Target the right people

Focus on your best prospects. Even though it costs very little financially to send an email, it can still take up a lot of your time if your campaign is not targeted.

Email marketing is more successful if it focuses on people you know are interested in what you're offering. For example, if you're running a special offer on computer hardware, it will be more effective if you promote it only to people responsible for buying IT.

Unsolicited marketing emails, or spam, are illegal, but because they continue to be a major problem, computer security software can be used to block them. People are easily annoyed when they receive an email that's irrelevant to them, and they're likely to delete unsolicited messages from your business without reading them.

But an email to an existing customer or contact, who has agreed to receive marketing from you about products or services, may well be valuable to them. Even if they don't buy from you immediately, they're more likely to do so in the future.

Keeping it relevant

If you've got a large database of customers and potential customers for your email marketing campaign, it's worth analysing what you know about them, so you can send a more relevant message. See our next article on how to manage your customer database.

For example, you could send high-spending customers an email about your new loyalty discount. Customers who haven't bought anything from you for six months will be more likely to respond to an update on your products and services.