FAQs E-Mail-Marketing

In the following you will find answers to those questions that we most often receive concerning e-mail marketing:

Basics and address generation

Firstly you need e-mail addresses via which you have permission of the owner to communicate with him or her, and secondly you need regular contents for your e-mailings. The contents should be so interesting that the email recipients like to read them (otherwise the danger exists that the email recipients will rescind their permission).

In general you should reckon with a setup time of two weeks. If things have to move particularly quickly and the first e-mail marketing action is not very complex, you can start within a week. For complex projects you should however plan three to four weeks implementation time until all the necessary processes have been set up and tested.

With AGNITAS, sending and e-mailing or an e-mail newsletter costs around 1 to 5 cents per month depending on the number of e-mails (including all additional costs such as bounce management, link tracking, interface for subscribing and unsubscribing, whitelisting etc., and including all operating costs for list management and managing the customer profiles). The one-off setup costs depend on the specific case and can be between several hundred and several thousand Euro. Please do not hesitate to ask us for a binding offer.

The method of choice for generating e-mail addresses is to build up an internal e-mail distribution list containing e-mail addresses that you primarily obtain via your own website but also via off-line response media such as answer postcards and fax forms. This of course takes time.

A (quick) alternative is to hire e-mail addresses from specialized e-mail address brokers. In this case, however, the response quotas are considerably lower than for a list you have built up yourself. The time advantage is therefore bought at the cost of higher losses due to scattering and a higher price.

Place the area where the newsletter can be subscribed to in a highly visible position on the website. Actively refer to your regular newsletters, for example in the ordering process, per layer/pop-up for first visitors to your website, and also in your off-line advertising materials. An effective method of gaining subscribers is with the help of a competition.

In essence you only need a valid e-mail address in order to send a newsletter. If however you want to build up a personalized e-mail marketing dialog, you should at least ask for the salutation (gender), title and the first and last names. There are actually no limits to what you can ask. You should however remember that the more information the recipient has to enter, the higher is the probability that he will break off the subscription process. You could for example also envisage a two-part subscription form in which you ask for the less important data in the second part.

We recommend that as well as a Subscribe and Unsubscribe form, you also prepare a form that allows the recipient to change his data himself. He can therefore correct his data record or make additions to it. Additional incentives such as a birthday voucher can help in having your recipient give out more information about himself. You decide what data the recipient can change or see.

As the sender of the newsletter, you bear the burden of proof that sending of the newsletter to the recipient has been agreed to. Only the double-opt-in procedure is legally safe as explicit proof of such confirmation. This procedure ensures that it really is the possessor of an e-mail account who confirms his subscription to the newsletter. Unauthorized third parties have therefore no opportunity of generating a subscription for other addresses that send unwanted advertising e-mails. Every confirmation must be recorded and stored for the period of time across which the e-mail address will be used for the sending of newsletters.

A double-opt-in procedure conforms to the law when the following points are observed:

• The recipient is requested to confirm subscribing by means of a link contained in a confirmation e-mail.

• The confirmation e-mail must not contain any advertising content because the addressee has not yet completed the double-opt-in procedure. Any advertising is therefore classified as spam.

• In addition, the confirmation e-mail should state what information the customer will in future receive.

Contents and format

Ask yourself what would interest you if you were the customer here. Write about products and subjects that are currently topical, about trends in your industry, about events and meetings or about other news. You can find other suggestions in our AGNITAS newsletter – subscribe here.

Certainly. Our experience has shown that responses to e-mailings in HTML format are much higher than for e-mailings in text format. Moreover, almost all e-mail recipients today use e-mail programs that correctly display HTML mails, so there are no longer any reasons not to use the HTML format.

This question can definitely be answered with “yes”. There are e-mail programs that initially only load the e-mail in text format and there are also several mobile devices that do not correctly display the HTML version. In addition, the text variant also plays a great role for several spam filters.

We interpret responsive e-mail design (REMD) as being HTML e-mails that can be flexibly displayed on the receiving device with the aid of Media Queries. The contents can therefore be of a different size depending on the display or window size or can be loaded with a different design. By using REMD, you ensure that your newsletter can be optimally read and used both on a smartphone display as well as on an Internet-capable TV.We interpret e-mail design (REMD) as being HTML e-mails that can be flexibly displayed on the receiving device with the aid of Media Queries. The contents can therefore be of a different size depending on the display or window size or can be loaded with a different design. By using REMD, you ensure that your newsletter can be optimally read and used both on a smartphone display as well as on an Internet-capable TV.

The reading of e-mails and newsletters, especially in the private environment, is moving more and more from stationary desktop PCs to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. The proportion of mobile users varies according to the target group but already today values of 15 to 30% are common.

Tracking and data protection

Success indicators such as opening rate and click rate depend strongly on the quality of the addresses. The more accurate and closely-knit the target group is, the better the results in all normal cases. Standard mailings generate 10 to 15% opening rates. From experience, e-mailings with a personalized form of address and optimized contents give opening rates of 15 to 25%. Personalized e-mailings with contents that are individually tailored to the profile of the specific recipient and contain valuable content can achieve values of well over 30%.

The average click rate across all industries and target groups is around 3.5%. Here also, personalization and individualization can generate considerably higher values, and indeed top values of up to 20% are possible.

A lot. How many e-mails could not be delivered temporarily or permanently? Were HTML mails opened by recipients? What links were clicked on? At what time and how often? Who clicked on what links? How many e-mail recipients unsubscribed after receiving an e-mailing? How big is the proportion of mobile users? These numbers and many more can be found in the Statistics section of E-Marketing Manager.

You decide this yourself. The master database with the e-mail marketing data could be located in your in-house operation (for example as part of an already existing CRM solution), but you can also outsource the management of your e-mail marketing data in its entirety to AGNITAS.

Data transmission between you and AGNITAS is carried out using strong encryption. On our servers, your data is protected by a professional firewall. Those AGNITAS employees who have access to your data are under a written obligation to confidentiality according to the German Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG) and the Tele Services Data Protection Act (TDDSG). AGNITAS is a member of the DDV (German Direct Marketing Association) and has formally signed its Obligation to Data Protection. Our Data Protection Officer is responsible for monitoring this.