Email Marketing

It has never been easier to maintain contact with your customers.

Email provides a cost effective way of marketing to customers, existing and new. Your web site can collect customer and prospect data. This data can be saved to a database and then used for marketing in a very targetted way.

Ciscom have a number of years experience in e-customer relationship management. We can advise you on the best way to collect customer data using your web site. We can then manage and run your marketing campaign, using plain text and graphical (HTML) emails.

Using industrial software designed for bulk emailing, Ciscom can send many thousands of emails at the same time, something that is not possible with your own desktop email software.

Sample HTML Marketing Emails

Open Rates

Clients often ask us what is a good open rate for marketing emails. There is no simple answer to this because it depends on the industry, company and recipient list. As a general guide you can expect an open rate of between 20% to 40%.

Measuring the open rate is not simple either. Usually it is done by counting the download of an image contained in the marketing email. However, this is not entirely accurate because some email clients (e.g. MS Outlook) do not download images by default and some emails will be read in plain text. However, it does give a reasonable guide.

Measuring Email Marketing Success

You should decide what is going to be the measure of success for your email marketing campaign. This is usually going to be enquiries or orders. Marketing emails can contain tracking that enables you to count the number of clicks, enquiries and orders that result from your email marketing campaign. As with the open rate, the number of clicks you can expect from an email marketing campaign varies depending on industry, company and the quality of the recipient list. As a general guide you can expect between 2% and 15% click through rate. This means that for every 100 people who open your email, around 15 would click a link through to your website.

Buying a Mailing List

We recommend where possible that you build your own opt-in marketing list from your website enquiries and by interacting with your own customers and prospects. This means that when a customer interacts with your website, you need to encourage them to provide their details for future contact. For example if a customer sends you an enquiry you need to make sure their contact details including email address are stored in your website database. Contact us if you require more information about how this is best achieved. Yyou may also wish to encourage customers to sign up for a regular newsletter or special offers.

If you decide to purchase a mailing list then you need to make sure that it comes from a reputable source and it is fully opt-in and up to date.