Email Marketing Guide
Complete guide for successful email marketing
Welcome to your one-stop resource for everything you wanted to know about email marketing. This handy email marketing guide will help you to get the most out of your email marketing. From your very first campaign for small business email marketing, all the way through to using powerful email marketing software features to analyse and fine-tune your campaigns.
From small business email marketing, through to blue chip and public sector email marketing, this email marketing guide will cover all of the key areas to make your marketing consistently successful.
Beginner’s Resources
What is email marketing? Why use email marketing? UK email marketing company? Starting email marketing How to structure a campaign Drag and drop email designer Importance of good support Switching software suppliers Types of email design
Does email marketing work?
Email marketing has been around for quite a while now and in the last ten years has really proven itself as a key element of any business's marketing strategy. Email marketing offers four main advantages over other forms of marketing:
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It’s incredibly cost-effective. When compared to other forms of marketing such as printed media or pay-per-click, for example, email marketing costs a fraction of the cost. Typically less than one pence per email, email marketing offers are very tangible savings.
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It’s very easy to do. Modern email marketing software, such as Email Blaster’s cloud-based platform makes it really easy to create and send professional-looking emails. You don’t need any previous experience or technical expertise - the easy-to-use cloud-based software makes it really easy to get up and running in no time.
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It’s totally transparent and easy to track your results. With campaign analytics, contained within the software, you can easily view key metrics such as your opens, reads and other engagement data. This means that you can tweak your future sends for optimum results by analysing data from previous sends.
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Email marketing works well to support other forms of marketing. Email marketing can be used easily as part of a wider marketing strategy, it can be used to support both your digital and traditional channels.
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For example, you can use your social media feeds to attract new audiences, who you can then include with your email marketing lists. You can also use traditional printed media to promote membership of your subscriber lists. Using email marketing in conjunction with your other channels really helps to boost the success to a wider target audience.
What do you need to start email marketing?
Starting email marketing is really simple, you just need your list of email subscribers and access to a computer with an internet connection. Email Blaster’s email marketing software is entirely cloud-based, so it doesn’t require downloads or messy installs. Just open a free account online and start creating your email campaign.
Like most modern email marketing software, Email Blaster is incredibly easy to use. The layout is intuitive, easily accessible and has all of the features you need to create and send your email campaigns within easy reach.
As a U.K business, the team at Email Blaster are easy to contact if you need a helping hand or a fresh set of eyes. You are welcome to get in contact with the support team via telephone, email, ticket or live web chat. If your current email marketing software provider takes too long to respond, maybe it’s time to consider switching.
Our Email marketing software
Here at Email Blaster, we’ve been supplying easy-to-use email marketing software for over 15 years. Our software is used all across the world by businesses of all shapes and sizes, from SMEs through to public sector and brand names.
Everything is written in-house, we don’t outsource any part of our software or network. We aren’t resellers or affiliates for someone else's product, every line of code that makes up our software is written by one of our development team right here at our offices in Northamptonshire.
The software is full of great features to give you access to everything you need to engage with your target audience to maximum effect. Once you’ve sent out your first few campaigns and are ready to look at some of the further features, there’s a whole host of email marketing tools:
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Subscribe form builder
Using this app, you can create either a single or double opt-in sign-up form to use on your company website. This form talks directly to the Email Blaster software and will automatically populate your nominated Email Blaster list with the email addresses of people who have completed it.
This form can be themed to sit seamlessly inside your website, or you could use it as a stand-alone signup page, a pop-up box or a floating section.You can also select to use double opt-in, this creates a totally GDPR-compliant workflow, with validation to check that the email address is correct prior to adding it to your email list.
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Ai template builder
Email Blaster is now able to harness the incredible power of Chat GPT to create fully AI-driven email designs for you. Ai will draft all copy text, find suitable images, and reproduce your company’s colour scheme, logo, social media feeds and contact details.
With minimal direction, Ai will create a whole email design in under a minute. The results are quite incredible, if you are up against the clock then Ai is a huge bonus to have access to. With Chat GPT doing the heavy lifting, you can truly work smarter.
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Custom data fields
With custom data fields, you can import lots of data in addition to the recipient’s email address. This brings a huge amount of flexibility to the ability to personalise your sends.
All data that you import would be available for you to use as a mail merge, this means that you can personalise every email to every recipient with all data that your company holds. This could include birthdays, customer IDs, product info, company name, position, personal notes etc. Personalising your sends to this degree really helps to boost your sales conversions.
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Smart tagging
With smart tagging, you can segment your data, you can assign tags to groups of people. This is a great way of identifying specific groups of people to either target or exclude from specific email marketing campaigns.
An unlimited number of tags can be created, these can be available to use across any list inside your Email Blaster account. You also attach any number of tags to any number of people, for example, one email address could be a member of multiple tagged groups.
Tags can be attached to singular email addresses, or on import, you can select to attach a tag to a group of people.
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A/B testing
The great thing about email marketing is the depth of visibility that you have over how your target audience is reacting to what you are sending. With access to a whole host of engagement metrics, this means that you can effectively try different variants and see which performs best.
