Load and send? Batch and blast? Those direct marketing concepts are ancient history in the modern email environment.Today’s email marketers must navigate their way through a complicated landscape of shifting customer expectations,challenging new technologies, evolving government regulations and other issues old-school direct marketers never had to face.
To help you face these challenges head on, we’ve compiled ahandy list of 25 essentials you can employ that will greatly improve your email marketing initiatives. While 25 may sound extensive, keep in mind that missing any one of these can affect your ROI, secure your position on blacklists, or damage your reputation with clients and prospects. And while manyof the essentials on this list seem obvious, the list itself serves as a good reminder of the many nuts and bolts mechanics that you should maintain in order to keep your email campaigns performing at their highest levels.
1. Permission is not optional
When you send unsolicited email, you hurt your brand, your campaign and your sender reputation. Don’t use “stealth”methods to collect email addresses such as pre-checked boxes on site registration forms. Use a proper, two-stage opt-in process that requires confirmation before the address goes into your database. Ask subscribers who have been on your list for more than 12 months if they want to continue receiving your email and retain all the permission data on each subscriber.
2. Manage your sender reputation
Don’t get on an ISP’s bad side by sending too many emails too often or by generating a high number of spam complaints. ISPs will block your emails, shunt them to oblivion in the bulkfolder and won’t bother to tell you what you did wrong. Here are some valuable tips for managing your sender reputation:
- Honor unsubscribe requests within the ten-day window dictated by CAN-SPAM laws.
- Stay off blacklists by monitoring, resolving and learning from spam complaints. If you’re delivering relevant content in formats that recipients want, you’ll minimize those complaints.
- Use a double opt-in process and unique IP address
3. Clean and analyze mailing lists
A “dirty” list – one with too many unsolicited, incorrect,out-of-date or duplicated addresses – hurts your campaign performance and your company’s delivery and sender reputation. “List hygiene” means cleaning out bad addresses,which reduces undeliverable emails and helps you spot problems fast. Review your list to see who hasn’t opened or clicked for the last six months. Provide them with a compelling offer to re-engage. If that doesn’t work, try changing the frequency with which you contact them to test if that makes an impact in how they engage with you.
4. Be prepared for churn
While good email marketing will keep your list engaged, the reality is that you need to continually use opt-in strategies to keep it viable. Not only should you have subscriber retention programs in place, but you’ll also need acquisition programs since as many as 30% of email addresses churn each year.
5. Focus on list quality over list size
Growing your mailing list is important, but don’t do it at the expense of quality. While it may look impressive to have a large list, quality names should be your highest priority. Make sure your company has defined its target audience and focus your efforts on adding names that fit this target. You may not have a large number of names in your database, but careful targeting will mean you have a list of high-value prospects and customers that result in higher response rates and greater success.
6. With opt-ins, establish and build trust
An opt-in is a statement of faith from your subscriber. Respect that by asking only for the most necessary information at registration. If all you really need is a name and email address, ask only for that. If you need a bit more – say city or state if your product isn’t available everywhere or size of business for routing leads – ask for that as well. To keep from scaring prospects away, keep the request for data to a minimum. You can always use subsequent email campaigns to qualify and fill in more detailed information.
7. Respect recipients’ privacy
Respecting the privacy of your email recipients and subscribers is a good business practice and will also help you avoid legal and ethical problems. Include a short, simple email privacy statement within your opt-in form and link it to the full policy statement on your Website. Define your contact strategy, the format in which you’ll share content and if you can, give the subscriber options on format and frequency. Adhere to the policy and make sure that if you change it, you give your subscribers an opportunity to opt-in again.
8. Give recipients what they want and need
Your subscribers expect control. If you don’t give them what they want, they’ll go elsewhere. Let them decide the email format (text or HTML), contact frequency and content preferences, if they’d like to receive additional information beyond what they opted-in for. Then segment your lists to reflect those choices. It’s always more effective to contact someone on their schedule and under their terms and get a higher response rate than to try to force a schedule or terms on an unwilling recipient and risk their unsubscribe.
9. Design for the Inbox
Poor design and improper formatting frustrate users. If they can’t easily navigate your email or find the information they want at a glance, your messages will fall flat. Your email has to stand out in a crowded Inbox. Here are some tips for designing for the inbox and optimizing deliverability:
- Be sure to test sample messages to see what performs.
- Put your company name in the “from” line for fast recognition.
- Add a “grabber” subject line – 50 characters or less.
- Use teaser text and HTML colors and layout rather than an image so readers can get an immediate “preview” of your email even if images are disabled.
- Put the important content – the offer, call to action,newsletter contents etc. – at the top of the email for immediate viewing. You only have seconds to make your case, so make the most them.
10. Check your email mechanics
Don’t forget to check your email mechanics on a regular basis. Some of the best campaigns fail because simple items like response links, the unsubscribe process, co-registration or images fail. It takes time, but each email execution is valuable. Don’t frustrate your subscribers or waste your money by sending out an email that doesn’t have its most basic items working. One of the best and simplest methods for making sure that the mechanics of each and every email campaign are optimized is to create and consistently utilize an email development and deployment checklist.
More to come in part 2…
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