"I’m James Bache and I look after client email marketing services at STAR Digital. Rather than go about how good we are, I thought I’d just explain what it is we actually do for our email marketing clients. "

Firstly we work with you to understand your email marketing goals, after all if you don’t know where you are trying to go how are you going to get there?

• What are you trying to achieve? Brand recognition, lead generation, online sales?
• How big is your audience, is it warm (opt-in) or cold (rented)?
• What web analytics do you currently have in place?
• What would be considered a successful campaign for you?
• How many campaigns do you intend on doing, what is your intended frequency and list size?
• How ready is your current web site to augment your email campaigns, will you need to create landing pages?

Once we’ve answered these questions we can do a reality check to see what we can expect from well constructed HTML email in your industry sector using our large reserves of client email marketing data. We’ve worked across most sectors for several years so we have good resources.

So that’s the basic email marketing goals....

Now we build your email using best practice HTML all hand coded and built as per the http://www.email-standards.org/ guidelines.

This doesn’t mean boring template driven email, take a look at the gallery of recent emails I’ve designed and built for clients. In fact I think some of the creative that we achieve really does push the boundaries of email design, and I’m proud to say that it motivates me to continuously monitor successful email campaigns and create better more functional email design for our clients every day.

"At STAR Digital we believe that successful email campaigns have to cut through the inbox clutter.
The subject line needs to stand out, and the creative experience needs to be clean, clear and usable."

If you need landing pages built we can create CSS based designs ready to be integrated as standalone pages on your web server or sub-domain, or often I’ll create code to be copied straight into your web content management system, (CMS). We can even create custom forms and ecommerce microsites to keep your campaign metrics separate from the noise of your main web site.

Also, if you are working with a large list we can perform multivariate testing on the fly, sending out different subject titles to track open rates, and combining creative ideas to see which get the best clickthrough rates.

Figure out the best subject line with A/B testing

No more wondering about which subject line will give the best results. With our automated subject and content A/B testing tools you can test variables against your lists to see which work best.

When it comes to sending your emails, we have technology that allows us to stage the send over a period of time when using large lists to either manage the response levels for your customer oredring teams, or avoid falling foul of over active firewalls.

Email Marketing Analytics

I often use other techniques to help with tracking visitors onto your web site by appending the links in email marketing campaigns. This way I can set up your analytics package to report on specific email campaign traffic in terms of the number of pages they view on your website, where they go, and how many successfully complete a task or marketing goal.

Plus every campaign I send on behalf of clients includes a full report on all of the basic metrics such as

• Hard Bounces (Bad email addresses)
• Soft Bounces (Blocked email, full inbox, SPAM Filters)
• Opens
• Clicks (By link)
• Forwards
• Unsubscribes

You get an online login to view this and a neat feature to open the email on screen with a link overlay report - see the image to the right, and click for a closer view.

So as you can see, it’s a pretty straightforward approach, and I’ve looked after thousands of campaigns, (millions of emails) and landing pages for our clients with great success in the last 12 months alone.

"I’m not going to wax lyrical and say we’re the best email marketing agency in the world, because we aren’t, but we do care about email marketing and doing it as well as we can."

We don’t offer DIY software to SME's as we’ve found that the level of support we have to give clients doesn’t pay, and that service levels collapse. I’ve found that our clients appreciate the fact that we can take their ideas and turn them into well designed, credible, deliverable email marketing while they get on with running their businesses.

For corporate customers we do offer turnkey email marketing solutions where we design creative led email templates for your marketing staff to customise and deploy in regular email marketing campaigns. We offer varying levels of control. Please call for more details.

If you’d like to know more, or bounce some ideas around please give me a call on 01604 696385 or email me james@star-digital.co.uk.

Further reading for passionate email marketers

Advanced Email Marketing – Jim Sterne
The Truth About Email marketing – Simms Jenkins
Successful Email Marketing Strategies - Hughes & Sweetster
Email Standards Organisation - website

Virtual Catalogue Integration

As experts in the virtual catalogue market, we can create fully integrated campaigns using you standard markeitng collaterall in a digitised format. To find out more about this exciting technology pelase vist our virtual catalogues page.