Experienced digital marketing practitioners all have their own favourite ways to market a business. Some require a lot of investment in terms of both time and money, others require great skill which tends to come at a price, but one thing that most marketers, digital or not, tend to agree on is that email marketing, when done properly, is a very effective way to nurture prospects and customers and maximise their potential in terms of spend.

Notice that I qualified the above statement by adding “when done properly.” A badly run email marketing campaign will just annoy people and could possibly alienate them from your business – forever. This is one activity that you have to get right but if you do – the rewards are substantial. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools and services available to help you to achieve your objectives with Email Marketing.

Email Marketing Success – It All Depends On The List

The key element to any email campaign is your email list. This should ideally include the contact details of your customers and prospective customers together with a reasonable amount of supporting data. A typical email list would include the name of the contact, the organisation for which they work and the position or role they have, their email address and , possibly, their telephone number and some commercial information about the organisation such as product or service category, geographical trading areas, number of employees and, possibly, turnover.

Obtaining such a list is not so easy, however. It used to be, but now it isn’t. this is because data-protection legislation in the UK, across the EU and in many other parts of the world prevent you from simply buying a list and sending unsolicited emails. Nowadays it is polite to ask people first of all if they would like to receive information from you and to give them the option of easily removing themselves from your list, should they wish to do so.

It is possible to purchase email lists where those listed have opted in but they tend to be expensive and often the opting in procedure is tenuous with the intended recipient of future emails not realising quite what they had let themselves in for. This results in a high “churn,” i.e. lots of people on your nice new list asking to be removed from it as soon as you start to mail them.

In most cases, the only way to get your hands on a really good emailing list is to build it yourself and there are many tools and products out there to help you to do this. In The Digital Marketing Directory we have listed all the best email packages and services and have reviewed many of them for your convenience. We also have a useful “How To” guide for building email lists and creating an effective email marketing campaign.