E-mail Marketing

Strategy, Design, Build, Broadcast & Automation

According to the recent (2011) e-mail marketing census from e-consultancy, e-mail marketing ranks as the top or second best channel for return on investment according to 72% of companies surveyed.

And it achieves this while consuming only 18% of overall budget...

At STAR Digital we approach e-mail marketing from a strategic perspective. As agency partners to Silverpop, our broadcast platform comes with a full suite of automation options to ensure that your e-mail campaigns are personal, targeted and relevant. Our key strength is that we actually know how to leverage and use the Silverpop Engage tools for our clients, delivering huge savings against in-house IT teams.

When it comes to creative, our team know how to deliver the best quality messaging and branding to make your messages cut through the clutter. We build flexible templates for use by in-house non-technical teams, and provide on-going support to get the most from every mailing.

When it comes to e-mail strategy we believe in doing it right. Whilst 45% of companies are planning to use advanced segmentation for their e-mail marketing, only 23% are actually doing it. At STAR Digital we know how to deliver advanced segmentation linked to user behaviour, or by using relational data from your sales database to deliver only relevant content or offers to the right people based on real historical data.

Some key considerations for e-mail marketers in 2011.

What are you hoping to get from your e-mail marketing?

What is your motivation for using e-mail marketing? Is it to generate sales, get more traffic, develop brand awareness, keep in touch with customers or just as a tool to provide a halo effect to other marketing channels. You need to be aware of how e-mail is developing.When used properly, e-mail marketing is one of the top ROI generators for a business.

Important areas to consider include;

• Behavioral Targeting
• Content Personalisation
• Relational Data Sets
• Integration With Other Activities
• Automated Programmes with Dependencies
• Promotion of Customer Reviews & Ratings
• Mobile Integration
• Video Content
• Sharing to Social Tracking
• Deliverability Monitoring

How will you use e-mail marketing?

Do you plan to integrate e-mail marketing into your marketing mix. Have you thought about your strategy?

What volume and frequency are you looking to work to? What is the main focus of the content, how will you deal with deliverability, what is the creative strategy, do you have the necessary HTML skills in-house? Can you measure the number of people that are opening and clicking on links in your e-mail. Can you automate your e-mail marketing programmes and manage bad e-mail addresses and users that want to unsubscribe?

Take a look at the top five barriers to effective use of e-mail as determined by e-consultancy's 2011 e-mail census.

• Poor quality e-mail database, lack of opt-ins
• Lack of e-mail strategy
• Lack of segmentation
• Lack of relevant content
• Lack of in-house skills

Who is responsible for your e-mail marketing?

Do you have the right talent in-house to develop an e-mail marketing strategy and deliver on creative and content? If so are you comfortable being responsible for sending campaigns?

If you have questions that you'd like answered about e-mail marketing strategy and execution, automated marketing programmes or the Silverpop Engage platform please call STAR Digital on 01604 696385.