What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a popular form of marketing which uses email as a means of communicating directly with customers. A common example is sending a regular newsletter informing customers of upcoming promotions, events or new products.
Many businesses use email marketing to help achieve brand awareness, customer retention, advertising revenue and other goals. Compared to many other types of advertising, it is inexpensive and very targeted.
Our System
Our email marketing system is a powerful, all-in-one email marketing tool. From organising contacts to creating and sending beautiful, personalised email campaigns – you can manage it all using only your web browser.
How it Works
1. Build a subscriber list
We start off by putting together a quality list of email subscribers who have opted in (i.e. consented) to receive emails from you. You can email anyone that has given you permission to do so.
There are a three main ways to create a subscriber list:
- You can enter your customer details manually. This data is stored in our online database
- You can import all your data as a csv (or Excel) spreadsheet
- We create an email capture form on your website to allow customers to sign up automatically to your list.
With contact information stored in the database, you can then start sending your first newsletter.
2. Send your emails
Creating a newsletter couldn’t be simpler.
We will create your company its very own email templates, designed specifically to match your branding using the appropriate fonts, colours and logos.
Our email marketing system uses a simple online editor that allows you to quickly create your newsletters, adding text, images and links.
If you want to send even more tailored messages, you can split your lists based on segments such as geographic location, purchase history, gender and age.
3. Track your emails
Email marketing doesn’t conclude with the successful delivery of an email.
Our software allows you to export great looking interactive charts, showing who is opening and clicking your emails, which links were popular, who didn’t receive your emails and why, unsubscribes and more.
This allows you to improve your campaigns and find out what works.
Why not just use Outlook?
If you send a few hundred emails at a time using Outlook, they will be considered spam and your company can be open to legal problems. Our system is able to support the sending of large numbers of emails without crashing or problems such as duplicate sending.
It has a database that stores contact information, campaign statistics, and message history. It also includes a scheduler that can send emails automatically. This allows you to adhere to a marketing plan without much intervention.
It also has features that assist in complying with the CAN-SPAM act, such as automatic unsubscribe and bounce-back handling. This will ensure not only that your emails are delivered, but also that you comply with important anti-spam legislation. We use technologies like Sender ID and DomainKeys/DKIM to improve the chances of your email being delivered.
Finally, with our software you have access to tools that provide reports such as how many people opened an email, how many emails bounced back and how many people visited the hyperlinks provided in the marketing message.
Our Email Templates
All of our email templates have a clear unsubscribe link to allow recipients to opt out of receiving further emails. The templates also contain valid company and contact information in the footer. Both of these measures help to ensure emails are CAN-SPAM compliant.
The Approval Process
Before you can send your first large campaign (to more than 500 recipients or so), we would need to approve your subscriber list to ensure it meets our comprehensive criteria covering permission, email content, privacy and much more.
Once we have approved the list, your campaign will be ready to send. This is a one-off process and should not take more than 12 hours to process.
Email addresses that fall into the ok to use category are:
- Customers that have signed up to receive email newsletters from your website
- Purchased a product or service from you within the last 2 years
- Handed you their business card at a trade show or other event knowing you would contact them
- Completed an offline form and indicated they wanted to be emailed
Email addresses from a third party or those obtained by “copying and pasting” from the Internet definitely cannot be used for email marketing.
Deliverability & Best Practice
The most important factor in the delivery of your email is sender reputation. If ISP‘s don’t know you or don’t like what you’re sending, you won’t be invited back. We go to great lengths to ensure we can offer you a reliable service with great deliverability. An incredibly important part of this effort is ensuring our server is never abused by spammers, and that our clients stick to best practice.
Email Authentication (SPF, Sender ID and DomainKeys/DKIM)
When sending an email, we let you set your own “from address” so that email will appear to be from that address. Because of the way email was originally built, it’s tough to prove if an email is actually coming from the person who claims to be sending it. Email authentication fixes this by letting you add some simple information to your domain name’s DNS records that says who’s allowed to send email on your behalf.
There are two main authentication standards you should support called Sender ID and DomainKeys/DKIM. What is important is that different ISP’s use one or a combination of both, so to get the best results we’ve made it as easy as possible to support both standards.
All the large ISP’s like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail are using email authentication as an important layer in their spam fighting arsenal. By setting up as an authenticated sender, you can instantly bypass certain filters, giving your campaigns a better chance of arriving in the destination inbox. Not only that, but many ISP’s like Yahoo! and Hotmail will flag your email as authenticated, which helps build trust between you and your subscribers and improves the chance of your emails being opened.
Email authentication only takes a few minutes to set up and we’ve made it a very easy process. The only tricky part is that you’ll need to access the DNS records for the domain you want to authenticate. We generate some simple records you’ll need to add to your domain’s DNS. Most domain name hosts will give you a hand with this step.
We take care of the rest and make sure that each ISP knows the email is definitely coming from you. You’ll now have a better chance with some spam filters, build trust with your recipients and ensure your domain name cannot be used fraudulently by others.
Smart Bounce and Compliant Handling
We automatically detect different types of bounces and react accordingly. Undeliverable addresses are removed immediately, temporary fails are given additional chances before removal based on best practice.
ISP Feedback Loop Integration
Our system is integrated into the feedback loop of ISP’s like Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL. We can detect if a subscriber marks you as spam, and remove them from your list automatically.
Reliable, Secure Server Environment
To keep your data safe, secure and always available, we use a state-of-the-art redundant server cluster in a fully managed, world class data centre. All sensitive data is stored on servers behind a constantly maintained firewall using the same level of encryption as many banks.
Contact us for more information about our email marketing service.