Email Marketing & Newsletters
Connecting with your customers is very important, and your website is a great tool where customers can find out about your products and services. However, the viewing of your website has to be initiated by a client, and sometimes you want to be able to reach out to your clients in a more pro-active manner.
Using high quality HTML newsletters it is possible to send your clients an email that contains all the rich content that they can expect to see in a web page. By making your email newsletters look like the website design it produces a seamless visual link between your emails and your website, driving more traffic to your website.
Email newsletters play an important part as a marketing tool for the following reasons.
- Cost effective to produce – once a design has been developed it can be reused for multiple newsletters.
- Easy to send out – sending newsletters to small mailing lists can be sent from your own mail client, for larger campaigns we would recommend the use of dedicated mailing services as provided by the likes of MailChimp.
- Effective at producing repeat business – by adding things like special offers and discount vouchers you are able to reward customer loyalty.
- Viral marketing – existing subscribers are likely to forward good offers to their friends, thereby producing brand new clients.
- Detailed reports – when using dedicated mailing services a wealth of information is available including delivery rates, clicks, forwards etc.
We provide two different types of newsletter design format, image based or rich text.
- Image based are made up of a fixed size image over laid with web and email links. If clients have suitable graphic design skills they can produce their own newsletters once the template has been produced.
- Rich text newsletters are produced in HTML and allow for more dynamic newsletters with a mix of text and images. The newsletter size can vary between editions and is a highly flexible format. When sent via dedicated mailing services they can also be automatically converted to plain text for email clients that do not support image download.
It should be understood however that you cannot send emails to anyone you like, this could be considered as spam (the sending of unsolicited email) and there are laws to prevent such actions. Ensure you have read the Information Commissioner’s Office Rules on Email Marketing and only send emails to clients that do not breach these rules.
We can provide double opt-in services for newsletter subscriptions that ensure peace of mind for both those who produce newsletters and those who receive them.
The double opt-in process involves a user entering their email address on a client’s website. That email address is then sent an email asking if they would like to sign up for the newsletter. Only once the unique link in the email is clicked will that email address be added to the newsletter subscription list. Upon subscription the user will also be provided with a cancellation link that they can click on at any time to should they wish to remove themselves from the mailing list.
Whilst much of the subscription and cancellation process has been automated, it is still the responsibility of the client to ensure they manage their subscription lists appropriately and that the content of the newsletters they send out contain material that their clients would expect and appreciate.
Each newsletter should contain a cancellation link (usually in the footer) to enable uses to unsubscribe from the mailing list.
We recommend that newsletters be sent no more than once a month, and at least once a quarter to ensure mailing lists are valid and up-to-date.
