Email Marketing
Creating a Campaign
An email campaign is used when you want to mass email 50 people or more. If only mailing to a few individual emails will result in a better outcome as people appreciate the effort you can only get from a personalised 1-on-1 email.
The easiest way to create a campaign is to copy an existing one (we would have created one for you previously).
- Login to the Admin section of your site
- Under the Marketing tab, go to Email Campaigns
- Right-click on the last campaign and choose Add Follow-up
- You can now follow the steps of the Campaign Wizard. Review each step and change if needed - most will not need to change. TIP: use the links in the sidebar to jump to the following sections. You will need to change:
- Campaign Details - set the Delivery Date and Delivery Time, and change the Email Subject to something catchy, yet relevant to the topic
- Provide Campaign content - Edit the body of the email with the message you want to share. Save Draft regularly to avoid losing changes. When you are happy with what you see in your web browser, click Email Me to have a copy sent to your inbox. Use Email Others? to send to other staff members - to ask them to double and triple check your email. Test that all the links work as expected. Once your email is sent, there is no way to change it!
- When you are confident the campaign is ready to send to hundreds of people, click Save and Send. If you are not confident, contact us and we will check it for you.
- After the campaign is sent, come back to this campaign and check the Reports and Performance to see how well your message was received.
Don't send SPAM
Unfortunately the ease and low cost of sending an email to a large number of recipients has made it very attractive to SPAM (unsolicited marketing). Fortunately most email providers now vet each message before delivery to check the value of it to the end-user. While these automated checks get smarter and smarter, it's easy to create an email that can be marked as SPAM and may never end up in your intended recipients inbox.
Here are some tips getting your message seen:
- Do not send to unverified addresses (there are legal ramifications along with instant and long-term black-lists that will makes any email sending very hard for you)
- Do not include words that are commonly used in SPAM (eg. 'sex', 'viagra', 'lotto', and to a degree 'free', 'win', 'won', etc)
- Do not send to a large number of invalid email addresses
- Do not include a large number of images
- Do not use the same keywords repeatedly (you do not need to use SEO in an email)
- Do send from a real email address
- Do include an unsubscribe link
- Do include your street address
- Do personalise the email with the recipient's name
Getting Results
- Try to use a stand-out subject line
- Avoid excessive images. Chances are they will be blocked and you will end up with large gaps in your content, causing content to get lost in the mess. Also an email made up of images alone will most likely be marked as SPAM
- Try personalisation. A person will be more likely to read an email to "them" as opposed to an email to "everyone"
- Have a Call to Action (CTA). Drive the reader to do something: respond, signup, buy - something that can be tracked to test why you sent the email
- Try to keep your email small, both in content size and download time. If people want to read more let them click though to an in-depth page on your website. Also don't slow your email with run-of-the-mill images - they will only make your email download slower and people don't have time to wait for anything.