Email Marketing for Every Small Business in Singapore?
We’re really excited about reaching far more small businesses in Singapore and start the conversation with, “Why exactly do you need email marketing?”
The answer should be obvious, or is it?
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Email Marketing Best Practices: Getting Permission to Email
Here’s a quick expansion on Point 1 of our Email Marketing Best Practices.
1) Always get permission to email (either before or after)
There are a few scenarios. This seems to make the most sense.
- If you have a prior business relationship with the email recipient (already your customer)
- If they have asked to be contacted or to be included in your list (brandy bowl for namecards in store)
- If they belong to a special group that must use your services (eg cleanroom engineers need specialised goggles and prescription lenses)
- They belong to the same association as you (once again, you must ask their permission.)
- If you met them in person before and have their contact or business card
- If you are a customer of theirs (they could become a customer of yours)
It’s okay to email in the above circumstances, but what if you have an old list of customers or someone with whom you have not already asked his or her permission to contact? Then do this.
Top 10 Email Marketing Best Practices
It’s time to let you in on a few email marketing best practices in case you are already managing your own email marketing campaigns. If you need some assistance to implement the suggestions below, you can get in touch with us to learn more.
1) Always Get Permission to Email
If someone subscribes to your email list voluntarily, it does mean he or she has given you permission to email.
If it’s someone you’ve manually added to your database (for a variety of reasons), it’s only polite to ask.
If you ask and someone says no, that’s better than not asking and getting black listed as a spammer with your ISP.
2) Send Multi-Part (MIME) Emails with TEXT and HTML versions
In our technologically advanced world with high speed broadband, amazing mixed multimedia and super duper web technologies, we often forget that not everyone is as technologically enabled as we are. The advent of mobile internet and broadband on mobile phones also see people receiving email at low speeds of 128kbps and reading email with text only email browsers.
Email Marketing: Integrating Offline, Online and Web Marketing Activities
This is perhaps a most interesting topic for traditional business owners. I see this as web technology meets small business and how we can use Email Marketing as the integrating platform and technology to bring all your marketing efforts into one single channel.
When we meet small business owners, we often ask them what marketing activities they already have committed their budgets to.
Many of them cite the following activities as part of their marketing mix.
- Hire sales people
- Send a flyer
- Share a corporate brochure
- Create a product catalog or a product newsletter
- Printed newsletter (most of the time in black & white photocopy)
- Send a greeting card or email at major festive holidays
- SMS marketing - costs a lot, got some responses, but limited texting capability
- Advertising in monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly magazine (in related industry)
- Advertising in other printed magazines, commemoratives, trade journals.
- Maintaining a database on Excel spreadsheet or within Outlook address book
Here’s how to get all your marketing activities in order:
Be fully compliant with local spam control and international anti-spam laws
Are your business-to-business or business-to-consumer marketing emails being marked by your recipients as SPAM or Junk Mail?
We have looked at the legal implications of sending email that people don’t want to receive any (even if they did want to receive those emails initially) and have distilled it down to a few rules that every email sender should adhere to.
Last week, we attended an industry meeting discussing the grey areas of the spam control and anti-spam legislation in Asia and around the world. While it is clear that we were already on track, we were very doubtful that email receivers clearly know what was to be classified as spam and what was not spam.
Here’s the guidelines that we can recommend you follow when sending your own email campaigns.