The Great Northern Blog » Email Marketing

Email Marketing – Quick Tips for Better Results

AndyAdmin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:46:07 +0000

Email marketing is so easy to do that many businesses do it almost on auto-pilot, and then wonder why they get poor results.

Too often they worry about the process and neglect the content, resulting in low open rates with most of their target audience failing to read a single word!

But the basics can be easy – just think about which emails you decide to open and then decide to read, and which ones do you automatically filter out to ignore. And work out how you make those decisions. Usually it will involve the following:

1. Email headline or title must catch the attention or trigger curiosity, without being ’spammy’. A poor headline is the fast route to the waste bin! It needs to convey enough information for the reader to want to learn more.

2. Who is the email from? Is it someone whose reputation you value and trust, or a company you’ve never heard of? Building the trust of your mailing list over time by providing content of interest and value is a good long term investment. An email from a known individual is more likely to be read than one from a corporate role address such as sales@ or info@

3. The content of the email itself should inform and assist the reader, even when the primary message is a sales proposal. It should be written in a style which you’d like to read.

Always think, would I open and read this email? And if you are unsure, work out why and change it!

WSI helps a number of clients to run successful email marketing campaigns across a variety of industries. If you would like to learn more, call us on 01928 787026.

Social media and email marketing can work together

AndyAdmin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:55:22 +0000

Email marketing has traditionally been one of the cost-effective and powerful ways to communicate with a network of contacts and nurture the relationship.

With the growing adoption by businesses of social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, many companies have shifted focus away from email marketing.

But the two channels can and should be working together.

Email marketing can encourage social media membership, while the social media can be used to promote email sign-ups.

It is important to establish and promote different roles for the two channels. Typically email marketing can be more targeted and exclusive, as you can gather demographic data as part of the sign-up process. So valuable content can be shared with a selected audience e.g. seasonal sales vouchers.

Social media membership is typically a lot broader and probably less well qualified. Involvement and shared content can encourage interaction with the company website, email sign-ups etc.

If you would like to understand more about how email marketing and social media can benefit your business, call WSI on 01928 787026

2008 Constant Contact All Star

AndyAdmin — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:29:20 +0000

Email marketing is one of the most effective mechanisms for building the relationship and maintaining contact with existing clients and business contacts. At WSI, we use a number of different e-marketing technologies depending upon the client’s specific needs. We regularly use and recommend the use of Constant Contact for permission-based email marketing, particularly for regular newsletters. Recently I was designated a 2008 Constant Contact All Star by Gail Goodman, their President and CEO. Their award read:

Dear Andrew,
You’re using permission-based email marketing to help drive your business. You’ve communicated regularly with your customers and members. And they’re clearly interested in hearing from you! You’ve maintained sound permission-based email marketing and list management best practices.

All of these indicate to us that you made excellent use of Constant Contact last year. And we noticed!

That’s why we are proud to designate you as a 2008 Constant Contact All Star! You’re part of a special group of our customers that we want to thank for setting a great example for other email marketers. Congratulations!

Thank you again for using Constant Contact, and we hope you’ll continue to serve as a great example to others in 2009.

Best wishes,

Gail Goodman
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer

If you would like to learn more about how email marketing can benefit your business, please call or email me.

Effective email newsletters

AndyAdmin — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:23:58 +0000

Email marketing can be a very powerful tool for customer retention and development. It can help to build awareness of the full ranges of products and services a company provides.With a sign-up button on your web site, it adds another conversion tool to increase the effectiveness of the site.

Email marketing can complement the existing channels of communication with customers, prospects and business partners, so reinforcing your brand and encouraging loyalty.

It is said “Selling is being in the right place at the right time, Marketing is getting you there!!”

The challenge is to make your email marketing informative and effective for your target audience. A recent blog post at SEOMoz earlier this year reviewed an assortment of e-newsletters to give a personal view on their effectiveness – there are some interesting lessons.