Matt Elliott, our director of client services, has been asked to present a session at OPERA America’s national conference in Houston next month. His session, “Six Steps for a Successful Email Marketing Strategy,” is an overview of what direct marketers need to do to engage their audiences through email marketing campaigns. It’s easier than you might think. Just be DIRECT.
D – Data
Collecting data should be an ongoing process and you need to collect as much subscriber data as possible from every touch-point. List acquisition is just the beginning. If you follow list acquisition best practices, build your own list, ask for permission, validate addresses with a welcome message, etc., you’ll have the right data that you need to begin a conversation with each subscriber. But that’s only the first step.
The second step is list hygiene – correcting misspellings, managing bounces, removing invalid addresses, auditing your lists, etc. This will help you ensure that your lists are accurate and up-to-date.
The third step is reporting and tracking subscriber data through your ESP. Be sure to track the metrics that matter, click-through, conversion, etc., as it will help you figure out the ROI for your campaigns and you’ll know the value of each subscriber. You should also use tools like dynamic profiling to capture each click a subscriber makes in your email campaigns as you can use that information to build a detailed profile of your subscribers likes and dislikes. This will help you speak relevantly to your audience.
I – Inbox
Deliverability remains one of the biggest concerns for email marketers. Are you doing enough to protect your reputation? Are your emails authenticated, accredited, and certified? Do you know how ISPs even measure reputation? ISPs look at the number of complaints and bounces your email deployments generate over a certain amount of time. They also factor in the length of time the domain has been operating, the volume and size of messages, certain mail server settings, third-party reputation lists (white lists, black lists, etc.), the configuration of the emails’ headers, links, images, content, etc., and whether the sender is authenticated, accredited, and certified. It can be complicated at first; but once you know what to look for maintaining a good reputation is easy.
We have published several white papers and hosted a webinar on this topic. Our online resource center is full of information that will help you reach your subscribers’ inboxes.
R – Relevancy
In his latest webinar “Factors that Impact Deliverability,” Matt mentioned that it’s time to remove the phrase “email blast” from your vocabulary. Nothing kills your audience faster than sending unwelcome, uninteresting, and unneeded emails to your subscribers so stop blasting out the same message to everyone on your list!
Instead of trying to come up with a generic message that appeals to everyone, or, gasp, sending a message out to your whole list whether the information is relevant or not, take a few minutes to segment your list. Profiling doesn’t have to be complex. Even simple segmentation works well.
E – Email Design
Like deliverability, email design is one of our more popular topics in our resource center. When planning your email strategy, there are several design factors that you must consider as design effects deliverability, usability, and conversion. Be sure that you use a designer who is familiar with the differences between email marketing and web design. Email has a completely different set of rules and errors in the code may cause your emails to render incorrectly. It’s also important to be aware of the differences of each email client. Your email might look fabulous in Outlook but horrible in Gmail.
For a full list of design do’s and don’ts, download our white paper “221 Email Marketing Best Practices.”
C – Calls-to-Action
This one is for those of you who are new to email marketing. Important messaging and calls-to-action must be kept above the fold, or in the top 300 pixels of the email. If these items are lower, they might not be visible without scrolling. Your calls-to-action should be clear, concise, and quick. “Download Now” might work better than “Click here to download more information.”
Also, your calls-to-action should link to specific, targeted landing pages. If someone clicks on a button in your message expecting to download a white paper, they shouldn’t land on your homepage. People don’t have time to search for the information on your site so if you’re not taking them to the right place, you’ll lose them.
On our next webinar, Tim Ash will present “Avoiding the Seven Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design.” It’s free to participate, but space is limited so register early.
T - Test
It is imperative that your email strategy includes testing your campaigns prior to deployment. You should test every part of your campaign…subject line, graphics, calls-to-action, offers, From address, deployment days and times, frequency, personalization, etc. However, for the most accurate results you should stick to an A/B split test where you’re only testing one item at a time. Multivariate testing allows you to test two or more items at once but unless you’re testing two completely different emails it’s difficult to measure the results.
If you have any questions or need help planning your email campaign strategy, contact one of our experts today.