The Email Blaster software contains an app to automate all of this for you. You can set the criteria for how you want to measure the success, this could be clicks or reads for example. You can then set the elements to test, this could be send times, email design, send from details, call to action or subject header line.
The software will send variants automatically to a small sample of your database, then measure the results and send the winning variant to to remainder of the database. Typically a good A/B test segment is around 10% of your database of email subscribers.
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Spam score
Email Marketing campaigns live and die by inbox placement, if your email campaign is triggering your recipient’s spam filter, then your target audience may not see your campaign.
This is where the Spam Score app comes into play. The app will run a live test on your email marketing design with all of the major email service providers and will report back with a score. It’ll also identify any spam phrases inside your subject header line or body text. This inbox testing is all performed before you do a live send to your audience.With Spam score, it’ll help to make sure that you are aware of exactly how inbox-friendly your campaign is - before sending a single email to your subscribers.
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Open source API
The API means that you can create a connection between Email Blaster’s software and your own CRM system. After you’ve created your integration, you can then keep your lists contained within the software in perfect sync with your own internal records.
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Insight web analytics
By adding Email Blaster’s Insight to your website, you can view what your email subscribers did after they clicked through to your website. This app will give you extended visibility, to track engagements and behaviour.
Insight will provide vital analytical data, displayed inside Email Blaster for page visits, average journey, entry and exit points, time spent on each page and type and value of any purchases made. By recording the value of purchases made as a direct result of email marketing campaigns, your return on marketing spend is totally transparent.
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Automation & drip campaigns
With the Automate app, you can create totally automated workflows of email campaigns. With powerful features such as decision-based smart campaigns and dynamic trigger points, you have access to a host of really useful tools to completely automate your campaign sends.
Automate can also be used in conjunction with the Subscribe app. This means that when a new subscriber joins your email list - Automtate will detect this and will start sending them a timed series of emails. This is a great way of creating drip campaigns or a series of onboarding emails for your target audience.
Timeline of Email Blaster
Email Blaster is born!
Created out of a vision to provide a reliable UK service for mainly UK-based clients, the software is launched and quickly gains a steady flow of new clients.
Web sign-up forms go live
Along with WordPress integration. Clients can now integrate Email Blaster with their website. This makes the sign-up of new subscribers into the software totally seamless and instant. Email Blaster’s widget also comes to WordPress, this means that WordPress websites just need a simple code to embed their sign-up forms into their WordPress sites.
Email Blaster ranks number one for ‘email marketing UK’
This leads to a huge increase in network traffic and client acquisition. Our first anniversary sees a huge growth in our client base. Email Blaster also joins The ICO roster as a UK-registered business.
Email Blaster moves it’s servers to a bigger data centre
The new data centre is located in Milton Keynes. To cope with the growth of the last few years, we increased our network of servers and tripled the size of our rack space.
Email Blaster joins feedback loops
For all of the major ESPs to report spam and monitor network traffic; this helps to stop unsolicited emails from being sent, this confirms Email Blaster’s commitment to ensuring that all network traffic complies with our policy of confirmed opt-in data being used only.
Huge library of pro-designed templates added
The design team created hundreds of professional templates, in a number of styles with a huge variation in styles. This makes it really easy for clients to pick one as a jumping-off point for their own campaign.
cBuilder goes live
After 24 months of research, development and testing, the all-new drag-and-drop email builder goes live. This is a real revelation for the building of email templates. It’s now faster and easier than ever to create a new design using a simple drag-and-drop building blocks process.
Email Blaster becomes a registered Internet Service Provider
Continuing the ethos to ensure everything remains in-house, and officially registered we now are able to self-supply our own network connection. With our own ASN number, we are recognised officially as an internet service provider.
Enhanced data segmentation tools are introduced
A major change is introduced to the software in how email lists are stored and can be segmented according to previous engagements.
Lists can now be grouped into easy-to-manage folder structures. Data can now be manipulated in order to create sub-sets of subscribers based on how they react to previous campaigns, i.e. if they received the campaign but did not read it for example. These powerful sets of tools make it really easy to group sub-sets in order to specifically target them with the campaigns that match their behavioural patterns.
GDPR goes live
GDPR now makes it a legal requirement for UK businesses to store the private data of their contacts, such as their email address inside the UK. Email Blaster has never used service outside of the U.K. so this makes us the perfect partner and still does.
Full automation goes live
Email Blaster users can now create totally automated drip campaigns with dynamic trigger points. Using a flow diagram principle, it makes it really easy to set up totally custom dynamic campaigns with decision stems and multiple paths.
Insight web tracking goes live
With Insight, clients can now directly track the behaviour of their email subscribers when they visit the destination of a click link inside the mailer.
This means that if a subscriber visits your website, via a click, you can then see what they did during a session; page visits, journey, entry and exit points, if a purchase was made, value of purchase, time duration of page visits.
Large expansion of the server network
Since GDPR came into effect in 2018, Email Blaster has become the first choice for UK businesses, specifically for Public Sector clients. In order to cover the additional hardware requirements, Email Blaster added a significant number of storage and network servers to include a larger redundancy cover for the software.
