Email Marketing Best Practices

Five Challenges for Email Marketing

Savvy marketers are using email marketing in a variety of new and creative ways as a strategic part of their marketing mix. To start your thinking down the right path we present five challenges for your best email marketing efforts yet.

Challenge #1: Test at least one metric per email campaign Going forward, testing will become even more important to improve your email campaigns. Before you can capitalize on the good or make changes to turn the poor into powerful, you need to know what aspects of your email campaigns are doing well or what are doing poorly. There's so much opportunity to test, there's no reason you should send a campaign without testing one metric. Here's a list that will get you through at least the next six months:

*Subject lines. It's quick and easy. Everyone should be testing subject lines! *Creative elements and design. *Long copy vs. short copy. It's long been debated. Which does your audience respond to? *Best day to send emails. It varies across industries. Don't leave something so important to a whitepaper that reports averages. Do your own testing to find what day works best for you. *Best time of day to send emails. Again, do your own testing to find what time of day works best for you. *Landing pages. Are you sending visitors to a specific landing page, or to your homepage where they have to search and find what they're looking for? *Conversions or website activity. Which emails pushed people to your website, and which emails pushed people to take action on your website?

Challenge #2: Decrease your list size to increase list performance To push your list to perform stronger, you need to weed out the names on your list that aren't responding. Of course, you want to increase your list with new email addresses at the same time (see Challenge #3). But the point is, get rid of those old email addresses that aren't performing. Here are some suggestions for cleaning house:

*Take a close look at your lists and list segments. Are there some list segments you are never using? If so, clean them out. *Review lists of people who have not responded to messages in the past few months. Maybe they should be contacted in a different way than the rest of your list. If they still do not respond, take them off your lists. Remember, today's email success is about quality, not quantity. *Review any new list segments you may want to make. Are there any ways to segment and strengthen messages to various groups? If so, segment them now and start communicating more effectively to those groups.

Challenge #3: Only use permission-based opt-in processes Sometimes permission is defined in different ways. Make sure your list is really an opt-in list. It's a common practice to collect email addresses from customers or prospects who complete a form on your website and provide their email address. Whether it's for a white paper, an online contest or something else, if they didn't expressly say, "Yes, please email me," they haven't opted in to receive email from you. Instead, put a check box on this form with an option to sign up for email. Then, only send to those who check it (and never pre-check it for them). Here are some other ways to collect permission-based email addresses:

*Add a signup box for your email newsletter on every page of your website *Add a signup checkbox at every opportunity - a contact form, a webinar signup, purchasing a product, etc. *Provide an incentive to increase optins *Provide a link to opt in to additional emails in your transactional email messages

Challenge #4: Revitalize, refresh, rejuvenate, re-energize Take a fresh look at your email, and you'll see perhaps it's time for a fresh new look for your email. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

*Do the designs of my email marketing templates and messages still fit? *Are the content elements in my messages still relevant? *Do I have enough calls to action in my emails? *What is one item I could add or change that would improve the look of my email? *How do my email messages compare to my print collateral? To my website? To the rest of my marketing efforts? *Is a template and/or message format "facelift" in order?

Challenge #5: Be on the lookout for new email technologies and trends There are a lot of new electronic communication opportunities and technologies you should keep an eye out for. Look for more info on these trends in future issues of Optin News. Here are some new technologies we'll be covering in coming months:

*RSS *Sender authentication *Technologies for quantifying your success in terms of website traffic and activity

We recommend working these challenges into your email marketing plans.

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