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Understanding Email Marketing

If you're considering introducing or amending your email marketing compaign it's important to consider the organisation behind the different types of email solutions available.

Email Marketing is key to marketing strategies of most websites, with marketers measuring much of their success through their email marketing solutions. Yet despite the relatively simple idea of email marketing it has many variants in terms of not only appearance but also delivery, with differing organisation behind each one. Understanding what kind of email marketing strategy will work best for your marketing campaigns, and the level of support and work behind it is fundamental for ensuring maximum results.

There are many different types of options available for applying email marketing into your marketing strategy, with the three most common types being in-house managed service, ASP (Application Service Providers), and fully managed service. If you are considering introducing or amending your email marketing campaign this article gives an overview of what each entails.

In-house managed service describes the email marketing system where the email campaigns are sent through a custom built or purchased / licensed software computer structures. This type of managed service can be built completely by the company if the internal IT team is strong in developing email applications that can be maintained, upgraded and handled within the organisation. However, there are many packages that can be bought and customised by your IT team, with the functionality being able to be adapted to suit your needs, allowing your team to amend a complete system and thus saving time and build budget.

However there are many areas to consider in an internal build or adaptation of an email marketing system, including:

• Compatibility with web interface, mail engine and databases
• The uploading of data configuration files
• The uploading, exporting and removal of customer data
• Response management (including the unsubscribe process, and response behaviour)
• Email tracking (including mailing list, bounce, and delivery guides, click-through tracking, purchasing, web traffic, and mailing list analysis)
• Hosting and administration (including password protection, automatic bounce systems, and data back up)
• Content management (including rich media capabilities if necessary), HTML templates, style guides, attachments, mail merge, and text, HTML and Multipart MIME integration, and
• Campaigns, including planning, workflow management, schedules, audits, test emails, and spam analysis.

This list is by no means detailed or complete, but it gives an idea of the functions that can be included in an email marketing system. While it is also necessary to have the correct bandwidth in sending your email campaign in-house, the pros to this type of solution include the internal handling of data and the control of creativity that the marketing team will have over campaigns.

ASPs (Application Service Providers) describes the email marketing system in which you hold a contract with a company that owns a web based email application: they send the email campaign through their system yet you control the content, creative elements, and the timings of when the emails are sent. The ASP system of email marketing offers the tools to send the campaign and removes the technical requirements of sending the emails.

Generally many ASPs charge a set-up fee, a monthly application access fee, and a charge for the number of emails sent within a time frame. Many offer development within the framework of the application so that it can work with your existing systems, but again this adds to the cost of using an ASP.

The web interface of an ASP requires the customer to input content within the framework that may look like a Content Management System, or may be within HTML code. However most systems allow you to create your email campaign in advance and run test emails before sending the full email to the subscriber list.

Pros to working with an ASP include avoiding bandwidth and hardware costs associated with in-house systems, and having control over the creativity of the campaign. ASP solutions offer a range of options with regards to email marketing, although many may not offer assistance with email construction or data management.

Managed services describes the email marketing system whereby you hold a contract with a company where the emails are devised creatively, built externally and sent through the company’s system. There are many advantages to outsourcing an email marketing strategy to an external vendor, with the foremost being that it can be done correctly should you not know enough to introduce the emails internally.

Payment for managed services is paid on a campaign-to-campaign basis, along with various supporting services such as creative branding and copywriting, email construction, data management an overall input into the marketing strategy. Additional charges can also be included for list cleansing, hosting, data validation and / or price per email (costing from 0.5 to 3.5p per email).