Your email marketing questions answered...

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is all about the effective use of email to reach out to your current customers as well as potential leads. However, there's a lot more to it than simply sitting in front of Outlook or Hotmail. Successful email marketing is all about measuring results whilst be very aware of the pitfalls of spam.

An industry strength system like announce means that your campaigns have a much higher chance of getting into to your customers inboxes in the first place. On top of this, the fantastic reporting tells you not only how many people openened your email newsletter but, more importantly, who opened it and clicked links etc. Our experts are on hand to advise you on how to get the most out of this exciting medium. [back to top]
What can it do for my business?

You work hard to get customers and new leads and you need to wring every ounce of value out of them! Announce is a massive help with this - by sending out a regular newsletter you keep business firmly on the radar of all your valuable contacts. Not only that, you'll be able to see which contacts are interested in what products so that you can move them further through your sales process. [back to top]
How much does it cost?

That's the good news! There's a solution to fit all budgets. Once your account has been setup, you only pay a small usage charge based on the emails sent. Find out more about the costs. [back to top]
Why should I use announce?

Announce is a best of breed, industry strength marketing tool which can help your business punch well above its online weight. Our announce email marketing tool is used by many, many hugely satisfied clients. Announce is run and owned by jojet.com - experts in bespoke web design, online marketing, pay-per-click and search engine optimisation - this means we can provide you with a one stop shop for all of your online needs! [back to top]
What are "image" based newsletters?

Good email newsletters should use a combination of text and images, after all, a picture paints a 1000 words! However, good email newsletters should also be designed so that, with images switched off, the core message of the email still comes through to the reader - all of this combines to help get your marketing message across!

Some companies send out newsletters as a single block image - this is not good practice as, with images disabled, nothing is viewable. Furthermore, these emails tend to be larger which attracts the attention of spam filters. Finally, such emails miss out on great reporting opportunities such as "which of my contacts opened the latest newsletter?". [back to top]
What are text based newsletters?

As the name suggests text based newsletters are just plain text - no colours, different fonts or images. Pictures and colours paint a 1,000 words so plain text newsletters tend to not have as much impact as a more colourful one.

Also, you get less reporting information (such as "who has opened the lastest newsletter?") and they can be more limited than their more advanced counterparts. However, if needed, announce can send your campaigns as plain text. [back to top]
What are "html"newsletters?

These are the industry best practice newsletters which can be rendered in many devices and email clients. Furthermore they allow for great reporting and tracking. They can contain text of varying sizes, colours and fonts as well as images etc so that the design matches the brand of the client.

A well designed HTML newsletter works perfectly well when images are turned off - we have the experience to help you with your design and can create bespoke templates as well..[back to top]
What are "mixed mime" email messages?

These are smart emails which present HTML emails to email clients which can display them and plain text emails to those which cannot - you get the best of both worlds.

In reality only a small percentage of devices cannot handle HTML emails - e.g recent Blackberry phones can handle them easily but earlier models could not and would display the plain text version instead.

Announce uses mixed mime for all your campaigns - you enter a HTML and a plain text version - we do the rest! [back to top]
Can I buy lists of email addresses?

This does get into a legal grey area but the bottom line would be to answer this question another way. Sending emails to a list of random people is not likely to get you much return. A better tactic would be to scour your business for all relevant contacts which can be added into the address book, add a "sign up for our newsletter" on your website and to make sure that the practice of asking leads for emails addresses (e.g. at a networking event or sales conference) is inbuilt into your sales process. This is a much more effective technique for growing your address book. You'd be amazed how many business cards you had collected over the years! [back to top]
How effective can announce be?

Hugely. Imagine this. You send out a newsletter discussing your latest products you've launched. A couple of days later you are able to view reports telling you the contact details of everyone who clicked on the email and what products they clicked! What do you do next? Well, a good idea would be to ring those leads up as they have pretty firmly expressed an interest. [back to top]
What are "triggered campaigns"?

These are fantastic! Imagine this scenario (and there are many others), you run a service where customers either sign up for another year or don't. It's a big process for you to chase all these customers. You could create a triggered campaign to send customers a series of emails leading up to THEIR particular renewal date - such a process could easily convert a % of your customers to renew with little intervention from your sales team! [back to top]