When it comes to emails and corporate electronic communication there is a huge gap most of the time between the marketing and IT team.
This is the beginning of a talk I presented a while ago, about the difficulties to understand the challenges behind communicating through emails and one of our solutions, developped in-house.
Misunderstandings between Marketing & IT
Marketing |
IT |
- does not refer to IT when communicating to the outside world
- doesn’t know technical details
- doesn’t need IT ?
|
- doesn’t understand Marketing needs
- doesn’t communicate on technical constraints and requirements
- doesn’t communicate on technical features (tracking, personalization…)
|
Standard email
Everybody sends emails:
- Needs a mail server
- Needs a mail client such as Outlook, notes, gmail etc…
- Easy to use : everybody uses it every day
- Powerful : send to 1 or to X (X relatively small) people simultaneously
From simple email to corporate Communication
Do you send to 10 persons the same way as you send to 10.000 ?
Do you want to target precise people ?
Do you need personalization of each email ?
Do you want to keep tracks of what has been sent, addresses, errors, unsubscribes, links clicked in our email etc...
Mass mailing should be thought as a strategy not a « add to CC » button
Mass mailing has technical impacts !
> Bandwith usage : traffic out. How much bandwidth will you consume with 200K emails sent from your LAN ?
> SPAM : are you sure you're doing what's needed ? There are a lot of rules to be followed to minimize spam and avoid annoying your audience + in several countries several of them are required by law !
> Website : traffic in (don’t send 200k emails in one go with a promotion if your website cant handle it !)
> All of this can get you a bad Image for your company.
About the template itself
Do you want to send a plain text email ? An HTML one ? Don't forget that in this case you still have to provide a plain text version of it. The best practice is also to give at the top a lnk to a hosted version of the email in case the client software of your audience is not able to read it properly.
For the images, do you want them to be embedded (emails larger but images displayed automatically) or hosted on a webserver (client has generally to accept images before seeing them, emails smaller) ?
Can IT measure if the emails were "read" ? How ?
Do you want to give the opportunity to have personnalized links in the email so you can give a promotion or help your audience go to a specific section of your website and recognized ?
etc...
If these questions are interesting for you, that means you should ask a specialist to take care of your mass mailings.
And if you have some questions, you can drop me a line.