One of the great things about email marketing is that you really can do it yourself, and for FREE! Over the past few months we have been working a lot with MailChimp – the great, free, online email marketing tool. As well as delivering workshops and masterclasses, we also offer services to individual clients who decide their in-house email marketing will benefit from a little bit of professional support. Two areas where clients find our help particularly useful are:
- Getting started in the first place
- Making sure their email marketing is sustained in the longer term
Longer term planning, support and implementation of a joined-up marketing approach is at the heart of BSA Marketing’s business but for some clients they are just looking for some assistance to get their email marketing ball rolling. A key stumbling block can be creating an email template to match their website, company colours, fonts, logos etc that doesn’t ‘fall to bits’ when they try and add varying message content. This balance between flexibility and consistency can sometimes cause projects to fail almost before they start. Ideally, you want to be able to easily change the content of your email for each issue, but be sure that you maintain structured branding and professionalism. If you are hiring someone (like us) to manage your marketing and email on a full-service basis, this is not too much of a concern, but if you are taking the DIY route, it can be a problem. A great solution can be bespoke email templates. We can design a completely bespoke template which ties down overall layout and style but allows content words and images to be edited easily. If you are using a system like MailChimp, which allows for highly structured templates with editable areas, we can develop a template that can be imported directly into your MailChimp account ready for you to easily adapt from issue to issue without the fear of upsetting the layout. Taking this approach does place restrictions on the format & length of your content, but the payoff is that putting your newsletters together month by month is much simplified. If you take our recommended approach of holding most of your marketing content on your website and then linking from an introduction on your email newsletter through to your website, having only limited space on your email isn’t a problem and ensure you keep your emails short which is definitely appreciated by readers! To find out more about bespoke email templates, give us a call.
