With seemingly gazillions of emails being sent every day and spam filter technology making it increasingly difficult to get through, it would be easy to think email marketing has had its day. However, the communication medium still has so much to offer that it should most definitely feature in any well-rounded marketing plan. But there’s good email marketing and bad email marketing, and whereas 10 years ago you could get away with the bad, you simply can’t today.

So here’s our 5 tips for email marketing.

1. Data capture

Before we can even begin to think about email marketing, we have to have some email addresses in the first place. That means implementing a strong data capture system that harvests as many prospect and customer email addresses as possible.

Data capture is a huge subject with lots of best practices that can be employed to grow your databases, so we’re not going to go into it all here. However, there are some basic things that can be done straightaway:

• Set up a system that requires all visitors to complete a registration card that asks them for their email address. Some won’t do it, but most will if your staff ask them (in the right way).
• Always ask for contact information from inbound telephone enquiries, and make sure you add them to your email database. In our experience, these are the ones that often get missed.
• Ensure you website is harvesting contact data in a way that allows it to be added to your email database – on an automated basis or manually at least.

If you’re serious about email marketing, you have to get serious about data capture, and we would strongly suggest NOT going down the business card drop or “enter our prize draw if you give us your email address” route. These voluntary systems are old hat and, in our experience, are pretty ineffective.

2. Choose your email marketing platform

Whilst Outlook and Apple Mail are lovely email clients, they’re NOT email marketing platforms - they’re for every day email sending and receiving. Don’t be tempted to use them for bulk email campaigns just because they’re free. It could jeopardise and hinder your email account. Plus, you can’t add an automated ‘opt-out’ functionality and you can’t see who’s opened or clicked on your emails. That’s all useful info for later.

There are loads of platforms out there, all offering similar degrees of functionality. The main two we’d suggest looking at are MailChimp and SendinBlue. Both offer a free level of subscription, up to a point. At the time of writing this little piece, SendinBlue’s free account allows up to 300 emails to be sent per day. MailChimp restricts their free account to up to 2,000 email contacts. However, both are a good starting point if you’re just starting out with the email marketing malarkey.

At some point (hopefully very quickly) you will outgrow these free subscriptions levels and you’ll have to cough up some dosh every month – but don’t be tempted as this point to revert back to Outlook or Apple Mail. It really won’t break anyone’s bank. MailChimp’s first paid-for subscription level is just $9.99 per month. SendinBlue’s is £15.

3. Create an email template that’s “on brand”

Create an email template that you’ll use for ALL of your email marketing campaigns. This doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does have to be “on brand”. This means it has to have some similarities in the way it looks to your other marketing output, and the most obvious guide here is your website.

Email marketing and your website work closely together. It stands to reason – people will receive your emails, click on links within them and then be taken to your site, so the two need to work in unison.