New marketing initiative unveiled

A new Government-funded marketing project deploying marketing graduates to assist Cornish businesses during the recession is claiming its first success.

MailAway is a self-service email marketing product that allows businesses to reach current and potential customers quickly and easily for as little as 2p per email sent.

Based at University College Falmouth’s Tremough Campus, the graduate e-marketing project is led by University College Falmouth, in partnership with Cornwall College, Truro College, Business Link and some of Cornwall’s best-known marketing, branding and internet consultancy firms: Gendall, Jarrang, NetInsight, Niddocks and UKNetWeb.

The project is funded through the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s Economic Challenge Investment Fund (ECIF) and pays for seven marketing graduates to help Cornish companies with their marketing activities in order to preserve jobs and boost sales during the recession.

One of their first tasks has been to analyse how businesses working with tight marketing budgets can effectively promote their products using email marketing.

Working with email marketing specialist and private sector partner, Stafford Sumner, the team of young graduates have created MailAway, offering such businesses the opportunity to write and manage their own email marketing campaigns without the need for technical expertise or big budgets.

Sumner said: “Many larger organisations continue to see the benefit of a bespoke, outsourced approach to email marketing, but this comes at a price and is often only suitable for the more established business. For companies with smaller marketing budgets and more time to spend producing content and developing ideas for their own email campaigns, MailAway is the perfect solution.”

Chris Philips, who manages the ECIF team at University College Falmouth, said: “This project has given the graduates a real insight into the sort of marketing assistance Cornish companies need to survive during challenging times. Moving forward, we hope that MailAway can be deployed as part of cost effective e-marketing plans for some of the businesses we help through the ECIF e-marketing project.”

For further information about the ECIF project, please contact Jeremy Richards, graduate e-marketing project leader at University College Falmouth, tel: 01326 211077