We all know that Email marketing is beneficial, but how do you go about getting the best out of it?  

We worked with The Mango Tree, a charity who support orphans in Tanzania and Kenya, to improve their web presence and nurture their leads through email marketing in order to increase donations. In this case, we used Kentico’s own email marketing tools. With a small website team within the Mango Tree, this was an ideal way to manage email campaigns and newsletters within the same system as their site. Although there may be more sophisticated Email Marketing tools available, Kentico does have some great features and covers the needs of most campaigns so it was a perfect fit for The Mango Tree.

Where do you start?

The newsletter template is content managed in a similar way to page templates within Kentico, which makes it simple and easy to manage. For The Mango Tree, the design focus was heavily on call to actions so that recipients could learn more about their amazing work by following links onto the site in order to find more information, and also be encouraged to donate. It is important that you don’t send too much information out via email, otherwise people may be discouraged from reading it. Images, brief text and links to a web page can work much better as readers can pick out the information most relevant to them quickly, and skip over the parts they are not so interested in. If you want to take this to the next level, then targeted email marketing can also be achieved, for example, like amazon sending out emails for related products, based on your previous searches. 

Unfortunately, it is not possible to create completely flexible email templates in Kentico in the same way you can with page templates, but fortunately creating templates is straight forward. If you want the same newsletter but with fewer sections, that’s not a challenge to create. 

Are you allowed in? 

It is important to have a decent list of email addresses to send newsletters or campaigns out to and to get permission to send out these emails you need to get people to sign up. Newsletters are usually straight forward, as in most cases the person is already interested in something that you do, so will sign up via your website. For some businesses, you may ask users to sign up for an account on your website in order to make a purchase. In that case, the user is on your email list unless they choose not to be. 

Getting whitelisted is also essential to make sure your email doesn’t bounce or end up in your contact’s junk mail. We would recommend considering a paid email service, such as Amazon SES to help reduce this risk. 

How do you know if you are successful? 

First of all, think about what you want your email marketing to achieve and how often you plan to send out email campaigns or newsletters. Do you sell a product, are you trying to remind people how your business can help them, or are you trying to persuade people to attend an event you are running?

Second, you need to think about tracking. Kentico allows you to track links within the newsletter or email you are sending out, and records whether a user visits your site from your email. There are some limitations to these areas, for example, some mail clients will block images until the user gives permission to download those images. If this is the case, until that user does download the images, it will not register as an opened email. However, tracking clicks will give you a good overview of how many people are responding to your email and visiting your site. 

If you want to get even more sophisticated, then you can look at doing A/B testing, to see which version of your campaign is having the greatest impact.

Overall, the email marketing software within Kentico has proven to be a great tool for The Mango Tree. The software is easy for them to use and with their templates already set up, they are able to send out regular newsletters in order to increase visits to their site and ultimately increase donations. If you’d like to find out more about the email marketing functionality with Kentico then get in touch!