Email Marketing

Direct Email Marketing

For most companies, Email Marketing is still a very important way of pro-actively bringing in new business. And, it does work: if it didn’t, businesses large and small wouldn’t be spending so much money and effort on it.

However there are obvious problems in getting started:

  1. Where does your list of prospective customer emails’ come from?
  2. How many emails will you be able to send by email marketing?
  3. What about the new PGDR legislation?

1. List of Email Addresses

The obvious first answer is to use the email addresses of your existing customers by exporting your email contacts into a spreadsheet file. If required we can help you with this.

Next, try to work out identifiable groups and/or business categories most likely to be interested in your products or services.  Let us know what you want and how many and we will harvest the data for you. We use specialised software that harvests contact information from directory websites, such as Yell and Thomson’s.

2. How many emails can you send?

Most ISPs including those who provide broadband to your home or office, limit the number of emails you can send in any one day. 100 is the typical daily limit. So if you send 2,000 emails in one go, less than 100 will be delivered, and your ISP is likely to block all your emails to prevent, what they assume, is SPAM. This makes email marketing impossible.

Then, apart from your ISP, your Domain host is also likely to limit the number of emails you can send via your Domain Name Server. So how do you get 2,000 emails out in one go? There are only two solutions: 1. You can use a mail delivery service such as MailChimp, or 2. You divert your email service away from your Domain host and have a large organisation such as Google or Microsoft to administer your Email Services.

Our preference is option 2 of the above. Although there is a cost of around £10 to £15 per sending account pcm, the chances of your emails being received by the intended recipients is much higher, especially if you are aiming at larger businesses and institutions. Any large company with control of its own mail servers, will likely block MailChimp, SparkPost, etc. but they won’t block Google G Suite and MS Office 365.

3. What about PGDR Legislation?

The critical factor is whether you are selling to individuals or institutions. If you are sending marketing emails only to businesses, charities, self-employed, civic authorities, educational establishments, etc. then you are not affected by PGDR because your customers are not individuals, they are institutions whose contact information exists within the ‘public domain’.

On the other hand, i you are sending marketing emails to individuals, then you must abide by PGDR legislation. Where you have previously sold something to an individual within the last six months, or if you are providing an ongoing service, then you are automatically entitled to hold information and contact those concerned. If not then you must have ‘explicit consent’ to retain their information.

Please contact us if you want us to get your Email Marketing campaign started, or if you just need more contacts, or if you want to improve on where you are: Phone 01324 882887 or Email or use our Contact Form. 

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