Marketing isn’t just for marketers. Whether you’ve created a new website, written a hot program or are simply on the prowl for opportunities, it never hurts to know the tricks of the trade. Attempt to wing it with something like email advertising and you can quickly find yourself swallowed by every spam filter going, and you’ll rarely get far by cold-calling national newspapers with an unprepared speech. Luckily, while advertising is an intricate, involved process, the basics aren’t that difficult to pick up. Over the next couple of months, we’ll tell you everything you need to get out there and self-promote without tripping yourself up.

Email heaven
Depending how you use it, email can either be the most powerful form of marketing on the planet, or the quickest way to annoy the very people you want to impress. Get it right and no matter what industry you’re in, email marketing will strengthen relationships and win you new sales.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing grew by 40 per cent in 2003. Much loved by marketers, then, but the medium is often misunderstood by customers. In a study last year, Gartner Research revealed that one in three online households report that 75 per cent or more of their email is spam. ISPs also often confuse legitimate mail with unsolicited messages. Last year, ReturnPath found that even the best ISP blocked seven per cent of permission-based email. To ensure that email marketing is effective, your business must take care to avoid it being seen as junk mail by either consumers or spam filters. But what exactly are the benefits?

“Email is a great way to talk to your existing customers, especially if you have plenty of news or can offer useful tips on a regular basis,” says Mike Teasdale, creative partner at online marketing agency Harvest Digital. “However, if you’re struggling to think about what you might put into a newsletter, chances are that your customers will struggle to find it interesting.”

If you do send out valuable content, email almost guarantees a good response rate. One of the joys of email is that it takes minimal effort to reply. More importantly, email lends itself perfectly to viral marketing. Emails breed emails, and this means, when used correctly, that email marketing breeds customers. Even better, all this is achievable for little or no outlay. Small campaigns, in theory, can cost nothing but time. If you have your own mailing list and are willing to create and send your own content, your costs are going to be lower than any other comparable form of marketing.

Spammer’s paradise
However, this low cost is partly why email marketing has a bad name. Because the cost is so minimal, companies don’t think. Too many view email as the McDonalds of promotional activity: a fast and cheap alternative to the meat and two veg of dedicated marketing. This attitude inevitably leads to junk emails and spam, which can seriously damage the health of any business. The companies that succeed with email marketing do so by seeing it as a challenging way to generate word of mouth sales, rather than short-term sales. This is perhaps the most crucial rule of email marketing: don’t send simply because you can. Always have a reason.

The biggest challenge is targeting your audience. Not everyone with an email address will be receptive to your brand of advertising; something that male organ-enlargement spammers have yet to understand! There’s no right or wrong email audience, just right and wrong for specific campaigns. Mike Maynard of Napier believes that the best audience for a campaign meets two criteria. “Firstly, they are genuinely interested in your product, and secondly, you know enough about them to make the email interesting.”

Everyone knows about the Viagra plague, and sometimes it’s hard to imagine who could possibly read half the junk email that arrives in their inbox. However, there are good offers as well. Just ask Cadbury, which mailed 5,000 addresses in its database with an offer to take part in ‘scientific research’ about chocolate. Magically, 3,000 places were filled up after just one mailshot, and within 24 hours! Surprisingly, one of the worst audiences is the tech industry. “You would think they would be the easiest – no way!” exclaims Maynard. “They understand spam filtering, they know how easy it is to send email, and they expect more than any other audience.”

Putting it on paper
There’s no need to restrict yourself to email, however. Direct marketing has been with us for over a century and is still going strong. Its benefits were first discovered by William Wrigley, the man behind Wrigley’s chewing gum, back in 1915. He realised that people who tried his gum really liked it; the difficulty was getting them to do so in the first place. On a whim, he decided to send a free stick to everybody in the US telephone book, all 1.5 million of them. In doing so, he rewrote the marketing rulebook. Within a month, the risk had paid off; sales had tripled, and Wrigley’s was on its way to becoming one of the best known brands in the world.

The trouble we face now is that direct marketing has almost become too successful. When Wrigley sent out his free chewing gum, people responded so well because it was such a novel idea. These days, we’re bombarded with marketing. Every time we watch TV, open emails or even read a magazine, somebody is trying to sell us something.

