details about us. With many premium email marketing platforms available today it is simple to create subsets and filters of demographically similar members within your email list. Segmentation allows you more accurate targeting for your messages.
2. Keep it personal.
   We all like people that really care about us.
   The more you know about the members of your list, and the more trouble you take in making it obvious that you are aware of who they are individually, the better the responses you will get to your solicitations, requests, and offers.
3. A small and responsive email list is better than a large and indifferent one
   Managing email lists and member data is a time consuming effort.
   Concentrate your efforts on identifying, segmenting and managing lists composed primarily of those members that are responsive to your messages. By following this guideline you stand to gain twice: 1^st you will be saving precious time by limiting the efforts you are wasting on vast numbers of useless contacts and 2^nd you will have more time available to dedicate to building meaningful and productive relationships with your responsive contacts.

If you found this useful…

you might want to check out these articles as well

Email ethics and legality

The ethics of email marketing are founded on a simple single understanding. People’s in-boxes are as much part of their private domain as are their bedrooms.

---

I’m new to email marketing campaigns and advertising – What Impact can I expect?

Email Marketing is being used by businesses and organizations to increase their profits and enhance their image.

---

Email from Non Profits and Charities have high Impact

The credibility and authority of an organization makes readers more receptive to their email efforts.

---

Business Email: Send for Impact

In the Email Game, the finish line is not the inbox. You must reach the reader’s mind.

---

What factors are distracting your readers from your Email Campaigns’ messages?

Your reader’s poor response may have nothing to do with your email.

---

Five reasons to send your email marketing through an ESP

Why you need to send using an ESP for your email marketing to be effective.

---

Readerimpact Glossary

A glossary of terms relating to email and online marketing

Information 2.0

I’m a sucker, I really am. I am naïve to the extent of being gullible and readily admit it. Sales people, advertising people, PRs, anyone with a slick tongue, makes short change of me.This is one of the reasons I’ve chosen to specialize in online marketing. The first time I experienced a web-based tracking and analytics tool I was hooked. For the first time I had access to up-to-date, objective, and validated data about my business at the tips of my fingers.

Advertising Campaign Evaluation – What’s the problem?

Monitoring traditional media advertising campaigns poses a number of challenges that nearly all arise from the lack of an accurate method to track the exposure and influence that these campaigns have. The problem is compounded by the fact that advertising campaign monitoring tools that do exist are usually unavailable to small business owners, who are essentially left with only the following monitoring options:

• Believing your agency – You can always choose to believe the numbers your advertising agency is supplying you with. These numbers are not objective by definition (your advertising agency has a vested interest in making things look rosy…).
• Questioning customers – Not all businesses allow for pleasant dialog between sales-people and customers and, although this method might generate wonderful anecdotes for you, it requires a lot of commitment in order to gather substantial amounts of hard data. One should always consider that any data gathered only reflects the opinions of those customers that took the time to answer your survey.
• Coupons – Advertising and tracking the use of various types of coupons is an excellent method to track campaign success however this method only factors customers that actually use coupons and gives literally no indication as to the effects exposure to the campaign may have had.

Online tools for advertising campaign evaluation

Now that we realize what are some of the challenges we face when we wish to monitor the success of an advertising campaign based on traditional media, its time to test what possibilities the online world has to offer us:

Every Click Counts

Although many of us are still unaware of it, every time we click on a link or button on a website or email, we are creating a record. These records can be collected and studied in conjunction with records left by other people clicking on the same links in order to create an accurate, up-to-date, and most importantly, objective report regarding the amount, type, and depth of exposure your messages are getting. Lets look at some great tools for monitoring the performance of your website and email campaigns:

Google Analytics

The really good news is that one of the best and most powerful tools for tracking traffic to your website comes from Google and is absolutely free! Google Analytics puts solid information regarding your visitors , referral sources, and content popularity at the tips of your fingers. Google’s statistics are easy to understand and excellent. The installation process is simple to perform and shouldn’t be any trouble for even rookies to accomplish. Once in place Google analytics will let you know:

• How many visitors are coming on to your site and what are some of their demographic characteristics.
• What sites and what type of search engine queries are referring traffic to your site.
• Which of your content is popular and is responsible for drawing traffic to your site and which of your content is unpopular and is responsible for people leaving your site.

Google Analytics is free and requires only a basic understanding of HTML in order to implement on your site.

The email option. Great even if you don’t have a website!

Email campaigns are a wonderful method to drive traffic to your website or, even directly to your business. I have often advised business owners who had not yet gotten round to putting up a website for their business to do precisely that and use email blasts in order to invite customers to stop by the shop and collect some form of gift or enjoy a “members only” special. ReaderImpact, our email marketing solution, allows businesses to create and manage permission based (see footnote) email marketing campaigns regardless of whether your business has a website or not.

Managing email marketing campaigns on ReaderImpact is easy and requires no technical knowledge whatsoever. All you really need to do is sign up for a free, full feature, 30 day trial account on the ReaderImpact website, and you’re good to go!

ReaderImpact’s tracking and recording manager lets you see:

• How many of the emails you’ve sent reached their recipient.
• How many of you emails were opened by the recipient.
• Whether the recipient clicked on a link within your email.

What’s next?

Online monitoring tools are already having an immense effect on the advertising industry because of their ability to objectively and verifiably monitor an advertising campaign’s success. Better monitoring is already translating into big-buck savings for advertisers and an increasingly steady migration of advertising budgets from traditional media to email and other online campaigns. It definitely seems as if time is in favor of us suckers as ever more efficient and intuitive monitoring tools become available. The days of the shyster advertising salesman are thankfully nearly over.

I ,for one, certainly won’t miss him…

–

Mike Darnell
Creative Director
Oleh Technology and Communications

Footnote: What is permission based email marketing and how is it different from “Spamming”?
Permission based email marketing is email marketing that is sent only to recipients that have given their consent to receive email from your business. Permission based email marketing is the opposite of “spamming”, which is the annoying bombardment of lists of unverified email addresses with marketing messages that the recipients do not want to receive.