The Inbox Advisor

We all know that email marketing works.  It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s inexpensive, and most importantly, your customers respond to it.  Email works for nearly any marketing endeavor – whether you want to introduce and sell a new product, invite customers to an online seminar, inform your contacts on corporate events, or use it for branding purposes, emails work.  The question is, are they working as well as they can?

It’s easy to find out by doing a quick and simple self-evaluation over your overall marketing strategies, goals, and procedures.  Here’s a list of questions you can ask yourself that help to identify areas where improvements can be made that will help increase your deliverability, relevancy, and response rates.

1. Are you capturing the right data during the opt-in process? The more you know about your subscribers, the more targeted your email messages can be.  Over time, it is easy to gather the data you need using the features listed above.  However, when new subscribers join your list, you don’t know much about them.  You can’t ask for too much information up front, so you just have to ask for the information that is most important to you.  Pick your top two or three profiling attributes and ask for that information on the front end.  While it might be tempting to collect the “usual” contact information from your subscribers, such as address and title, if you don’t segment your list by location or offer items for specific job functions, don’t waste your subscribers’ time by having them fill out this information on the front end.  Instead, just ask for the information you need. 
2. Are you collecting data across multiple customer touch points?  Don’t rely just on the data gathered during the opt-in process.  You can get much more detailed data on your subscribers using dynamic profiling, web analytics, and integration with other customer databases like CRM.  My last blog covered this topic in more detail.
3. Are you maintaining a clean list?  Nothing ruins your reputation faster than mailing to invalid email addresses over and over again.  That’s why it is so important for you to follow email marketing best practices for list management, such as monitoring your hard and soft bounces regularly, using the double opt-in confirmation process, performing list hygiene to correct misspellings, and using a third party service for appending, change of address, validation, etc.  These procedures will help you maintain a list of interested subscribers and accurate email addresses, and will help ISPs determine that you are a legitimate sender and not a spammer.
4. Are you targeting specific groups of subscribers with each email send?  The days of the one-size-fits-all email campaign are over.  If you are still sending out one generic email to everyone on your list, you’re missing a huge opportunity to increase your response rate and ROI.  Listrak performed a dynamic content case study and published the results showing a 41 percent increase in click-through rates for a targeted campaign compared to a non-targeted email sent to the entire list.  There are a number of ways to segment your lists and you should also segment your lists not only by product preference, but by delivery time preference as well.
5. Are your emails focused on a specific call-to-action?  Before you begin a new email campaign, you should know what goal you want to accomplish, and yes, that is goal – singular – not goals, plural.  Very few recipients are going to take the time to read your entire message word for word, most people just scan the message to be sure it applies to them and then click on the call-to-action button if interested.  If your message isn’t focused on a singular goal, it becomes distracting and you will lose your readers’ interests. 
6. Are you following email marketing best practices for design?  How your emails look is just as important as what they say.  If your messages contain broken links, missing graphics, or if the layout doesn’t render correctly, no one is going to waste time trying to decipher the message.  It’s important to remember to test your emails in different email clients and different browsers prior to sending it to your list.  In most cases, you can set up an email address for free, and it only takes a few extra minutes to email the message to the different accounts to see how it looks.  It’s a small, quick step, but it can save your entire campaign as you’ll be able to fix any problems before the email is deployed to your subscribers.
7. Do you have a mobile email marketing strategy in place?  Just as important as sending a well designed HTML email is including a text message.  More and more people are picking up emails on mobile devices and if you don’t offer a text only version, you are losing a lot of readers right from the beginning.  I posted a blog on this topic as well, which you may read here.
8. Are you sending emails out at the right time?  Frequency rules are changing as more and more email marketers are using advanced features like dynamic content to increase the relevancy of their campaigns.  Rules, such as “never mail to a subscriber twice within 72 hours” are no longer in place as it doesn’t matter how often you’re sending mail, it only matters how relevant the emails are.  If the recipients want and need the information you’re sending to them, they’ll read your messages.  We just published a white paper on this topic, which may be downloaded here.
9. Are you testing your entire campaign, or just your subject lines?  A lot has been written on the importance of an email’s subject line.  It is the gate keeper, the first thing recipients see that lets them know who the message is from and why they should open it.  I’m not disagreeing on how the subject line can make or break a campaign.  However, the landscape has changed.  Inboxes aren’t as crowded as they once were as spam blocks have gotten tougher and as more and more people are constantly picking up email on iPhones and Blackberries.  And with these advances, your email subject lines must evolve, too.  It’s important for you to test your new subject lines to see what works with your audience, but you shouldn’t stop there.  You must also test images, offers, layout, and other campaign aspects to see what works the best.  Sure, it’s a few extra steps, but if you can increase conversion rate by 10 percent or more, isn’t it worth it?
10. Are your emails branded correctly?  Brent Shroyer included this tip in his blog 50 Tips, Tricks, and Hidden Features, and goes into more detail in his webinar of the same name.  (It’s #2 on the list)  Branding affects the deliverability of your messages as well as the tracking links, and if your messages aren’t set up correctly, you run the risk of damaging your reputation.
11. Are you tracking the right metrics?  Are your measurements accurate?  The email industry still lacks standardization in this area.  You must do your due diligence to find out how your ESP calculates delivery, open, read, and click-through rates; otherwise the numbers could be skewed to mask problem areas, especially regarding deliverability.  It is also important that you build your own benchmarks and that you only measure similar campaigns against each other as this will give you the most accurate look at how your emails are performing.  Finally, you should use a web analytics tool, like Google Analytics, so you can look at campaign performance beyond the click-through rate.  While it is important to know what links your subscribers are clicking on, it’s also important to know if those subscribers are converting to a sale or completing your goal.  We have several white papers on this subject posted in our resource center.

To learn more, contact one of our email marketing experts today.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 7:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized, General Email Marketing, Self Evaluation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or use this trackback link from your own site: http://experience.blog.listrak.com/wp-trackback.php?p=42