What is an emailing?
There are many different different ways to make your products/services known to your leads/customers. Just to name a few:
- Print your products/services on a t-shirt and walk in the streets with it.
- Your own website accessible through search engines.
- Ads on TV.
- Paper mails.
... Emailing consists in simply sending an email to someone or an organization/company you got the email address from.
Strenghts and weaknesses of an emailing
As all communication channels, emailing has some advantages and drawbacks, let's see them.
Strengths:
- costless communication channel.
- you can easily test what works and what doesn't.
- you get an answer straight away.
- you can purchase databases.
Weaknesses:
- compared to mails, emails need to go through antispam.
- it gives a bad image of what emails are.
- the conversion rate is quite low.
- probably your competitors are as well using this communication channel.
Why should you care about emailing?
Good question, after all a digital strategy can rely on some SEO techniques and some ads here and there:
- Emailing is one of the most accessible digital marketing channel of all.
- Targeting: you are sending your communication to individuals that you identified. Note that, the more your database (CRM) will be descriptive, the more chances your emailing will have an impact.
- Cost effective: the cost of sending emails is close to 0 with small databases. Affordable when used on bigger ones.
- Easy to measure: compared to other channels, the number of metrics to follow will be less than 10. You can also measure how many people convert on your website thanks to it.
- Simple to make some tests: you just need to edit the content of your communication and that's it. You never know if your audience prefer pictures rather than text email... or maybe both.
- Easy to handle: simple as sending an email.
- Quick: you get your answers almost straight away according to your audience. Note that you can couple it with an analytics solution such as Matomo.
You will probably won't do your full acquisition strategy based on emailing, but for sure emailing is a branch you need to control in order to run the extra mile.
Why you shouldn't use your own email service provider to send emailing?
The reason why you don't want to use your personal webmail or email message to send an emailing are the following:
- You won't have metrics measurements.
- Your email from which you are sending your communication will be quickly identified as a spam.
- You cannot really handle a database there.
- To make it simple it has not been designed for that.
To make it simple, stop your bad habits of pushing the send email button from your email provider solution. If you continue you will quickly find out that your email has been identified as spam and all your communication through this channel will be seriously affected. So you need to use an emailing service in order to send emailing campaigns.
There are many emailing service providers out there. But for most of them, there are proprietary solutions. In this course we will focus on phpList, a Free software solution to send emailing.
How does an emailing work with phpList?
Compared to any other vendors out there, with phpList, you are in control of everything, from writing your message, to send it to your target audience.
Different steps of an emailing
- Draft your message.
- Select to who you will send it.
- Send it.
- Analyze the results.
Why paper mails are still useful?
- As most people are identifying commercial email as spam, you have more chances to reach an individual with paper mail.
- The conversion rate is higher even if it will cost you more.
- You can reach some people who may be inaccessible otherwise.
Pay attention, according to the organization or individual you are targeting it may be not be taken well as it is not ecological.