Email marketing: three cases where it works here

The article on content marketing sorts spending into what is rented and what remains. Email belongs to the second pile, and it holds a particular place in it: this is the only channel where you hold the person’s address rather than only the document they came to read.

A list travels. You can change sending provider, change site, change agency, and leave with it. No audience on a social network moves, and that property is what makes this channel interesting independently of how it performs.

That said, this article has to open with a refusal rather than a promise. For most Algerian businesses selling to the public, email does not work, and selling those businesses an emailing engagement amounts to billing them for a list nobody will read.

There are three situations where the channel is not only viable but better than anything else, and a fourth — the transactional message — which is not marketing and is nonetheless the most profitable part. This article covers those four and leaves the rest alone.

The first is selling to other businesses. A buyer, a technical manager, a fleet administrator: those people work in their inbox all day, they file there, they retrieve there, and they will answer you in writing because that is the record they need.

The second covers institutions and organisations: administrations, schools, clinics, associations, public companies. Email is the official channel there, often the only one accepted for a bid or a request, and a personal messaging app replaces nothing.

The third is the case of long relationships with dates in them: a practice following files, a training centre with sessions, a maintenance supplier with annual contracts. There is a date to be reminded of, it is predictable, and email is the only channel where a reminder three weeks ahead does not read as intrusive.

One thing is common to all three: the person is expecting something from you, or could reasonably expect to. That is what separates an email that gets read from one that gets deleted, and it is a more reliable criterion than segmentation.

If you are in none of the three, the next section still applies to you — because the transactional message is not marketing and it concerns everybody.

A significant share of addresses collected by hand is wrong, and the error is invisible at the moment of writing. A missing letter, a misspelled domain, an extra digit: the message goes out, nobody receives it, and you never find out.

The problem is larger here than elsewhere for a simple reason: many addresses are dictated aloud, in a noisy shop, with letters that resemble each other across French and Arabic. The error rate of a dictated address is far above that of one typed by its owner.

The correction is a counter rule: have the customer enter the address themselves, on your phone or a tablet, and have them read it back aloud. It takes fifteen seconds and removes most of the errors.

The second correction is technical and it is nearly always missing: check that undelivered messages come back somewhere and that somebody looks at them once a month. An address that fails three times comes off the list, or it damages the sends that follow.

Finally, do not create a customer account without the address being confirmed by a first message. That confirmation is not a formality: it is the only way of knowing an address exists before depending on it to send an invoice or a delivery notice.

The right frequency is the one you can hold for a year without inventing a subject. For most of the businesses we work with that is once a month, and for many it is once a quarter.

What destroys a list is not rarity but irregularity plus padding: three sends in two weeks then nothing for five months, then a message that opens with "it has been a while". By then the recipient no longer remembers giving you their address.

The unsubscribe link has to be visible, work immediately, and ask for no justification. Hiding it produces exactly what you wanted to avoid: the reader reports the message as spam, which is far more serious than an unsubscribe because it damages all your future sends.

Treat unsubscribes as useful information rather than as loss. A rise after a particular send tells you that subject or that frequency did not suit, and it is free feedback few channels offer.

Finally, clean the list once a year: addresses that have opened nothing in twelve months come off. A shorter list that gets read beats a long one that degrades sending reputation and costs you more with the provider.

What we will refuse first: selling an emailing engagement to a consumer business whose customers write by messaging app. That is half of the enquiries we get on this subject, and the right answer is to refuse and say where the effort belongs.

We will refuse to buy or use a file of addresses, whatever its source. There is no discussion: the people asked for nothing, and one campaign of that kind is enough to make your domain unusable for your quotations and invoices.

We will also refuse to put an open rate in a report. The measure is broken by automatic image loading, and presenting a figure known not to measure what it claims is a way of being paid for noise.

What we do: the sorting first — which case are you in, and should something else be done instead; the transactional messages written before any campaign; the domain authenticated and the sender set to a person’s name; the collection exchange named and honoured; and the list exported to you, in a file, at any time.

And what you can do this week without us: place an order on your own site, or sign up to your own service, and read the messages you receive. If they do not say when, how much and how to reply, you have just found the only piece of work that matters.