FAQs E-Mail-Marketing

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.