E-Mail Marketing: An Interview with Dave Delaney of Emma
Writing by 
Darrin Dickey on Wednesday, 7 of November , 2007 at 9:03 am
In order to explore the opportunities available using e-mail marketing, I did a short interview with Dave Delaney, New Media Manager for Emma, an e-mail marketing service. Dave talks a little about what e-mail marketing is and how it can be useful.
Q: What are the benefits of using e-mail marketing?
A: E-mail is the marketing medium that talks back to you. Most ESPs (that’s “e-mail service providers”) offer tracking and reporting that show you who opened your e-mail, what links they clicked, who forwarded the e-mail, and more. You can learn a lot more about your audience’s interests and behaviors that way through e-mail than through some of the more traditional marketing methods like direct mail. Also, e-mail is a relatively inexpensive way to stay in touch with your customers, members, donors, etc., and keep your brand in front of them.
Q: Are there certain types of businesses or organizations who benefit more from e-mail marketing?
A: Emma works with about 8,000 organizations, representing a variety of industries like large financial firms, small non-profits, creative & design agencies, universities, retail shops, and everything in between. They’re all using e-mail marketing and communications to stay in touch with their customers, promote events, advertise specials, promote their brand and expand their reach. Because most businesses put a pretty high value on those things, we think there’s a place for e-mail marketing in any organization’s marketing plan.
Q: Is e-mail marketing expensive?
A: It certainly doesn’t have to be. At Emma, for example, our monthly plans start at $30 and allow you to send up to 1,000 e-mails. That’s cheaper than a cell phone plan and possibly even cheaper than the box set of Poison’s Greatest Hits. Not that we’d, um, know that.
Q: How often should one send out e-mail newsletters? How long should they be?
A: This is a common question in the world of e-mail marketing. And although there’s not a silver bullet answer, there are some best practices that tend to work well. When you’re thinking about frequency, think about things from your recipients’ perspective. Send too often and you might annoy; send too infrequently and they might forget you. Work toward finding your ideal frequency.
When you’re considering length, remember that everybody’s time is valuable, including your readers’. Make your points quickly, near the top of your e-mail if possible, and if you have a lot of content to send, consider linking to a landing page on your website or to a downloadable PDF.
Q: Who puts them together and sends them out?
A: Emma is all self-service, so our customers sign into their accounts to add and manage their audience members, create and send their campaigns and check the response as it comes in. Of course, service and support come free of charge with every account, and we have a fabulous team of people to help along the way, some of whom are named Erin and Dean. But probably not Lonnie.
Q: Any other ideas you’d like to convey?
A: Sure. There’s a very important legal component to e-mail marketing, and it centers around the federal Can-Spam legislation that helps to regulate commercial e-mail. It requires that you include a physical address in your e-mail, provide a way for recipients to “opt out” of your mailings and honor those requests in a timely fashion. E-mail delivery is an industry unto itself, so consider using an e-mail service provider to handle the compliance and delivery for you, so you can focus on the content, design and strategy (and besides, that’s the fun part!).
About Dave Delaney:
Dave Delaney is the New Media Manager at Emma. He is a recent transplant to Nashville, Tennessee from Canada and has extensive marketing and new media experience. Dave and his wife Heather have two children and produce a podcast named Two Boobs and a Baby +, which offers a humorous look at parenting. To learn more about Dave, go to www.DaveMadeThis.com and you can find links to his podcast, his personal blog and his blog about new media.
About Emma:
Emma is one of the major companies providing Web-based service that makes it easy to create, send and track stylish email newsletters and campaigns. You can find out more about Emma at www.MyEmma.com.
Other E-mail Services:
There are some other good companies offering e-mail marketing services. In addition to Emma, I encourage you to check out the ones listed below and balance what they offer against your needs to make an informed decision.
Final Notes:
I’m sometimes asked if it’s OK to make and send out your own e-mail newsletter without paying for a service. It is, but I don’t recommend it. I do have companies I work with who do this, but the time you spend creating, designing and building each newsletter is a burden. Most organizations don’t have a lot of free time to use doing this on a regular basis. It’s worth the small investment to work with a company such as Emma or Constant Contact and let them handle the technical part. Then you can spend more time creating remarkable content that might encourage customers to read your message and possibly share it with others. The added time needed to handle the technical aspects is one of the reasons some do-it-yourselfers give up on e-mail marketing. The service providers out there are so reasonably priced that it usually doesn’t make sense to do it all yourself.
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Category: E-mail Marketing, Newsletters
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