Email campaigns (marketing)
Written by Jamie May
Email Campaigns: Low Cost, Easy to Ignore, Still Worth Doing
Written by Jamie May
Email marketing is overused. Most of it gets deleted without being opened. And yet it remains one of the cheapest ways to stay in front of people, so ignoring it completely would be a mistake.
The key is knowing what it’s actually good for.
Where Email Works
Email is best used to stay in touch with people who already know you. Newsletters, quarterly updates, promotions to past customers, a follow up after a meeting. These work because there’s already a relationship there and the email is expected or at least not unwelcome.
It’s also the right medium when your message is technically dense. Architectural plans, proposals, detailed specs, expressions of interest for government or large corporate procurement teams. Nobody wants that information in a phone call. Email is low urgency but high capacity for detail.
Where It Struggles
Cold email is hard. To generate meaningful new business from cold outreach you need serious volume of tens of thousands, a clean list, and a very short punchy message. Most small businesses don’t have the list size to make it work as a standalone channel. Use it as a second touch, not a first. A cold call followed immediately by a short email referencing the conversation is far more effective than a cold email on its own.
A Few Things to Get Right
If you’re using an email marketing tool like Mailchimp, a single punctuation error in the wrong place can send your entire campaign straight to spam. Check everything before you send. Be aware of Australian spam laws around consent and unsubscribe options, and don’t hammer your list so often that people add your domain to the firewall.
If you don’t have a dedicated tool yet, a basic mail merge through Word, Excel and Outlook is enough to get started.
The Takeaway
If you don’t have an email list, start building one today. Every client, every prospect, every person you’ve had a meaningful conversation with. Then send something useful to that list once a quarter at minimum. Not a hard sell, just something worth reading that keeps your name in front of them.
When the timing is right for them, you want to be the first name they remember.
