Email Marketing & Communications

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a cost effective means of communicating with your customers and users. It is one of the most popular forms of direct marketing, allowing you send advertising messages and form part of a communication strategy.

According to Wikipedia it is estimated that companies in the US alone spent $400 million on email marketing in 2006 alone.

Some of the reasons email marketing remains popular are:

• If executed correctly the return on investment can be tracked down to the smallest detail
• Compared to other direct marketing campaigns such as direct mail, email is far less expensive
• Emails are delivered almost instantly whereas mailed adverts can take days
• Over half of internet users check or send email on a daily basis
  

The pitfalls of email marketing

Although email marketing can and should be a very successful part of a direct marketing campaign it is important that it is carried out by a company that knows what they are doing. There are a lot of pitfalls that inexperienced companies can fall into and these pitfalls can result in fines, legal issues and lots of lost customers.

Spam
Anti-spam laws have been bought in to stop the abusive practises that many unscrupulous companies participated in and although this is never going to be your objective it’s not hard to fall foul of laws. Only using details from customers who have opted-in (given their permission to be contacted) is one way to keep your email campaign from landing you in trouble.

Email client diversity
Although your design may look fantastic in image form getting it to appear the same way across the thousands of email clients your customers use, from outlook to hotmail isn’t easy. There are several methods of making sure your customers get the message you want to convey no matter what client they choose to read it in but not all companies understand this process.

Blacklists and spam filters
Much work to help protect you and your customers from receiving spam email has been done not only my legal entities but also by ISPs (internet service providers) and software companies. The introduction of blacklisted email servers (your servers are flagged as participating in spam and blocked) and spam filters (your email client dumps suspicious emails in junk folders) has led to more and more emails failing to reach their desired targets. Ensure the company you choose to execute your email campaigns use only white listed servers and ask about client testing before sign up.

How Punkyduck can guide your email campaigns

Punkyduck can help guide you through the process of building, sending and tracking your email campaign avoiding the pitfalls and achieving a successful return on investment.

Some of the ways we can help:

• White listed email servers
• High email client compatibility
• Strong calls to action
• Full end to end tracking
• Full adherence to email marketing laws
• Simple to use user interface
  

To find out more about how Punkyduck email marketing services can help your company please give us a call on 0845 0 347 347 or email us at emailmarketing@punkyduck.com