Marketing

Mass marketing: email marketing

Email marketing or emailshots are an easy way of contacting a large number of people quickly, easily and generally low cost.

However, there are pitfalls to watch out for so as to avoid being classed as a spammer. First of all, there’s varying legislation governing what you can send and to whom, depending on your country of operation. I plan on writing follow up articles about opting in or out and how to manage subscriber lists at a later date. This post is more concerned about the do-ing element of email marketing.

Yes, you can use your own email software such as Outlook Express, Outlook or Thunderbird… or even directly from your web mail accounts, if you decide to run things via web based services. The danger of doing this though, is that if you’re running a business – the last thing you really want or need is for your domain to be blacklisted because of email abuse. So, think very carefully about how you’re going to go about this.

A handy way to add a degree of safety to your mailshot activities is to use a third-party mailing application.

A couple of the better known ones are:

Not only can these manage varying subscription lists for you, but can safely send hundreds or even thousands of emails on your behalf and give you full statistical analysis of the success of your campaigns. Mail Chimp even offers a free package for low volume lists – allowing for up to 500 subcribers and 3,000 emails per month before requiring you to upgrade and start paying; whereas Campaigner, offers unlimited packages from just $10.

Does it matter that they’re not UK based?

The simple answer is, no. Support may not be as quick due to the time zones, but the prices are certainly worth the trade off.

Marketing, business and web skills

So this web site is now a handy place for me to keep everything that I do online ordered and accessible, as well as test various online technologies and functionality.

My skills and experience includes:

  • Marketing – strategic & tactical marketing plans, advertising, etc.
  • Business & organisational health checks
  • Web design – HTML, PHP, Joomla, WordPress, others…
  • Graphic design – predominantly Photoshop – covering print and advertising design, business graphics, logos, invitiations, anything really…
  • Research – predominantly secondary, desk-based research – but also including advice and consultancy on alternative options and sources of information
  • Recruitment – how to recruit, services available, routes to market, CV writing advice, careers management and consultancy work, recruitment web sites, etc.
  • Social media marketing – just starting here (late, I know), but, watch this space…