Here is an example of a well executed permission based email campaign by London Drugs:

• They asked for my email at store level – establishing permission to communicate
• They took the time to remind me about how I subscribed to their list
• They make an effort to deliver relevant communication – they don’t assume I want to receive the newsletter because I provided my email at store level. Asking me to opt-in to the newsletter builds trust and increases the likelihood of engagement
• They offer an additional incentive to sign up

With spam becoming the norm, it’s cool to see that some organizations still understand the value of their permission asset.

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By Mark Smiciklas

What goes into making a great e-newsletter and why should your small business consider embracing e-newsletters as a marketing communication tool?

The Formula

Content + Design + Permission = eNewsletter Success

Content – Offer content that you feel provides value/benefits to your subscribers. It’s okay to sprinkle in company news and special offers, but don’t make your e-newsletter a glorified sales brochure – people will bail if they feel they are being advertised to.

Design - Lay out your e-newsletter so that is easy to read. Assume that most subscribers will be reading your email online – avoid small fonts, single spacing, long paragraphs, etc.

Permission – Offer a number of ways for your customers and prospects to subscribe (opt-in) to your e-newsletter. Place a sign up box on your website, personally invite your clients to sign up via telephone or email,  offer ways for customers to sign up at your retail locations, etc. Don’t be a SPAMMER…it’s not attractive and it’s bad for business.

Reasons to Embrace eNewsletter Marketing

1. Build relationships. eNewsletters provide an opportunity to develop and sustain communication with your stakeholders – helping your small business build relationships with customers, prospects and vendors.
2. Generate sales leads. eNewsletters that offer good content present insight on how to address your customers’ problems and subtle information about your products/services.
3. Cost effective method of marketing. Email distribution only costs pennies per subscriber and campaign content and can be organized internally (a few hours per month) or through an email marketing agency for a limited fee.
4. Customer Retention. I’ve heard many business people state that the cost of finding a new client far outweighs the cost of retaining an existing customer. The case for retaining customers gets even stronger when you take into account the following study results from international management consultants Bain and Company: A 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%. Effective marketing communication is a great way to protect your “relationship” asset – eNewsletters can help your small business retain existing customers and build incremental business.
5. Measurable Communication. Unlike other forms of marketing or advertising, e-newsletter campaigns offer real metrics that provide information on how many people opened your email, details on who opened your e-newsletter, how many (and which) links were clicked, etc.

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This Marketing Visual was inspired by Email Campaign Case Studies (One Good, One Bad).

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by Ryan P. M. Allis

According to a study by the Winterberry Group, email marketing brings in $15.50 per dollar spent . This is about 17% more than direct-mail campaigns and 73% more than telemarketing campaigns. In short, email marketing matters and if you’re not sending out at least monthly email newsletters to your subscriber base, you should be. The true cost comes from acquiring the prospects and clients, not the three or four hours
needed to create a monthly newsletter.

Many organizations, once they have spent the thousands of dollars acquiring their clients, fail to market to their existing base. I’ve met quite a few marketing managers who would rather continue spending $200 a pop for new qualified prospects rather than $0.01 per person to build the relationship with their existing clients and recommend new products or encourage re-orders. I’ve found that sending relevant email
communications to persons who have requested to receive them is the single most effective way of cultivating the type of relationship needed to turn your prospects into customers and your customers into
lifetime product evangelizers.

As a reader of this article, chance has it that your organization is one that already sends out a newsletter, or at least is considering doing so soon. Once you began sending your own newsletter, however, it is important to follow two important rules that will increase your likelihood of achieving your marketing goals, whether they are to increase repeat orders, convert a higher ratio of prospects, or obtain top-of-mind
brand awareness.

The first and most important rule is to only send relevant content to persons who have requested it. What does this mean? Well, let’s say you are a travel and adventure planning company. If someone has subscribed to your Kayaking Monthly Newsletter, don’t move them over to your European Vacations list and send them an article on Dining in Tuscany. In most cases, you will very quickly lose any prospect or reduce the lifetime value of your relationship with an existing client. If the person also subscribed to it, it would be okay to send him or her a monthly company newsletter that from time to time had information on other topics, but don’t mix newsletter bases just to increase mailing volumes.

