Email Marketing – Is it suitable for your business?

Email Marketing: In one guise or another, we've been in business a long time, and we're pretty damn sensitive to how people feel when they receive unsolicited calls and emails. In our current business, the problem is acute. Just about every business owner in Australia, including us of course, receives a torrent of unsolicited, time-wasting, low quality offers of websites and SEO' every single day.

We really do know how you feel about this. We try hard - really hard - to be polite to the people who call us as we're having dinner and ask us yet again '...am I talking to the owner of "Sydney Business Web ?" Would you like to be on first page of Google?" (sic).

We try hard because we know that the poor sod on the other end of the line is just trying to make a living, as we are ourselves. However, as a justified exception, when we receive scam calls, we have endless fun asking "where's my free toaster?" and "do you realize you are speaking to a police officer?"! But that's a different although very funny story (we love winding up scammers!).

Why do People Use Email Marketing?

Like me, you probably go through your email pile every morning and delete everything you don't recognize, unless it has a really striking headline relevant to you and your industry (and even then it almost always disappoints you anyway). You also delete everything with a heading like 'SEO proposal', 'Pay for results only', page 1 of Google', and 'free webinar will make you millions'! I can't even write these things without laughing.

So why do people do it? Why oh why oh why? Well here's the thing:

The Upside of e Email Marketing

On average, across all industries, marketing emails have an open rate of 16% and a click-through rate of 7% (You can verify these numbers here. So if you send out ten thousand emails, you are going, on average, to get seven hundred sets of eyeballs on your offer. At a conversion rate of only two percent, that means 14 sales. if you are selling high value items at $1000 each, then this is a money-making strategy. Obviously the numbers differ for low value items. And if you are a clever marketer, targeting customers who might really need your product with a genuinely great offer, the conversion will be far higher - maybe as high as 7%.
Email marketing is cheap. A SMTP (don't worry about that if you don't know what it is - it's geekspeak) account can give you up to three hundred free emails a day (we're thinking of our own new account with Sendinblue). Of course, you need to set everything up and may need some help with that.
A good SMTP account allows you to use mailing lists, add to them automatically, track clicks and upsell and resell. It's a very useful tool for business!
It's not as brutal on the marketer as cold calling
SMTP accounts can be linked securely to your own email addresses and to many superb marketing tools such as competition platforms, lead generation platforms and more. The graphical and tracking facilities are not something you want to reinvent!

New Email Marketing Panel on Sendinblue

The image above of a Email Marketing Stats Panel at Sendinblue (click for full size) shows:

Contact ID Details
Email Open Rate %
Email Click Rate %
Unsubscribe Rate % (ALL marketing Emails must have this option)
Complaints
Bounce rate (emails that do no longer exist usually)
Date of Email sending

You will no doubt have noticed the SMS facility in that image, but as we haven't used SMS for marketing (yet?) we offer no comment.

The Downside of eMail Marketing

Email marketers use SMTP email integration ( and other geeky methods) with providers such as Sendinblue and MailChimp because they need website infrastructure that's set up to send thousands of emails a day, and they need the additional features for list management, sending downloads for newsletters etc.

It's also safer to work through an SMTP platform than through your own domain, because mass email always runs the risk of getting your IP blacklisted - and suddenly none of your business emails are being delivered because the Spambots are blocking them. Getting your business IP off a blacklist can take days or weeks, which can obviously damage your business and brand.

If you get your email provider's IP (web address) blacklisted with your low quality emails they will often shut down your account after a couple of warnings. But they can see it coming - they count the number of rejected emails, bounced emails, complaints and unsubscribes and their tolerance levels are very, very low and they all keep a constant measure of your 'reputation' that you must act on.

Which Businesses Should Use eMail Marketing?

The answer to this is any and every company. As proof of this,

Businesses Using eMail Marketing: Data available at Smartinsights.com

Conclusions and Remarks

if your business is not using eMail marketing, you are almost certainly losing out. However, you will need to identify your customers and not blindly spam every address you can find. You need an ethical code of conduct, genuinely good offers and a tight control over the whole process.

Your spam complaints need to be kept to less than 0.5% and you must never contact those customers again, or the ones who unsubscribe. Your follow-through must be immaculate and your website must have a well designed sales funnel.

This has been a very, very light overview or Email marketing and we will provide a much more in-depth viewpoint when we have time. Hope this gave you a little insight. We have more articles on online marketing for you to explore. Happy Selling!