Building an email database is a great way to market your products and services, and ensure that you are always in touch with the strongest prospects who are interested in your business.
Email is far less expensive than direct mail, and it is much easier to track the performance of an email campaign, since you can get both open rate information and response rate information through your analytics software.
There are many benefits to building an Australian email database. If you build the database correctly, you will only be targeting people who are interested in the information that you have to offer, and you will present strong calls to action, so the response rate should be good.
Over time, you can work on improving the performance of your campaign even further by refining the landing page that email recipients are directed to when they click on your link.
Email marketing can be used to improve your companyís perception in the public eye, and to advertise the products and services that you offer.
Your email marketing campaign should serve as an extension of your website in that it helps to increase the number of people who are thinking about the website on any given day. Your website is passive & the only time that people get information from it is when they visit it. Email will allow you to reach people when you have a message that you want them to see.
While not every email that you send has to be attempting to sell something, you can still use emails to market without including a blatant sales pitch. Each time you send an email, make sure that it is obvious what the email is about and that it is clear what the reader will get for taking the time to open it.Are they coming for information, entertainment, or money off their next purchase?
Whatever you offer, if you provide a link to your website in the email (and you should) then it is important that you link the user to a page that includes relevant information for the subject of the email. Sending someone to the home page will likely alienate the and leave them confused.
Some people have one email list and send out topical, time sensitive emails to people throughout the month. Others have autoresponders which will send out emails one by one after the subscriber signs up, so every subscriber will get a series of 10 emails at set intervals apart, but one person could be getting email number nine while someone else is getting email number five. Different techniques will work for different niches.
Australian Email Database Rules
Building an Australian email database is something that must be done carefully to make sure that you are in compliance with Australian marketing rules. There are several things that you must bear in mind, of which the most important is privacy and anti-spam laws.
You are allowed to invite people to sign up to email databases, and if someone opts in then you can send them emails. To encourage people to opt in it is a good idea to offer some form of incentive & perhaps a free newsletter, or money off a product.
Whatever you do, make sure that you put the mind of your subscriber at rest by providing them with a clear link to a privacy policy, so that they know what will be done with their data. You should not share the data or use if for anything other than the mailing list that the user has agreed to sign up to.
Anti spam laws in Australia are quite strict. Under the Spam Act of 2003, commercial email lists must follow several clear rules and you should not send email to someone who has opted out of your list.
There are some forms of email list that are partially exempt from the spam act, including charities, religious groups, schools, political parties and governing bodies. However, the average business must follow the rules since they are clearly going to be sending marketing messages.
You can improve your chances of operating in compliance with the anti-spam and privacy laws by using an email service such as Vision 6, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Streamsend or Campaign Monitor. These are all recommended by the Australian government as being acceptable tools for emailmarketing.
They offer the option to create emails and schedule them to go out at certain times, as well as manage subscriber lists, monitor your marketing campaigns, and more.
Remember that you should be consistent in your marketing efforts. It is no good to send out emails every now and then ñ you will need to send them out on a regular basis, preferably to a predictable schedule.
If people get used to getting an email from your company every Tuesday afternoon, they will start to watch out for it. If, on the other hand, they do not hear from you for several months there is the risk that you will be forgotten about and when you do next send an email out to them they will think that it is spam and decide that they no longer want to hear from you.
They may even report your message as spam, which means that it is more likely to get flagged as spam by the main webmail providers, reducing further the number of people who see your messages.
