Mass marketing options as a public officer in Singapore

By Digital Marketing 14/05/2023 Articles, digital-marketing, email marketing 0 Comments

Kahhow

Published in

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5 min read

Just now

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In this piece, I will explain a few things:

Why bother with an email marketing tool
Option 1: Personalize.gov.sg
Option 2: Postman.gov.sg

1 Why do we use an email marketing tool instead of a traditional email?

You may have received a large bcc-ed blast in your life as a public officer. It is convenient, it is familiar, but lacking in a few ways:

Tracking engagement is poor. Assuming it is just the vanilla email client (without any plugins), you won’t be tracking open rates or clickthrough rates. You probably don’t know if your audience opened the email.
Tracking relationship building is poor. If you have some sort of funnel to track stages of a marketing journey, without a marketing tool, you are probably doing it by hand. This is painful especially when there are opportunities to automate tracking
There is a limit to the number of emails you can send (up to 500 emails, assuming you use Gmail). On top of that, there is a high chance that your email might be marked as spam if you choose to send it out — the chance of it being viewed is lower and most modern email providers have an inbuilt spam filter

Cap for sending email blasts via personal email, read more on limits for sending email by Google

Beyond constraints of sending out via personal email, there are good reasons to have an email client, including but not limited to A/B testing, automation, audience segmentation and more.

Other helpful readings to justify investing/ learning about email marketing:

#1: Personalize.gov

Send personalised emails, push recommended content on your site, and more.

There is web and email personalization but this article will just focus on the product for email personalization.

Splash/ landing page for personalize.gov.sg (email)

Step 1: import audience/ CSV

Step 2: map attributes

Why must I map all fields? Hmm —okay this was may bad I later realized you have to deliberately select not to map/ “do not import column”

Managing audience in postman.gov.sg — cleaning and mapping columns and attributes

After

The email editor is mostly self-explanatory. If the columns were imported and mapped correctly, they can all be called as “merge tags” within the email builder.

The email-building experience was generally positive. Whether you want to write your email in plain HTML from scratch or use a no-code email builder that is very much like Mailchimp, personalize.gov.sg

However, sending emails was quite a nightmare and for the 3 campaigns attempted, all of them got stuck in outbox in May 2023. This is likely (soon be) resolved and will properly escalate it.

#2: Postman.gov

Reach out to citizens in minutes

I wrote more about email blasts for public officers back in 2021 so will skip the explainer of how it works.

Postman has other channels like SMS and Telegram blasts but this article will only focus on the email aspect.

Landing page of Postman.gov.sg, not to be confused with postman for API calls

Feature comparison (caa 14 May 2023):

Attaching images in Postman.gov.sg is a little trickier than personalize.gov.sg and previews are not supported
Postman.gov.sg does not check for duplicates in audience whereas Personalise does which is a nice touch:

When uploading an audience to Personalise

Known bugs with Personalise — conceptually great, but sending out campaigns has been an absolute nightmare

Stopped, resumed, copied and copied and retried the campaign — even though it was set to “send immediately”, I still don’t know if it is really sent.

There is an API* for postman for progammatic/ transactional emails. Could not really find one for

*API = Application Programming Interface. Interface can be thought of as a contract of service between two applications. This contract defines how the two communicate with each other using requests and responses.

Wishlist for government email marketing

This is not a long list but will help

Audience management for subscribe/ unsubscribe — both tools obliges the end user to still manage these audiences by themselves
Suggesting ‘best send’ times/ use send-time optimization
Automatic campaign performance reports
Tooltips to improve engagements, especially considering that most public officers will have limited email marketing experience

Tldr: which tool to use?

For long term audience management and users with email marketing experience, consider personalize.gov.sg

For ad hoc email blasts, postman.gov.sg is a lot more user friendly and has a gentler learning curve, especially for those who have not used other email marketing clients.