We’ve just received a company newsletter in our inbox. Nothing unusual I hear you say, except when you take a closer look at the CC’d field you find hundreds of other customer’s emails sitting there. What’s more shocking is it comes from a national courier company! A very well known one.

We have returned the email to the sender advising them of the mismanagement of their email communications with their customers. Being such a large company they should know better but perhaps the sender is new to mass emailing or to the company? Whatever the reason if you’re thinking of sending out a bulk email from your email software to your customers follow these 8 tips:

1. Get permission: when sending someone an email they must have consented to receive that email. if not, you are sending spam. Make sure you remove people when they unsubcribe. Email marketing services will automatically manage this for you.

2. Don’t send emails from your email software: there are plenty of paid and free solutions on the market. Brighton based Pure360 offer a great solution for a fee. Some companies such as mailchimp offer a free service provided you have a small number of subscribers and only send a few communications a month, perfect for smaller businesses.

3. Don’t mass CC: If you are going to send via email software don’t do what this courier company did! As we’ve seen in this example their customers have been exposed to one another’s email addresses. Okay, so this isn’t the worst breach of privacy but it’s not good and could potentially open customers up to more spam.

4. Keep a separate email address specifically for that purpose: once that email goes out you will get hit with a flurry of out of office replying and unsubscribe requests. Having a separate email address will stop your inbox from being clogged up so you can manage the flow better.

5. Don’t overload: Make sure your messages are targeted toward the right customer base at the right time and you don’t bombard them with lots of emails. This will depend on how much you have to say but we’d say once a month is good for the average business but some might find themselves sending one a week. Gauge customer reaction through the amount of people who unsubscribe and reel it in if you get too many.

6. Segment your customer base: this happens when you start compiling your list. Make sure you are collecting only relevant information (to comply with Data Protection Act) and detailing any specific interests they might have. For example, our client, Arundel Jailhouse run a series of different events so they would mark up against each subscriber which events they have attended. This helps target different messages to different people, thus increasing the response rate.

7. Be consistent: if you are going to commit to a monthly newsletter, make sure it is monthly! Put a regular reminder in your diary to write and send your email each month. Once you get into the habit it’ll become second nature.

8. Test and refine: using email marketing tools will always be of huge benefit even if it is for the analytics. Make sure you monitor the performance of you campaigns. See how many people opened the email, who clicked through. You can then start to refine subject lines and content to increase this.

If you want more of this then sign up to our digital marketing newsletter. And if you need any help getting your email marketing right then feel free to get in touch!