Custom Mail merge & smart tagging comes to Email Blaster
When importing of email subscribers, clients can now also import up to 50 other columns of additional data, all of which can be totally customised and recalled with mail merge inside an email.
Smart tagging gives clients the ability to allocate tags to individuals and groups. This makes it possible to create subsets of data within a list. Multiple tags can also be allocated to the same people, this means that overlapping is possible if a person needs to be attached to several groups at once.
Ai comes to Email Blaster
Email Blaster is now able to bring Chat GPT to email marketing. Using the power of Ai-driven content, the design-builder can now create a complete email design for clients, including images, text, branding, calls to action, social media links and corporate colours.
With minimal direction, Ai can create all of this in under a minute. The relevancy and quality of what it produces is truly stunning. This offers a huge time saving for busy email marketers.
Is it important for UK businesses to use a UK-based software platform
The advent of GDPR in 2018 has made this a legal requirement for UK businesses that hold the private data of their clients and contacts (of which, an email address is classed as private data). GDPR states that this data needs to be kept in the UK (under the protection of the law).
You can export your contact's private information outside of the UK, but you must obtain the permission of all of them before doing so. Logistically this would prove very difficult for most companies to do. In reality, most contacts if asked “Can we export your data overseas, to a country where GDPR doesn’t cover protection against the misuse of your personal data” - most people would answer “No”.
The other main reason that makes life so much easier is very simple - sometimes when you want help or support, it is easier to just pick up the phone, or send an email and get a reply quickly.
Here at Email Blaster, we hear from our clients every day how much they appreciate being able to quickly and easily contact the team and get support when they need it.
How does GDPR apply to email marketing?
As we’ve previously discussed, the big one is that UK companies must store their contact’s private data in the UK (or - obtain consent to export them outside of the protection of GDPR).
It also provides very clear guidance on the process that must be followed to obtain consent from your contacts prior to sending them email marketing.
For consumers, your contacts must have followed an auditable confirmed opt-in process. This means that they must have put a tick on a box on a form to confirm their consent. This for must also include an outline of what kind of content and frequency that they can expect to receive your email communications.
All email communications must also include the option to easily unsubscribe from further communications. If asked, you must also be able to provide your contacts with all of the information that you hold on them. Email Blaster makes this easy, we will ensure that any list you import is fully GDPR compliant. We ask all clients to self-certify that they have consent in place. The software will also provide the ability to easy to download a contact card, containing all of the information you hold for a contact - should they request a copy of this.
How to build email lists
There are a number of ways to build email lists, the approach that works the best is to use all of them! - there are lots of sources that you can use, the golden rule is to make sure that you are offering potential subscribers a strong enough reason to sign up with you.
Popular incentives include subscriber-only content & discounts, it’s really important to offer something in exchange.
Social Media is a great way to build your lists of email subscribers, using Email Blaster you can create a double opt-in stand-alone form. You can then publish this to your social media feeds - complete with your call to action, you can use this to invite your followers to join your list.
It’s also possible to use a sign-up form on your company website. This can be used as a pop-up, floating or embedded. The Email Blaster ‘subscribe’ app makes this really easy to do, you don’t need any web coding experience, and the app will do all of the heavy lifting for you. Drag and drop design makes it very easy and quick to do.
You can also set this form to be double opt-in, this is a great way to validate any email addresses before they are entered into your list. This helps to maintain really good list hygiene.
One of the best methods and often the most overlooked is to have a thorough audit of your current contacts. Over recent years, you may have had quite a bit of contact with people who may have enquired and not purchased - and also existing customers. These groups are often your strongest source of new data.
Is it ok to use purchased email lists?
GDPR says that you can send emails to businesses who have not opted in directly with you. So, whilst it’s perfectly legal to use purchased lists of business email addresses, there are some pretty strong reasons why they are best avoided:
- Purchased lists are cold data - these are lists of email addresses that are sold to anyone who wants to buy them. This means that they are often heavily over-saturated with cold marketing emails.
- These lists are often quite old, which means that a high percentage of the email addresses contained within them may be dead or no longer used.
- As purchased lists are sold based on the count of how many addresses they contain, it’s not uncommon for lists to be padded out with duplicates, consumer addresses and dead data.
- As a marketing medium, they yield hardly any results - all of the factors we’ve discussed contribute heavily to the very poor results that these lists often generate.
- Spam filters routinely blacklist email senders using these lists. In order to protect inboxes from being bombarded with communications that they didn’t ask for or aren’t relevant - they will block senders.
How to use personalisation with email marketing
Using personalisation with your email marketing really helps to boost interaction with your target audience. Nobody likes to feel that they are a part of a large-scale blanket marketing campaign. Using personalisation helps people feel valued, if your email contains personalised data, unique to the recipient this really helps to communicate this.
You can take the concept so much further than just mail merging the recipient's name into the greeting part of your email. You can also use Birthdays, anniversaries, business info, previous product purchases, and links to unique web pages that display customer-specific info.
Taking the time is gather this data and use it can really take your engagements to a whole new level.
