Email campaigns and group email
Email campaigns are known by several different names including listserv, email subscription list, email list, e-newsletter and email distribution list.
The important difference between an email campaign and an email discussion list is that a campaign is only one-way communication from the list owner, as opposed to an email discussion list where emails can be sent by the group’s subscribers to the group.
The term email campaign is more appropriately a marketing term for promoting an organisation, service or product via email. Generally, most people will use the term email campaign and email list synonymously. For the purposes of this article, we will use the term email campaign and will primarily discuss a free email campaign service called MailChimp.
Depending on the organisation, an email may have all of the content in the email or it may have a snippet and require the reader to click for more information on the organisation's website. Both forms will promote your organisation and will encourage visitors to your website.
Unlike other free services such as Yahoo! Mail groups, both email services are totally brand-able and the service is anonymous, giving your organisation a powerful email communication tool.
Is email still relevant with all the social media options?
Email is still relevant to all Internet users, as almost everybody who uses the Internet has an email account regardless of the latest Internet trends.
Social media is growing and changing every day and is still the new “in thing” awaiting the next web revolution to replace it. Within the young realm of social media we have already seen many social media services become popular overnight and then almost disappear as quickly, replaced by the next latest trend. Today, Facebook is the latest trend. Yesterday it was MySpace.
Countries such as Japan and South America prefer different social media to Facebook. In countries like Syria and China social media is heavily controlled and sometimes banned.
However, for any country that has the internet, the most consistent and widely-used form of electronic communication continues to be email.
Using Listserv and Email Group Services for newsletters
Many organisations previously used free services such as Yahoo! Groups and the technically complicated listserv feature of their websites to create and operate their mailing lists.
Listserv requires a certain amount of technical knowledge to install and to unsubscribe from. When you move website hosting providers or change your website address, a technician is often required to download your list of email addresses and to convert them into readable text. By default, many hosting providers do not include listserv data in their backups of your site.
Yahoo! Groups is the most common form of email groups for non-profits in New Zealand, as the service has been offered by Yahoo! for many years. The service is free (paid for by adverts in the body of the email), but the problem with Yahoo! Groups is that many organisations' spam filters will designate Yahoo! email as spam or a risk to the organisation's network.
MailChimp
MailChimp is an email campaign service available from: http://www.mailchimp.com . It offers its services at no charge – there are a number of commercial options available if your email lists grow to over 12,000 emails per month.
MailChimp will use an email address supplied by you as the sender email, thus reducing the issues of your mail being flagged as spam.
MailChimp also has an intuitive web page dashboard to create, delete and modify email lists and campaigns with a list of over 100 professional email templates. In addition to these essential services, MailChimp is social-media-adaptable and contains many self-help resources to assist organisations of all sizes to create and distribute email lists.
Another email service that is powerful and easily-customisable is Campaign Monitor. The key difference with Campaign Monitor is it is a commercial service. Campaign Monitor is available at: http://www.campaignmonitor.com .
Signing Up
Signing up for MailChimp is free and quick. Prior to signing up you will need to decide which plan you will use: the free plan of up to 12,000 emails per month or a paid plan for more activity. If you are not sure, you can sign up and use the free service then upgrade at a later date.
- Sign up from the MailChimp home page: http://www.mailchimp.com
- Complete you contact details
- Reply to the email confirmation
- After you have confirmed your email you will be asked to integrate your mail campaigns via Twitter and FaceBook. This is optional and relevant to organisations that use these social media.
- Click “It’s email time”
- The “Free Plan” is the default email plan. To change it, click on the relevant option and have your credit card ready.
Pricing
If your organisation has more than 2,000 subscribers per list and will send more than 12,000 emails a month to those subscribers, you will need to purchase a larger plan. For example, you could have 7 lists of 2,000 subscribers and send each list one email per month to make a total of 14,000 emails being sent.
If your organisation is going to send more than 12,000 emails per month, there is a 15% discount for non-profit organisations. All prices are in $US and are to be paid by credit card.
If your organisation has to pay for the email services, you may wish to look at Campaign Monitor, whose pricing begins at $5 per campaign and 1 cents per email sent. Your organisation will need to calculate its costs based on the amount and frequency of emails and then decide which service provider is more economical and if pre-paid or pay-monthly works out cheapest.
