E-mail marketing - UKBF post

I've just submitted as post on UKBF answering a question about e-mail marketing that I thought would be of interest.  here's a link to the question itself  and here's the text from my reply :


"I think with a mailing to existing customers it's a 50 50 call as to whether formatting the e-mail yourself as a simple document (perhaps including your logo) which keeps things looking 'intimate' or having something produced that might look very marketing orientated and/or more mass produced - depends on the nature of your clientele and the impression you'd like to convey. For a small mailing like this I'd go for the in-house approach personally. Perhaps consider a semi-regular professionally laid out newsletter as an alternative ?

As per other comments, be careful about the set up of your e-mail to avoid spam filter problems. You'll also need some kind of 'opt out' clause, so ensure their is a mechanism to remove people from your database on request.

However you route the mailing, make sure that the mailing list is sent in the bcc box - a few weeks ago I saw a large mailing list sent out in the cc box in error and it was a bit of a data protection debacle.

Last bit of advice and this will impact on content and layout - make it short and snappy. In my experience people will only ever take in one or two paragraphs if they bother to read the mail at all - make sure then that there are no more than one or two key messages and only one call to action - once you've rewritten your content for brevity, e-mail it to yourself in the final draft format - then if you can, take a step back and re-read it as a customer and assess :
impact, content, message, layout - does it tick the boxes you want the customer to get?

Hope that this helps

Phil"