Alan Gayle is a sales and marketing consultant specialising in the construction industry. In this column he offers advice on how to make an impact in the market. Here he continues his examination of email marketing.

For the past two months I’ve been talking about email marketing. I want to conclude by giving you some information on your database of email addresses and the data you will receive after the e-mailshot has been sent out – what is known as analytics.

A database of emails of your customers and prospects is an important asset. If you don’t already have one, it takes little effort to create one. If you use the ‘contacts’ cards on your email program you already have a database that you can export, or if you can use Excel you can easily make a start on creating one from your existing files.

Keep separate lists for existing customers, dormant customers, potential customers, suppliers, strategic partners and so on, or at least have a column in the spreadsheet to segment the different contact types.

The latest wisdom from the marketing gurus says that

e-mailshots are most effective when the recipient knows something about the sender. They don’t have to be an existing customer, but the best results come from recipients who have some notion of the sender’s company and what it does.

An e-mailshot can have a positive effect even if the recipient never buys from the sender. For example, I’m on the BRE’s database and I receive its monthly newsletter. I’ve never bought from BRE and I might never do so, but I have referred people to it for product testing because it’s the first name I think of.

You might say BRE is already best known in its field, but its online marketing activity serves to reinforce that position. It’s a good lesson to smaller companies about how the big boys achieve and maintain their market dominance.

I should mention The Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 and the Data Protection Act 1998. These require you to protect the data you hold from abuse and mean you should not send promotional emails without the express permission of the recipients.

You might have given your consent to receive promotional emails more often than you realise by ticking the ‘yes’ response when you are asked about wanting more information on websites, when you visit exhibitions, or on most of the digital or hard format forms you fill in these days. Even so,

e-mailshots are sent without the recipient’s permission every day. I get quite a few trying to sell me Chinese granite, the No1 position on Google and various other stuff. I’m sure you do too.

The regulations also state there should be a method for recipients to unsubscribe from your

e-mailshot. This raises the whole question of ‘permission marketing’, but that’s a subject I will explore another time.

For now, let’s talk analytics. When you use an email marketing provider such as MailChimp or DotMailer you will automatically receive analysis of your campaign. Pay close attention to the number of ‘bounced’ emails – a high proportion indicates a stale database. Also look at the number of ‘opens’ and ‘click-thrus’. If someone opens your email or clicks one of the links it implies they are interested.

To evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign I always compare the important data (bounced, opened and click-thu) with the industry average that the email marketing provider supplies. And I recommend you calculate the cost of each response by dividing the cost of the campaign by the number of click-thrus, or sample requests, or whatever your calls to action were (refer back to the previous issue of NSS if you want to revisit ‘call to action’).

You could spend almost as long studying the analytics as you spent on the e-mailshot itself, but I suggest you stick to the three key elements of bounced, open and click-thru.

Finally, a few points to consider:

• Employ some data collection techniques to entice visitors to your websites to give you their email address
• Keep adding new customers and people you meet to your database
• Use Autoresponders as an easy way to contact people who respond to your call to action
• Newsletters are boring! To me, the very word is boring. Remember email fatigue and the ‘A’ of AIDA (attention). It is time to use your imagination.

Alan Gayle has worked in sales and marketing roles in the construction industry since 1983. Following a successful career with some of the UK’s leading building product manufacturers, he has worked in the stone sector for the past 10 years. He now runs Keystone Construction Marketing, a marketing agency specialising in the construction industry. The agency works with building contractors, subcontractors and building product suppliers to help them increase their sales and improve their margins.