“Last year, UK firms sent nearly four billion mailings to customers, and more than one billion to other businesses,” says Tim Rivett, head of small business at the Royal Mail. “Unfortunately, some of those were a waste of investment, as not enough attention was paid to getting it right.” Rivett reckons that two thirds of all mailings have mistakes that prevent them ever reaching their final destination, such as incorrect addressee details. Even if there are no errors and the mailing is sent to the right people, there’s a danger that it will end up going straight into the bin. Consumers have reached a point of marketing immunity, which makes it hard to attract their attention. There are only so many times you can see the words ‘Special offer now on!’ before they become meaningless.

While more expensive than email (you have to pay for materials as well as the postage) direct mail is a surprisingly useful marketing tool. Where email excels at attracting existing customers, direct mail has the ability to introduce new customers to what you have to offer. A recent campaign by the North West Tourist Board aimed at older couples living near Lancashire, which included a puzzle competition and a chance to win a weekend break, had a response rate of 11 per cent (10 times higher than that of most campaigns) and generated sales of £145,000. Once again, it’s all about targeting. People who aren’t interested in what you have to offer won’t magically change their minds just because they get an email or piece of card through the post.

Making your mark
As ever, you have two choices when it comes to marketing: do it yourself or enlist the help of an agency. Taking the DIY route, direct marketing is by far the hardest. It’s one thing to plan on sending out 25,000 four-colour envelopes with your logo on them, but quite another to handle the logistics of getting them all printed up, addressed and ready to go. Opt-in email lists are the easiest to handle, requiring nothing but the ability to take in addresses on your website and fire out the emails. There’s no shortage of software to handle this, ranging from the commercial Gammadyne Mailer to the freely available PHPList.

When choosing your mailing software, you need to consider various things, such as the compatibility of the web interface where you’ll be collecting your addresses and the mail engine that will ultimately dispatch them. On a more practical level, you’ll also have to pay careful attention to the mails being sent out, including how the recipient can unsubscribe, what happens to bounced messages sent out to invalid addresses, tracking mail to its destination, and what rich media you can include in it. As your list grows, you may need to bring in other software, such as EmailHygiene, which identifies and corrects poor quality addresses and removes unusable accounts. It costs £20 to cleanse 1,000 emails, with a minimum volume of 25,000.

The personal touch
The advantage of outsourcing your marketing campaign is the experience you can buy into. “Agencies apply themselves to these ideas day in and day out,” says New Brand Vision’s Ben Harris. “They know what works and why, and are best placed to make the most of your marketing budget.” Obviously, budget is a crucial factor, and many people automatically equate agencies with higher costs. Even so, running a DIY campaign isn’t necessarily cheap, and an integrated agency will enable you to put together other supporting material, which could potentially reduce your overall costs.

When looking for a direct marketing agency, the usual rules apply: look for a track record, endorsements and a firm you can trust that is immediately transparent about its costs. Avoid any agency that tries to bombard you with phrases like ‘out-of-the-box advice’, ‘creative vision’ and ‘four-dimensional branding.’ Instead, make sure you find an agency with success stories that are directly relevant to your business. Don’t settle for testimonials, ask for referrals. As far as costs are concerned, the sky’s the limit, with fees generally worked out as a fixed fee for a design, then on a cost per 1,000 emails, for instance. If possible, find out roughly what other companies paid and what they got for their money before you negotiate a fee, then make sure you set your budget right from the start, and agree on a service level agreement that specifies exact timeframes and costs.

“The only advantage of DIY is reduced costs,” says Harris, “but this advantage is correspondingly negated by the reduced effectiveness of the campaign. It’s worth the additional expense of an agency to ensure the campaign is fully maximised. A realistic budget can be the difference between generating revenue or merely wasting resources.”

Ask any marketing agency and you can be guaranteed they’ll say the same thing: agency good, DIY bad. But the fact is, some of the most successful campaigns are done in-house. You can safely assume that William Wrigley never discussed the ins and outs of his ROI with an agency.

Making a list, checking it twice
Assuming that you don’t already have a list of customers, it’s likely that you’ll want to save a lot of time and effort by buying into an existing list. There’s no need to resort to those terrible ‘million addresses for £100’ letters that so often land in your inbox. You can pretty much guarantee that (morality aside), they’re untargeted, often inaccurate and a waste of your time. Instead, there are a number of reputable companies that you can purchase opt-in data from. The largest in the UK is OK-Mail, which has a standard ratecard price of £220 per 1,000 emails.

However you build your list, it’s vital that everyone on it has asked to receive an email from you. The law is fairly straightforward when it comes to email marketing in the UK: it’s illegal to send unsolicited commercial emails and text messages. Start by getting people’s explicit permission to send them mass emails. Then, in each email, you must offer the customer an opt-out option. Put a system in place to deal with any unsubscribes and periodically check that unsubscribe links or email addresses work.

