1. 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A “dirty” list – one with too many unsolicited, incorrect, out-of-date or duplicated addresses – hurts your campaign performance and your company’s delivery and sender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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Test for correct rendering of emails on all email clients
HTML emails – with pictures, colors and graphics – can look or function very differently when viewed in different email clients. Here are a few ways to test for the correct rendering of your email messages across numerous clients before deploying your campaign:
• Send a sample email to an account with each of the major providers – such as AOL, Earthlink, Gmail and Yahoo! – to spot bad links, poor rendering or other formatting issues.
• Do the same for any email client that allows the receiver to use a preview pane or review without images – such as Outlook 2007.
• Use an email service provider that helps you see how your email is rendered across clients.
• Design the header of your email to provide the desired outcome regardless of email client. For instance, if you know that there’s a good chance your image-rich header will not be viewable in most email clients, use an Alt Tag that “sells” the idea or offer your image header is conveying.
6. Test for delivery and spam filters
Emails that are well targeted with great creative and compelling offers don’t do your company any good unless they’re actually delivered. Test your content against spam filters
and see how many of your emails are blocked. If you aren’t pleased with the results, optimize your email for Inbox delivery by creating good headers (as above), writing content that doesn’t look like spam and cultivating good ISP relations. If your current email solution doesn’t have a component to help you avoid spam filters, consider finding a solution that will analyze and determine the deliverability of your content.
7. Test something every time
Testing is a classic way for direct marketers to refine their efforts to get the best results. If each of your email campaigns doesn’t include a testing component, you’re missing out on an opportunity to improve your ROI. Some elements you may want to test include:
• Subject lines
• Offers
• Deployment date or time
• A new list, or segment your existing list to compare one segment against another
Your results will provide new ideas for more effective campaigns and help you get rid of offers, lists or creative that aren’t working.
8. Define your email value proposition (EVP)
Without a clear value proposition, your email won’t hit your recipient’s “internal Inbox” – the barometer in the mind of each recipient that tells them whether your email message is worth their time. Give your subscribers clear reasons to open your email messages every time by establishing and sticking to your own EVP. An EVP should:
• Be unique to your company and tie back to your company’s business and/or marketing objectives.
• Clearly define the value your email message brings to subscribers.
Define your EVP much like you would a positioning statement and make sure that it concentrates on how it will directly benefit your subscribers. Use your EVP as a measure when
you review your content, creative, frequency and segmentation strategies. Most importantly, make sure that the content you offer to your subscribers is in keeping with the expectation you set with them when they opted-in and that the content continues to be relevant and valuable to that specific audience.
9. Personalize for greater relevance
Personalization uses recipients’ own information to create highly relevant and valuable email messages. This is more than putting a recipient’s name on the top of the email – it’s about creating content that specifically addresses the recipient’s behavior and interests such as buying history, hobbies, geographic location, format etc.
10. Be prepared for mobile devices and social media
The reality in today’s wired environment is that your email messages will be viewed on mobile devices – and your carefully designed HTML email will look like gibberish on
most of them. This is particularly true in business-to-business marketing. Be aware of this and design your email messagesaccordingly. Or offer subscribers a mobile version. Social media is another powerful tool on the rise. On its own, it can be used to message to your target much like email marketing, but by combining social media and email marketing, you have the opportunity to gain exponential response and ROI. Define your social media strategy, determine your social media vehicles (LinkedIn, Twitter etc.) and, as part of your execution plan, leverage your coverage in the social sphere to feed your email initiatives. You’ll not only gain further reach, but also engage prospects and customers in a more meaningful dialog.
11. Deliver value continuously
Subscibers’ needs change over time. Your emails will compete with new and changing sources of content or offers that will affect your value proposition. Survey your recipients occasionally to learn their needs and interests and pay close attention to the response metrics that indicate whether your emails are getting stale. Analyze each deployment for revealing statistics on factors such as subject line, offer, links clicked, segmenting etc. By soliciting feedback, watching trends and staying in touch with the needs of your subscriber base you can re-tool your email campaigns to deliver consistent value while staying true to your EVP and the expectations you established with your subscribers.
12. Know the laws affecting email marketing, and comply
In the U.S., email marketers must follow email and privacy statutes in 36 states and also comply with CAN-SPAM, the federal email law. In addition, the E.U., Asia and Australia
have their own anti-spam laws, as do most countries with an email presence. Adhering to these laws is critical – the consequences of breaking them can be dire.
Excerpted LYRIS’ “25 Essentials for Exceptional Email Campaigns”