Email Marketing

Why do it: People have become used to getting much of their information via the web, and email is a big part of that. However, we all hate getting spammed with unwanted email. At Bastion Internet, we help you develop a program to communicate on a regular or as-needed basis with customers, prospects, past prospects, and more. If you’ve done business or had inquiries from people, they’ll typically welcome email updates containing new product information, company information, sales specials, and more.

What’s involved: In a nutshell, you’ll need to design your email format, compile your subscriber list, sign up for a distribution service, integrate the campaign into your website, compose your email, merge it with a subset of your list, and send it out – easy, huh! Well, it may not be easy, but it can be straightforward and effective when you have Bastion Internet help you out.

Design – creating your look and feel: An email/online newsletter should reflect the design and feel of your other web properties (e.g. website, blog, etc.).  However, there are definitely different elements involved. We work with you to create a compatible design that incorporates the look and feel of your website into an effective email / newsletter format.

Subscriber List – compiling and managing: We encourage our clients to use email marketing as a method of communicating with interested parties.  This usually includes current or past customers, prospects that have requested information in the past, business partners and others who would likely be interested in your updates and have “opted” in to receive information from you. 

Distribution Service – getting signed up: There are a lot of advantages to using a commercial service to do the mechanics of actually sending out your emails.  First, these services handle the actual electronic distribution. That’s valuable for two reasons – it’s quick and convenient and you won’t run the risk of having your domain blacklisted for spamming. There are a number of well established and reasonably priced services and we help you choose between them and get you set up.

Integration - integrating the campaign into your website: It’s important to use your website for two components related to your email marketing.  First, you’ll want to have an effective way for new visitors to sign up to receive your newsletter.  Next, you’ll likely want to display past newsletters on your site.  This provides additional content for both your web visitors and for the search engines to index and ultimately drive more search engine traffic to your site.

Time to write – composing your email: Most of the composition of your email will be up to you. However, we can help with layout, text formatting, and image processing. In fact, you can just send us the text and raw images and we’ll construct your email or newsletter for you. 

Who gets it – selecting your mailing list: Once again, you can choose to do this on your own or have Bastion take it on.  This is where you manage your database and choose a subset or your entire list to email out to. Once that’s done, it’s just a matter of putting the email together with the list, merging away, and sending out.  Most of it’s pretty automatic at that point, however, we’re there to help each step of the way.

Did it work – measuring success: Lastly, you’ll want to know if your efforts are paying off.  There are a number of ways to measure traffic and conversions and we’re there to help you monitor and analyze results.

So start taking advantage of this great marketing tool to drive even more traffic to your site.