Adding a Mail Chimp subscription form to your website
To create a form for your website you will need to have created an email list first. The list can have no subscribers or it can be full of subscribers. From your dashboard select “Create Forms”.
If you are familiar with HTML you can switch to the Advanced Mode and code your own subscription forms. But be aware that custom forms are only available as pop-up windows, which most modern browsers will block by default.
For the average user there are two options:
- Use the default form and copy the code onto your web page.
- Customise your form online and use the MailChimp provided URL to include on your website.
TypePad users can integrate MailChimp forms directly into their websites and WordPress users can add a widget called “MailChimp Widget”. You will be required to use the appropriate lists ID for each form. The ID is available from the list page in your Mail Chimp Dashboard.
Tips for effective use of mail lists
As with any method of sending bulk email, you have to be responsible and not send email to people who didn't request it. You will also need to offer the subscriber an easy way to unsubscribe.
Your organisation should initially be familiar with The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007. Details and other resources are available from the Department of Internal Affairs website: http://www.dia.govt.nz/Services-Anti-Spam-Index .
Some tips to ensure your organisation's email campaign avoids spam filters, and is effective and ethical, include:
- Have permission to include an email address in a bulk-sending list
- Create a specific email address that is solely for communication with your email lists. Some responses may be subscription information, bounced emails or even complaints. Immediately following an email campaign, the rate of replies will be high.
- Don’t mistake a contact email address for a person or organisation wanting to be part of your email list or other regular bulk email
- Have opt-in and opt-out options in your email that are clear to see and easy to understand
- Take some time to design the email so it looks professional. Use the free email templates
- Check the grammar and spelling as you would with any paper-based newsletter
- Include all of your organisation's contact details and a contact person.
- Include a default reminder of how people subscribed to your email list. Sometimes people may have subscribed to your list many months ago and forgot why and how they did.
- If you have more than one list, make sure you are sending the email to the correct list.
- Avoid cheesy sales pitches such as “FREE today only” and lots of exclamation marks, as these will alert a spam filter to block your email. MailChimp has a detailed article to assist here: http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-spam-filters-think
- Not all email programs will display your email the same way. Test how your email looks in various email applications such as Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Hotmail and Gmail.
- MailChimp offers detailed reports of your email campaigns. Study them prior to sending out subsequent emails so that you can gain maximum advantage.
- Make sure your website has a detailed Privacy Policy. It could include information stating you will not sell your email lists.
- Create separate lists for different information and advertise them all on your website.
Twitter and FaceBook Integration
MailChimp does allow integration of MailChimp and social media via its SocialPro add-on. This feature is primarily for marketers who need an analysis of their subscribers.
Planning your first email campaign
Like any publication, whether it is a website, newsletter or book, your email campaign requires careful planning and time management to ensure the end product is effective and successful. The same is also true with group email as it reflects your organisation's credibility in the same way that your website reflects your organisation.
The first steps are to ensure you have an appropriate list of contacts and a reply-to email address. Depending on your list, it may be an idea to create a new email address that describes your list. It's likely that there will be high volumes of traffic once you send your first group email.
- Create a descriptive but short name for your email list. It could simply be
newsletter@yourOrg.org.nz . The same name can be used for the subject and various other descriptive fields.
- If your list is quite general, consider having smaller lists that are more specific to relevant groups. MailChimp offers a feature to split email groups into smaller more relevant groups if your groups are well-planned.
- Think about what future information you may require for funding purposes or for your organisation's own use, so it can be included in the sign-up forms.
- Will there be sufficient staff to answer email queries and phone calls that may arise after the email is sent?
- Does the email template accurately reflect your organisation's website and objectives?
- Ensure that your emails are legal
- Have your email proof-read prior to sending it
- Ensure there is sufficient information in the header and footer of the email about how to subscribe and unsubscribe as well as how to contact your organisation
- Have someone ready to update the list from any bounced email. The danger of not updating the lists is your email could look like spam to your ISP and other ISPs.
- Have someone test the sign-up and opt-out processes of the email list.
Managing your subscribers
Email lists can build up over many years and become an important database of contacts for many organisations. Often it is convenient for organisations to leave these email lists in their email program, though this is not always the best long-term option for access and backups.
