“Load and Send?” “Batch and Blast?” Those two marketing concepts are ancient history in the modern email environment. Now, you have to navigate your way through a complicated landscape of customer expectations, challenging technology, government regulations and other issues old-school direct marketers never had to face.
EmailLabs recently identified a set of principles they call “The 22 Imperatives for Email Marketing Success.” Don’t let that number intimidate you, though, as most marketers are already deploying many of these imperatives. Increasingly, though, companies that fail to follow all of these principles will find their email marketing programs underperforming their competitors and not achieving maximum ROI.
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
two-stage subscription process that requires confirmation before the
address goes into your database. Ask older opt-ins if they still want
to receive your email, and retain all the permission data on each
opt-in.
2. Manage Your Sender Reputation
You’ll get on
an ISP’s bad side if you send too many emails too often to too many bad
email addresses, or generating too many spam complaints. Result? The
ISP will block your emails, shunt them to oblivion in the bulk folder
and won't tell you what you did wrong. Honor unsubscribe requests
immediately, stay off blacklists, monitor and resolve spam complaints,
and use a double opt-in process and unique IP address if you don’t
already.
3. Clean and Analyze Mailing Lists
A “dirty”
list – too many unsolicited, incorrect, out-of-date or duplicated
addresses – hurts your campaign’s performance and your company’s
delivery and sender reputation. “List hygiene” cleans out bad
addresses, reduces undeliverable emails and helps you spot problems
fast.
4. Deploy Authentication Technologies
Some ISPs
are using methods that allow email from recognized senders but block
spammers and malicious senders. They include “whitelisting,” SPF
Classic, SenderID and DomainKeys. Ask your email service provider which
methods it supports. Unauthenticated emails could be blocked, filtered
or sent to bulk/junk folders.
5. Test for Delivery and Correct Rendering
HTML
emails – with pictures, colors and graphics -- can look or function
differently when viewed in different email programs and ISP-based email
services. Send a sample email to test emails accounts at major
providers, such as AOL, Earthlink, Hotmail and Yahoo! to spot bad
links, copy that triggers spam filters, bad images or other problems.
Also, make sure your emails are W3C HTML-compliant. Otherwise, you risk
being filtered, particularly at MSN and Hotmail.
6. Establish and Build Trust
Ask only for the
most necessary information at registration. (You can ask for more
later, when your recipients trust you.) Send only what you say you
will, when and how often you promised at registration. Without trust,
recipients are less likely to open or act on your emails and more
likely to unsubscribe or file spam complaints.
7. Respect Recipients' Privacy
This is just good
business practice, but you’ll also 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 Web site.
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 format (text or HTML), the
frequency, the content and whether you can send them other kinds of
information. Then, segment your lists to reflect those choices.
9. Provide Administrative Functions in Each Email
Give
recipients the tools they need to manage their subscriptions, contact
you, forward information to others and get more information, right in
the email. Reputable emailers include this information in a clearly
marked section, usually at the end of each email.
10. Test, Test and Test Again
Besides testing
for delivery, you must also test to see which attributes work best in
individual emails. What you think you know isn’t always what works
best. Testing is as easy as a classic A/B split and can show you which
day of the week really draws the most opens and clicks or which subject
line tanked.
11. Define Your Email Value Proposition (EVP)
Without
a clear focus and value proposition, your email won’t hit your
recipient’s “internal inbox.” People can manage only a limited number
of regular email communications. Give them clear reasons to open your
emails every time. Define your "EVP" much like you would a positioning
statement and use it to drive your content, creative, frequency and
segmentation strategies.
12. Segment Lists for Better Results
Use the
information you collected at sign-up to divide your list into relevant
segments and deliver targeted messages. Better yet segment based on
email and Web behavior such as which links recipients clicked on or
what actions they've taken on your Web site. That will boost your
performance and make your communications more valuable to your
recipients. Segmenting also helps you understand performance and trends
based on demographics and segments.
13. Personalize for Greater Relevance
Personalization
is the next step. It uses recipients’ own information to create highly
relevant messages, which boosts your value. Top-quality email service
providers allow you to personalize right to the recipient level, with
email that recognizes each one by name, buying history, content,
format, etc.
14. Use Good Design & Format
Weak designs
and improper format frustrates users. They can’t navigate your email
easily or find the information they want. So, they opt out. Or, they
delete you every time. Or, they hit the “Report Spam” button and hope
that makes you go away. That’s why you test sample messages, to make
sure they perform across many email programs and Web services.
15. Design Emails for the Inbox
Your email has
to stand out in a crowded inbox. Put your company name in the “from”
line for fast recognition. Add a “grabber” subject line. Design the top
of your email to be preview pane and "disabled images" friendly. 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. Finally, put the important content – the offer, the call to
action, newsletter contents – up at the top for immediate viewing. You
have just a couple of seconds to make your case, so don’t waste them.
16. Deliver Value Continuously
Recipients’
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 on their needs and interests. Make
it easy for them to change their subscription preferences. Analyze each
send for revealing statistics on factors such as results according to
subject line, offer, links clicked, segmenting, etc.
17. Focus on List Quality Over List Size
Growing
your mailing list is important, but don’t do it at the expense of
quality. Analyze your house lists carefully. Clean them frequently,
especially before a campaign or publication. Segment lists by customer
value and activity level as well as the permission factors we discussed
in earlier Imperatives.
18. Integrate With Other Marketing Channels
Email
marketing can’t exist in a silo. You’ll get a higher ROI when you
integrate it with other marketing channels and touch points, such as
direct mail, telemarketing and trade shows. Design search-engine
landing pages to make it easier to begin a relationship. Promote
newsletter content through multiple channels, and reprint email
information on your Web site.
19. Focus on Goals, Not Process Metrics
You
can’t measure an email campaign’s success just by counting the average
open and click-through rates. Instead, measure performance against your
end goals. Number of transactions, demos sold, white papers downloaded,
etc. will tell you if your email program is actually achieving your
desired goals.
20. Use Advanced Automation
The simple “load and
send” strategy doesn’t work anymore. You need to deploy a whole range
of advanced technologies – behavioral segmentation, detailed reporting,
API database integration, dynamic content, triggers and more – to drive
improved results and ROI. For example, you can use triggers to send
specific emails to recipients based on their email actions. This
automates a manual process and delivers dramatic results.
21. Allocate Necessary Resources
Many companies
got into email marketing because it was cheaper than traditional direct
mail, but that’s all different now. The landscape – from ISP relations
to technological innovation and government regulations – is more
complex now. So, your organizations must allocate adequate budgets,
resources and know-how to do the job right and achieve your ROI goals.
Your email service provider should be able to help you out, but you
must also educate your team and key influencers in your company.
22. Know the Laws Affecting Email Marketing, and Comply
In
the United States, you must follow email and privacy statutes in 36
states as well as CAN-SPAM, the federal email law. In addition, the
European Economic Union, Asia and Australia have their own anti-spam
laws, as do most countries with an email presence. Have an attorney
with appropriate expertise review your email and privacy policies.
Audit your practices across all departments, not just marketing, that
manage email, and train everyone in correct procedures.
That's it for the teaser version. We'll email Intevation Report subscribers when the full white paper version becomes available.