It is important to note that just setting up an interest segment and adding it to your sign up form doesn’t require you to create a monthly newsletter on that topic, but once you get a few dozen to a couple hundred people interested in that area (depending the value of the product or service you are providing), it will likely pay to have quality content developed on that topic for distribution in interest specific newsletters. This can be easily done within the iContact email marketing software by either creating a list specifically for persons
interested in a topic or creating a segment of persons with a specific interest.

The second rule is to be consistent with your sending frequency. Depending on your type of business and
your subscriber interest level, the right volume for you could be weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Once you find the frequency that is right for your organization (and this could vary newsletter to newsletter), stick with it. We see a lot of companies whose email strategy can only be defined as “ad hoc.” Rather than blasting out a promotion whenever sales are lagging, we recommend having an emailing schedule for each newsletter and sticking to it, whether it be every Saturday, every other Wednesday, or on the 15 th of each month. As an example our company newsletter, the Permission-Based Email Marketing Monthly goes out on the 28 th of each month.

What type of results can you expect from regularly sending out regular email newsletters? Here are two examples from users of iContact the email marketing software my company Broadwick provides. Biotage is a company based on Massachusetts that provides DNA sequencing instrumentation. They send out event notifications and company updates to 20,000 or so subscribers each month. David Shultis, Marketing Communications Manager of Biotage, notes, “We’ve seen open rates at around the 38-42% mark for our large mailings. There has also been a ‘pass-along’ quality of our emails, as we’ve noticed new names that were not originally on our mailing lists responding to offers.” Another iContact user, Julie Ibrahim, Vice President of the Tiger Sports Shop says “The monthly newsletter keeps us and our inn at the forefront in the minds of our
past and potential guests. Thus with the continuous news from us and our region, we are kept in mind, with no sales effort or pressure.” If your organization wants to see marketing results like these, it may be time to start or expand your usage of permission-based email marketing.

If you stick with sending relevant, high quality content-rich emails on a consistent basis to persons who have requested to receive your emails, you will increase your prospect to customer conversion rates and
customer lifetime value at a fraction of the of the cost of traditional methods and take advantage of the best type of marketing possible—free marketing through authentic customer word-of-mouth.

Ryan P. M. Allis is the CEO for Broadwick, Corp. Broadwick offers the leading permission based email marketing software, iContact. We Simplify Email Marketing.

(c) Broadwick, Corp. 2000-2006 http://www.broadwick.com
All Rights Reserved. You may freely distribute or publish this article provided you publish the whole article and include this copyright notice and links in full.

Allow me to share this excellent example of BAD email marketing…

“Mark, I hope you are well. Sorry for the unsolicited approach but due to the time difference between Singapore it is quite difficult to speak. Anyway I noticed you advertise on E-hotelier so blame them for my intro!! I am keen to find out if Asia is a target market of yours? I ask as “Magazine Name” is a B2B marketing E-newsletter that focuses on the Asian Market. I have taken the liberty to subscribe you, please feel free to unsubscribe. “Magazine Name” is distributed to over 150,000 daily so we are one of the best read in the region…”

Here are some of my thoughts…

• Blaming the time difference as justification for a bad marketing approach i.e. spamming is lame. I have no issue receiving company introductions via email…be professional and let me know why I should choose to read on, listen, respond, etc. Don’t use questionable tactics and then ask for forgiveness.
• The fact that I advertise online doesn’t give you the right to spam me – Blaming my online ad partner is super-lame.
• Taking the liberty to subscribe me without my permission is unethical. Why would anyone deal with a company that assumes this tactic is acceptable?
• Letting me know that it’s my responsibility to unsubscribe (after signing me up without permission) is ridiculous. This is a sure fire way to get reported for spamming.
• Having a huge list of subscribers is great, but only if you nurture it using permission based marketing. The list above has no credibility. How many subscriptions were permission based, via opt-in, double opt-in, etc? Based on how I became a subscriber, likely not 150,000.

Don’t join the dark side of email marketing. Gaining permission to communicate with your prospects/customers is the only way to build a marketing relationship based on trust – the foundation of any great small business.