MailChimp allows the import and export of email lists to its services. For backup purposes, using a service like MailChimp is a no-hassle way to keep a backup of your email lists in a safe and secure environment; one that is accessible anywhere there is an Internet connection.
Lists of emails cannot be imported directly from email programs such as Windows Live Mail, Outlook Express and Eudora. Email addresses stored in Google Mail can be imported directly to MailChimp.
Email contained in programs such as Outlook will firstly need to be exported out into a csv format, and then uploaded to MailChimp using the “upload from file” option.
To import email contacts follow these steps:
- Create or select an appropriate list
- Select "Import" for the selected list
- Select the appropriate service (Google, text etc) to import mail from.
Once the import has been completed MailChimp will send an email with any errors, successful emails added and other relevant statistical information that relates to your list.
- After sending an email to the list, you should check the reports so that any bounced emails can be deleted.
Email archives
Archiving or backing up of mailing lists is done by default with MailChimp. Again, this is a hassle-free way for any organisation to maintain accurate backups of past email campaigns.
After an email has been sent, MailChimp will provide you with a link to the email archive which can then be used for your own reference or the code added to your website if you want to offer archives to the public.
Templates
Templates are primarily used for branding the organisation that sent the email. If a newsletter can appear in a template that has the same visual look and feel of the website, it creates brand recognition, trust, an authoritive message as well as more traffic to your website.
Templates are created from HTML, CSS and images. Depending on how your website is created, the same HTML file or template can be copied and used for an email template.
It is important to test any template within several email programs to ensure it still looks the same in all programs.
MailChimp offers a number of free email templates that can be adapted to suit your organisation's requirements via modifications to the HTML.
Why use a group email service
Email groups have been used for many years by organisations of all sizes. Each organisation will have a different need for email lists and a different justification.
Some useful ideas for group emails are:
- Distribution of newsletters
- Organisation's updates
- Notifications
- Information/Media releases
The lists of ideas are almost limitless and can be an economical and quick method to distribute relevant information to your stakeholders.
If you want to use email for discussion groups then you will need to look at using services, such as Google Groups, that allow email recipients to reply to the group.
When to use an email discussion group email service
If your organisation wants to offer free-flowing discussion amongst an email group membership then email discussion groups are a better service than an email campaign.
Discussion groups are stored on third-party servers and require little technical knowledge. They can, however, be very difficult to customise and brand with your organisation's email addresses.
Options are typically available to select privacy settings that range from closed groups requiring membership approval/invitation to publically-open groups that anyone can access and read.
With the introduction of social media and services such as FaceBook groups, Online Discussion boards, and the high use of Instant Messaging, your organisation may opt out of email discussion groups in favour of a more suitable service.
Well established email discussion groups that are freely available include:
New Zealand Spam Laws
There is one major spam law in New Zealand – The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007, also known as the Spam Act. This Act should be referred to if your organisation is utilising the services of an email list to send information, regardless of whether you are selling anything or not.
The New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs has a detailed website with resources and how to complain about spam. A summary of the Spam Act from the Internal Affairs website is below.
“The purposes of the Act are to:
- Prohibit unsolicited commercial electronic messages with a New Zealand link (i.e. messages sent to, from or within New Zealand)
- Require commercial electronic messages to include accurate information about the person who authorised the sending of the message and a functional unsubscribe facility to enable the recipient to instruct the sender that no further messages are to be sent to the recipient
- Prohibit address-harvesting software being used to create address lists for sending unsolicited commercial electronic messages
- Deter people from using information and communication technologies inappropriately.
- The Act is also intended to encourage good direct marketing practice by:
- Requiring electronic messages to contain a functioning unsubscribe facility
- Ensuring electronic messages are sent only to customers who have consented to receiving it
- Restricting the use of address-harvesting software.
The Act covers email, instant messaging, SMS and MMS (text and image-based mobile phone messaging) of a commercial nature. It does NOT cover faxes, Internet pop-ups or voice telemarketing.”
Further assistance
- MailChimp has detailed written and video tutorials on each step of creating a Mail Campaign: http://kb.mailchimp.com/
- Campaign Monitor has detailed written and video tutorials on each step of creating a Mail Campaign: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/
- Yahoo! and Google Groups also have detailed tutorials for creating a group.