Email Campaign Management

Integration

The one truth of email marketing is that an individual sale is of little consequence. It is repeat purchases that matter. That is the reason for email lists and why your intent should be to keep subscribers on it and increase their number. A sale is merely the prelude to the next one.

Buying is a procedure and you should do everything possible to make the process simple. Ease the customers from the marketing email onto the landing page seamlessly. Even if you have an expensive and underused graphics department, or your business is design, the selling process is not the place to demonstrate it. It is self-indulgent and might surprise or confuse your customers.

It is a bit like the instructions given in self defence: move to your right but make it look as if you are going left. Each page should be sufficiently different from the preceding one to show that the customer has moved on but it needs to be obvious that they are still with the same company. The differences can be subtle: change of format, or the arrangement of the graphics, or perhaps the typeface. All they need to know is that the landing page is different from the email marketing one but that they are still with the company they started with.

One size does not fit all. New technology and squabbles between different platforms can make things difficult for those intent on a consistent corporate identity. Your marketing emails will be read on different platforms by those on your email lists and by individuals on more than one.

It is not for nothing that the London Transport logo is de rigueur on graphic design courses. It is deceptively simple yet can be used on all forms of marketing. The idea behind it is for one design with multiple executions: they might have been thinking of the needs of email marketing.

So the remit is a logo and style that is applicable to letter headings, business cards, promotional pens, iPads, Blackberries, posters, adverts and tomorrow’s must have.

And just to make things difficult, your graphics will have to change, and not all that far in the future. Those in email marketing know that technology moves on almost daily and what was perfect for yesterday is incompatible with now. This means your carefully considered corporate image will have to change as well.

Sudden is not good in email marketing. It might shock those on your email lists. If something startlingly new pops into their inbox they might well consign it to the spam folder in fear.

You have a number of options. You could stage the changes over a period, running the new logo alongside the old, gradually altering the relative sizes and emphasis. Or you could follow the Santander route when the moved on from Abbey National and just tell everyone it is coming.

Whichever way you go you should remember that in email marketing, graphics must aid selling. Pretty might be nice but it must work for you as well. Your logo and corporate design are tools. Use them.

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