If you’re collecting addresses yourself, it’s worth using a double opt-in procedure. Often used on websites and bulletin boards, this sends a confirmation message to the address that the user specified, asking them to confirm their subscription before any messages are sent their way. Most importantly, remember the Data Protection Act (full details here) which only enables you to keep someone’s personal data if it’s secure and not stored for longer than necessary.

The law is the same whether you’re using an agency or buying a list. Don’t be afraid to ask your agency exactly how the target audience opted in to receive your mail.

On the direct marketing side, your best bet for new prospects is the Direct Marketing Association’s list manager service here. You don’t have to be a member to search through the hundreds of lists on offer, which are split into categories like ‘Animals’ and ‘Wealth’. Profile data of the list is provided, as well as information on how it was sourced and how much it costs. For instance, when we looked at the Sadler’s Wells theatre list, we found the names had been gathered from ticket sales, and the list was ‘affluent and astute’, with 72 per cent female and 86 per cent living in Greater London. The rental price was £105 per 1,000 names. Data lists can also be bought from Ladson House, the most comprehensive directory of consumer and business mailing lists in the UK.

Whether you go in-house, out-house, or somewhere in between, the basics behind a good campaign remain the same: everything needs to be thought through.

“The devil is in the detail,” says More2 managing director Kevin McSpadden. “Companies get it wrong by not making good-quality list selections, not testing the list before roll-out, bad data quality, not supplying a compelling offer, or an inappropriate call to action, such as a direct mail for the elderly with a tiny voucher to fill in. However, failing to measure is the most typical error.”

Following the money Email makes this extremely easy. Many marketers are drawn to HTML mail because it enables their brand identity to be visually represented, but it also makes it possible to track emails to their destination. A tiny GIF file embedded in the body of the email can be used to find out who opened the file, and by whom. However, there are downsides.

Plain text is faster, more consistent, firewall-proof and more like the emails that people are used to reading. Also, most mail clients now filter out any and all images until the reader specifically asks to see them. HTML should be safe enough for B2C (business to consumer) campaigns, because the percentage of people that can open HTML mail is in the high 90s. However, it’s a good idea to stick with plain text when mailing other businesses, if only to avoid them disappearing into a passing firewall. Direct mails demand a call-to-action to be measurable: a form to fill in, a specific product to buy, a website to visit or something else that you can track. If you just send out a pack of standard marketing materials, there’s no sure way of measuring the response.

When content is king
None of this is any use at all if you don’t have anything to say to your customers when they read your mailshot. Newsletters, competitions, free vouchers and anything else you would genuinely like to receive yourself will be valid, and will provide you with a direct method to gauge your success. Careful content also needs to be matched with careful timing. This can be difficult when dealing with direct mail, but email gives you full control over when your message will arrive (if not necessarily be read).

Most experts agree that Monday morning is the worst time to send out emails, especially to business addresses. In fact, mornings in general should be avoided. Your audience will be focused on other tasks for the day, and their inbox is likely to be deluged with junk mail from the previous night or the weekend. Friday is the obvious day to send B2C campaigns aimed at weekend or general leisure activities, but a very bad one for B2B, where everyone is busy looking forward to going home. For them, the general consensus is to send midweek, and mid-afternoon.

Unfortunately, when it comes to tracking responses, you’ll have to be prepared for realistic numbers. The response rate of a typical postal campaign floats down around the one per cent mark, no matter how carefully you target it. Email is about five to 15 per cent, though you should be aiming at 10 per cent. Bear in mind that you’re not sending out spam but directly targeting your email, hopefully making your audience more receptive than they would be to Viagra adverts and shonky porn sites. If not, your problem may be your product rather than your marketing. However, it’s also possible that your first mail may only be intended to test the water. “The best response we achieved was with a two-part mailer,” says Harris. “The first day set the scene, and the follow-up pack was used to create the call-to-action.”

Ultimately, if you can measure the response and cost per sale accurately, you should, over time, be able to work out what works and what doesn’t. The bottom line is that direct marketing can be every bit as effective today as it was a century ago. The volume of direct mail may increase every year, but most of it is sent out almost automatically by big firms with little time for creativity. If you’re willing to take as bold a decision as the one Wrigley took when he sent everyone that free stick of gum, the response rates can put even the biggest corporate giants in the shade.