Electronic newsletters are a great way to build relationships with potential/existing customers. Here is a summary of some eNewsletter components and some suggestions on how to get started:

Content

Develop your content offering. The most important thing to consider is what value your eNewsletter brings to subscribers. Offer information that will help your subscribers become more knowledgeable, enabling them to use your content to run their businesses more effectively. Avoid using your eNewsletter to overtly sell your product or service – it won’t take long for subscribers to figure out whether or not your eNewsletter is really a glorified brochure.

Once you have established the theme of your eNewsletter it’s time to think about the process of creating content. Start slow with respect to newsletter frequency – publishing one issue every two months is a good way to avoid getting overwhelmed with respect to content development.

It’s great if you are able to write your own content – but this can be difficult for many people, particularly from a time perspective. Think about gaining permission to use other people’s content (making sure you properly reference their material, of course). There is no shortage of good online contributors that would be more than happy to have their thoughts published in your newsletter. Don’t be tempted to “borrow” other people’s  ideas – I always ask for permission to use content and have never be declined. Try using the following email request letter…it should help you start gaining permission and building your content library:

“We would like to request permission to use content from your (article, website, press release, etc) in some of our upcoming online newsletters. We will list the source information within the newsletter and provide a link back to the original article on our website.

About Us

(Your Company Name) is a public/private company that provides (list your product or service offering) to the (list your industry). Our eNewsletter provides concise industry centric content that is aimed at helping (your target market) manage and market their business. For more information please visit our website at (your website address).

Thank you for your consideration. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at your convenience.”

Unfortunately, online plagiarism and content theft are a common occurance – my experience is that writers are so surprised that you are actually asking for permission, that they will be more than happy to grant it.

Email Management

Sign up with a web based email marketing service provider. It’s an easy and inexpensive way to get a quick and professional start. There are a number of email marketing programs to choose from – many of them offer similar features such as email templates, subscription list management, CAN SPAM compliance, double opt-in, opt-out, forward to a friend, email bounce back management, email metrics, etc. I have worked quite extensively with iContact and find it provides great functionality at a reasonable cost.

The first thing you will need to do after signing up is design a subscription form – basically, a field for your website where people can sign up to receive your eNewsletter. The iContact application walks you through this process and provides you with the HTML code to paste into your website – if you are not comfortable with adding this code to your site, consult your web programmer for help.

Newsletter Design and Strategy

The next step is to design your newsletter and consider a strategy for driving traffic back to your website. Don’t get over ambitious with respect to article quantity – I suggest three articles per issue in the main body of the newsletter. You can “sprinkle” some product/service/company content in the sidebars – remember, the content that provides value to your subscribers should take centre stage, but it doesn’t hurt to have some relevant company information in the background.

Consider just including the introductory paragraph to your article within the actual newsletter and providing a FULL ARTICLE link back to your website (where the complete article is posted). This serves two purposes – it helps create new website content on an ongoing basis and it draws people back to your site. After they read that great article you have provided, they might just take a tour around the rest of your website.

One last thought on eNewsletters – it takes time to cultivate a permission based list of subscribers. Be patient – it’s not the number of subscribers that’s important, it’s the quality.

I subscribe to a design magazine called HOW. I recently received the following promotional email:

Dear Mr. Smiciklas,
“As a preferred HOW customer you qualify for this special offer…Claim your FREE issue. No Risk. No Obligation. CLICK HERE.”

Great! I was about to be rewarded for being a loyal reader. When I clicked on the link I was directed to a subscription form…having to commit to a one year subscription is an obligation – so much for my FREE issue.

As a customer, I chose to grant HOW permission to communicate with me via email, so no problem there. But the marketing “slight of hand” is a bit of an insult…and bad business. There are ramifications to tricking your customers into action:

1. The permission you gained to engage your customers in a conversation about your product, service, etc will be revoked…now you just become another spammer!
2. All the goodwill your brand has developed will disappear…poof!

Avoid the temptation to get “slick” with your marketing and respect your customers by engaging in honest communication – the brand trust that will be created is one of the most precious assets your small business will ever own.