Email Marketing at its best
Email Marketing has always been one of those taboo areas in Marketing, some love it and some hate it.
Over the last few years with the introduction of the new GDPR Privacy rules it has been increasingly difficult to undertake Email Marketing in the correct way. But the stats show that when it is undertaken correctly it can be incredibly helpful and profitable for your business.
There are many reasons for undertaking an Email Marketing campaign. We, here at Blue Whale Media Ltd use this form of marketing in various different ways.
- Keeping our support customers up to date with the latest developments that they should know about via our support email which we send out monthly.
- New offers, if you are lucky enough to be a support customer of Blue Whale Media Ltd, then you also get access to some of our amazing marketing discounts.
- New customer offers. We are always happy to bring new customers into the company and have some amazing monthly offers available to do so, which are unique to new customers.
- Newsletter, even in the year of Covid its important to share any good news with our customers/potential customers so we ensure we do a good news newsletter at least once a quarter.
How much time or money should you spend on your email marketing?
Here at Blue Whale Media Ltd, we are lucky that we have a fantastic team of Marketing professionals who can ensure top quality Email Marketing. But we appreciate that’s not the case for most businesses. So, you have options.
- Spend no time or money on Email Marketing. This can be a costly mistake though. It is anticipated that by 2023 4.3 billion email users will be sent a year and there will be 293 billion emails sent a day with an average return on investment of £40 for every £1 you spend.
- Spend your own time and money. This can be a great way of reducing your costs as a business but could again be a costly mistake. When companies try to undertake Marketing tasks themselves it most likely takes them a considerable amount of time to complete the task with no real reasoning behind why they have come up with the design they have. This could mean that the campaign is ineffective despite the time and funds that have been spent on it.
- Hire a Marketing Agency to undertake the task for you. Now you can normally pay minimal amounts for them to come up with a design but then they will not explain the design and reasoning to you. Or you can pay a decent amount which will result in more time being spent on your design and a detailed report being sent to you to explain why items/layouts have been included. This then allows them and you to evaluate the response from the campaign and develop it further for the next run.
Top tools for Email Marketing?
If you do choose to run your own campaign, there are some fabulous resources out there which can assist you at minimal cost. Our preferred platform is Mailchimp, but there are various others like Send In Blue etc and in fairness they are all fairly similar to use. So if you are comfortable with one you should stick with it because half your time will be spent learning how to use the new system.
Then it’s the planning we have a favoured resource in the office which is Monday.com it’s an amazing system to help you plan out all your marketing tasks, and most other tasks to be fair. We tend to use this in conjunction with a great little template from hubspot which is free to download Click here. This is a great tool to use to run, manager and evaluate your email marketing.
Templates VS Custom
There are various ways of undertaking your own Email Marketing which can be accessed fairly inexpensively. If you have very limited design skill, we would suggest you look at using a downloadable template. Now you can get set templates within the email marketing platforms, but if you are looking at something that is going to have more bezass then take a look at the templates you can buy from the likes of Envato. They are on average £13 and can help you include everything that’s should be standard in an Email Marketing design.
Obviously these templates will never be as customable as a design that you have created yourself and therefore they can be slightly limiting. But that’s the compromise if you are trying to keep costs low.
Events you should be preparing for
As we run up to the Winter months there are several events that can get a lot of traction for your business.
- Halloween
- Thanks Giving
- Black Friday
- Cyber Monday
- And of course Christmas
- Boxing Day sales
- New Year
Now what type of Marketing you choose to undertake for those events depends:
Halloween – You may choose to do a simple Happy Halloween campaign with a few special offers to go with the event.
Thanksgiving – We tend to think this should be more a company statement to say what the company/staff are thankful for that year. It could be achievements or milestones hit. But it’s a nice way to bring customers into the fold and make them feel like they are part of your company. We would suggest you don’t add offers etc to this campaign as it can water down the spirit of the campaign.
Black Friday & Cyber Monday – These have become some of the most profitable days in recent years, not only for ecommerce websites but also for businesses. We would recommend no-one misses out on this amazing opportunity to push their balance sheets into the black!
Christmas – My personal favourite time of year! This can be a great period to show new products, offers and much more. We tend to up our Email Marketing during this period to one a week and showcase not just offers but the amazing events that the team have been taking part in during the holiday season.
Boxing Day – Again this can be a great event that can help push those last few sales of the year over the line. For retail it can also be a great way of having a “winter clean” and getting rid of all remaining stock from 2020.
New Year – Like thanks giving it’s a really great opportunity to put a statement out to conclude the year and share the companies hopes and milestones for the next year.
In conclusion, Email Marketing: Yes or No?
Anyone from the Marketing industry still very much believes in Email Marketing as a great resource. But like mentioned above only if it’s done correctly. So take your time and think out your expectations and requirements for Email Marketing to ensure your expected ROI is achievable.
Thanks for reading
Stephanie Sweeney – Blue Whale Media Ltd
