Guidelines for Successful Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the top interactive tools employed today by marketers. However, many issues need to be considered in developing a successful email marketing program for your organization. I have compiled the following guidelines to consider in order to ensure your success:

1. Formulate an email strategy. Decide what your goals and objectives are. Are they to retain customers, acquire new customers, build brand equity? Decide who is going to receive your newsletter and why they would be interested. By initiating a planning process, you may find you need to segment your lists and send multiple newsletters and include surveys, viral components or other functions. Proper planning will help you achieve more success for less money.

2. Build an email database through permission. This means that email addresses are obtained through some form of opt-in communication. The main reasons for obtaining permission are for legal compliance, deliverability, brand experience, and cost-effectiveness leading to a higher ROI. If you do not get permission, you are an annoying spammer that is damaging your organization’s brand equity.

3. Provide personalized, relevant content that is delivered in a timely, consistent manner. This is an important consideration. People can only handle approximately a dozen email relationships with other organizations. So, if you want to be one of those twelve, you need to provide content that is valuable and interesting to the reader. In other words, don’t waste people’s time. Treat them as if you were physically talking with them in person. If done right, people will look forward to your newsletter, which makes consistency important.

4. Execute your email with strong creative designs. Maintain your brand equity and increase the impact of your email with captivating concepts, graphics, and layout. However, do not go overboard to the point where form devours function.

5. Stay legally compliant. Make sure every email delivered has a physical address and a method for unsubscribing. This is a requirement of the CAN SPAM act. The last thing your organization needs is a lawsuit over emails that were supposed to benefit the company.

6. Use a spam filter detection device. To increase your chances of arriving in your target’s “inbox,” you need to watch out for spam filter triggers like “free” or “click here.” Many email service providers provide a tool for examining the content of your email.

7. Track your results and optimize. Be sure you are studying campaign metrics such as open rates, click-throughs, unsubscribes, etc. Perform tests with small portions of your list, make adjustments based on findings of your statistical analysis and deliver the optimized email to the remaining list. This will aid in developing the most cost-effective email campaign possible.

8. Hire an email service provider (ESP). The days of setting up a corporate exchange server and blast emailing are over. First of all, your emails won’t even be delivered. ISPs are continuously monitoring IP addresses for illegitimate email (non-permission-based) and blacklisting those IP addresses. That is enough justification alone to hire an ESP. In addition, the ESP should provide a wide variety of tools for 100% legal compliance, subscriber management, tracking and reporting, and email creation. It’s an investment for maximizing ROI.

These are overall guidelines. Each of these items can be an article by itself, but keeping these main points in mind is an excellent top-level guide. 2006 will prove to be an outstanding year for permission-based email marketing. Remember, permission is key. Start building your databases and leverage that data using this excellent interactive tool.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss this article, please contact us.