As part of your overall marketing mix it is important to have an effective communications strategy in place for your existing customers and new prospects. Permission email marketing allows you to effectively get your message to your audience as a ‘trusted’ advisor.

What is Email Marketing?
Email Marketing involves sending regular email campaigns to a list of opted-in recipients, these could include customers, future prospects or partners and suppliers. Email topics could be a regular newsletter, with your latest news and offers, or it could be an industry related article – whatever suits your target market! With the correct system, you should then follow through and look into the analytics of your campaign to learn what to improve on and how much traffic it drove to your website.

Why should you be using Email Marketing?
Email Marketing may be seen as ‘old fashioned’ when compared to social media and modern marketing, but it is still a central part of marketing and the key to many businesses success. Regularly emailing your contacts with latest news, testimonials and articles will help to establish your brand and become someone they trust. It will also remind them that you still exist, so next time they are looking for a product or service that you may offer, you’ll be the first company they think of.

CRM System

Managing your customer and prospect information is essential to your business success. IRUN’s customer relationship management system is a simple to use but highly powerful customer database and communications tool which allows any individual, organisation or business to store details of their customers and then communicate to them via email or SMS.

Why use one system to store your contacts and sales information and another to communicate with your customers when InTouch can do both, plus much more?

Email Campaigns
The primary focus of InTouch is to allow you to communicate more effectively, cheaply and more often with your customers. The Email Campaign area of InTouch makes this incredibly simple.

SMS Marketing
The use of SMS marketing as a medium for communicating with customers is a fast growing trend. Whilst receiving countless SMS messages you have not signed up for can be very annoying, subscription based SMS Messaging can be very effective where customers are happy to receive them. More information.

Contacts
InTouch makes the storing and management of your customer data logical and simple. InTouch is easily customised so every customer can stored unique pieces of information about their customers. You can now even customise which customer data fields are returned within the results of a search!

Custom Fields and Reports
Whilst there are a number of standard pieces of information every company will store about their customers, such as name, address and telephone number, most companies store types of information that are specific to their business. InTouch makes this possible through Custom Fields, allowing each custom to have data fields specific to their account.

Through a mixture of free text, drop down menus and date fields InTouch can be customised to meet the data requirements of any business, whether you are a car garage that wants to store a customer’s next MOT date or an IT Reseller wanting to store whether a customer has 0-10, 10-50 or 50+ employees, InTouch can be configured to work for you.

Campaign Reports
Want to learn more about your customers? Want to know who is opening your emails, which links they are clicking and when? Every Email campaign you send via InTouch will provide you these real time statistics.

Calendar & Documents
InTouch provides a powerful mix of a contact and sales database with Email and SMS Marketing functionality, but there is also much more to InTouch. By adding file sharing and a shared calendar, InTouch is becoming the one solution which can replace multiple pieces of expensive software.

InTouch accounts now come with up to 200mb of file sharing space so you can store all your important documents in one secure and easily accessible place. You can link the document into it’s logical area (i.e. Sales, Marketing etc) and also link the document to any number of contacts within InTouch.

Surveys and Questionnaires
The system allows you to create Surveys and send them out to your contacts within an email campaign. You can then view all of the results of the survey within the system, plus the added benefits of being able to see the analytics of the email sent out.

Contact Data Management

IRUN is committed to abiding by the Data Protection Act and ensuring that customer information is used only as the customer has agreed it to be.

InTouch is developed in a way so as to put off spammers and help legitimate customers stay on the right side of the law.

• We are constantly educating ourselves on best practices and legal aspects Email Marketing
• Automatic generation of Unsubscribe links in every email sent out by InTouch
• Provision for HTML and text based emails
• Part of Feedback loops with ISPs so we can suspend accounts we suspect of being abused for the purposes of Spam

Creating a Successful Email Campaign

As part of your overall marketing mix it is important to have an effective communications strategy in place for your existing customers and new prospects. Permission email marketing allows you to effectively get your message to your audience as a ‘trusted’ advisor. There are a number of steps you need to take to ensure email marketing success:

1. Have a flexible email marketing software package
Having a great email marketing software package is the first step to ensure your email marketing success. You should be easily able to segment your audience by category so that you can send relevant data to the correct individuals, which is personalised with their name. You need to be able to track open rates, clicked on links and unsubscribes and ensure that your software package is scalable as your business grows.

2. Have a permission base list of email subscribers
To ensure that your emails get through the myriad of emails that land in an individual’s inbox it’s important to make sure that your message is gratefully received. To be able to link a subscribe box from your website into your software package is a great way to grow your marketing list.

3. Have great content that individuals want to receive
Your email marketing should provide your clients with information that will help them in their business as well as providing them with updates on your products and services. A well-crafted email can result in new enquires from your existing client base and an opportunity for you to upsell.

4. Consistency is the key, don’t start what you can’t continue
If you’re starting an email marketing campaign then ensure that your customers know how frequently they will receive an email from you… be it once a quarter, or once a month. You need to make sure that you are consistent with your messaging as this is the way that you can instil trust in your customers.

Email Permission Guidelines

Sending people unsolicited email or SMS messages, commercial or otherwise, is against the law in many countries worldwide. Besides that, wouldn’t you rather be talking to people who you know are interested in what you have to say?

Who can I send email or SMS messages to?

• People who have specifically signed up through your website.
• For example, by ticking a checkbox (not checked by default) on your signup or sales form.
• People who completed offline forms & indicated they wanted to be contacted.
• Eg: By filling in a competition or survey form where they specifically agree to receive email or SMS text messaging.
• People who gave you their business card and asked to receive communications.
• If someone gives you their business card and you have also explained to them that you will be in touch, you can contact them.
• They purchased something off you in the last 2 years.
• By making a purchase from you they have provided their permission implicitly, although it is much better to explicitly ask them.

Who can’t I send email or SMS messages to?
Anybody that is not covered by the list above! Here are some examples:

• Lists, email addresses or telephone numbers received from a third party.
  Includes any list you bought or rented, got from a partner or membership organization. No matter the claims of the source of this list, you cannot send email to them.
• Addresses or numbers you collected or “copy & pasted” from the Internet
  Even if they look like ideal customers for you, you can’t email someone just because you found their address.
• Addresses or numbers you haven’t communicated to within the last 2 years
  Permission doesn’t age well. Even if you got their permission legitimately they won’t remember giving it to you. If you haven’t sent something to that address or number in the last 2 years, you can’t start now.