Email marketing in Australia: elusive, complicated and tricky? No, not at all.
Email marketing, or Email Direct Marketing (EDM), is all about keeping your audience updated on what’s happening with your business and brand.
But, we want to focus on Australia, and how email marketing is different Down Under. Australia has its own sets of laws, marketing services and audiences.
According to Hubspot, 86% of professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes. And with over 6.69 billion email accounts globally, email marketing is a lucrative way of doing marketing.
At pepperit, we recommend database segmentation. This involves targeting individual characteristics of your database, such as job title, age, or the event they attended, to create email content that is personalised. Hubspot has found that recipients of segmented emails are 75% more likely to click than they are on non-segmented email campaigns. So, give your database the message they are interested in and use language that resonates with them.
By adding a message and delivering content that is important to a particular segment of your database, your open rates ought to increase. 32.4% is a general benchmark of an average open rate throughout Australia, according to Litmus.
It’s important to remember that Australia also spans three time zones. You must be spot on with timing for when your EDMs are received by each audience, which may also require segmenting by state and city. Weekends will typically have drastically lower open rates, so make sure you know what times your audience is online, opening and reading emails.
Email Marketing Laws in Australia
It’s one thing to know the stats but the law is also important to understand for email marketing in Australia.
The Spam Act 2003 covers spam laws for marketing messages and emails within Australia. The act provides for areas of consent, identity and unsubscribe options on emails, which can be enforced by ACMA, with fines up to $1,800,000 for those who contravene these laws.
Consent must be given by the owner of an email address to receive your communication. This means you’ll need their express permission before you can directly market to them. You may also be able to infer permission if they are an existing customer, having purchased a product or service from you. However, it’s best not to leave this to chance, and can easily be addressed by carefully mapping out this opt-in process as part of your customer acquisition journey.
To comply with the Spam Act 2003, you’ll need to identify yourself as the sender. Meaning your name or business name, email address, and mailing address needs to be clear on the email, and include correct contact details for the person or business identified as the sender.
Lastly, having a clear and easy unsubscribe option is crucial. Every marketing message or email marketing in Australia needs to include unsubscribe instructions. Any requests for unsubscribing must be honoured with five days.
Interested in learning how email marketing or automation can work for you? Drop us a line.
