In this piece, I will explain a few things:

1. Why bother with an email marketing tool

2. Option 1: Personalize.gov.sg

3. Option 2: Postman.gov.sg

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.

Read on for more details(:

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

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. What is email marketing by MailChimp

2. The Ultimate guide to email marketing by Hubspot

#1: Personalise.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.

Step 1: import audience/ CSV

Step 2: Map attributes

Note: you can create multiple audiences and segment them such that your automations thereafter can be more robust/ targetted for each user segment.

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, personalise.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.

Feature comparison (caa 14 May 2023):

• Attaching images in Postman.gov.sg is a little trickier than personalise.gov.sg (you have to use go.gov.sg or have an external URL to embed it) and for the latter, previews are not supported. In contrast, personalise.gov.sg truly is what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG).

• There are some artificial intelligence (AI) tools in-built into personalise for text generation and summarization tools, which is a nice touch. I did not actively use it but do see it being potentially valuable for those still struggling with a blank email and need inspiration to start.

• Postman.gov.sg does not check for duplicates in audience whereas Personalise does which is a nice touch:

• Known bugs with Personalise — conceptually great, but sending out campaigns, especially scheduled ones, performed inconsistently

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

*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 perhaps improve distribution efforts:

1. Audience management for subscribe/ unsubscribe — both tools obliges the end user to still manage these audiences by themselves

2. Suggesting ‘best send’ times/ use send-time optimization

3. Automatic campaign performance reports

4. 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 personalise.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.