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So you want to send eDM? November 10th, 2009
Uncle have been helping ourselves as well as our clients lately with a focused and sustained push to develop a solid, electronic, direct marketing strategy. Email is far from a recent technology, but one that has been used and abused in varying degrees throughout the relatively short history of the internet. It’s been done a lot. It’s also been done badly, and only in recent years have the truely entrepreneurial companies enabled us all to do it better.
Preparing your list
The first thing you need for a successful eDM campaign is some willing, and hopefully interested recipients. Got a nice big list of previous customers from the last 3 years? Great! Unfortunately, that’s probably not good enough. If you didn’t have the forethought to ask their permission (via an opt-in) at the time you took their address, you can scrub them from your list. However good your intentions, sending to these addresses would be spamming, and is illegal.
The ’soft opt-in’
There is also a special form of consent under the Privacy Regulations called the “soft opt-in”. This applies where (i) an email address was obtained in the course of the sale or negotiations for the sale of a product or service to that recipient, (ii) the direct marketing is in respect of similar products and services, and (iii) the recipient was given the opportunity to “opt out” when the details were collected and with subsequent communication.
Anything left on your list? You can then remove any address over 12 months old. Email accounts generally have a very short life-span, and sending just several dozen emails in a list of hundreds that bounce will light up spam detectors like christmas trees, and your eDM provider of choice will likely close your account pretty swiftly.
Tempted to use your list anyway? Consider this. People have power. Every time they use the ‘Mark As Spam’ or ‘Junk’ button in their email client, that action is recorded as a spam complaint, fed directly back to your eDM supplier, and counted. For little more than 1 in every 5,000 transmissions receiving a complaint, your eDM provider could well be looking to shut you down.
Legalities aside, spamming can damage the hard-won reputation of your brand. Internet users move in vast social networks, and have the tools and the power to quite suddenly and effectively expose the poor practices of businesses if they believe they have been treated unfairly.
If you’re still tempted, you should also note that your sending domain (in our case, creativeuncle.co.uk) can, and will be blacklisted by your ISP or by one of the many anti-spam services used by the major email providers. Simply put, you will not be able to send ANY email.
Sending to your list
There are several major players in the business of eDM delivery, and Uncle currently use either Campaign Monitor or MailChimp depending on the requirements. They’re both pretty much the same, both very reasonably priced, and both excellent. They foster good relationships with email providers around the world to get your messages delivered, and protect this relationship by imposing some strict rules on spam complaints. They both provide some very useful post-campaign statistics, and easy list-management.
Designing your email
That’s where Uncle come in. You can see some past examples here, and here. We can design, code, test and deliver your campaign on your behalf. We can also provide the training and templates required to empower your company to manage this by yourselves.
Drop us a line if you would like to know more…
