Email Marketing Do’s & Don’ts

Although not new, every business now seems anxious to jump on the email marketing bandwagon. Email marketing is great because, if done right, it can be a relatively low-cost but highly responsive way to communicate to and activate customers. When done poorly, however, it can turn a customer off completely, sometimes forever. Before your company launches an email disaster, here are some helpful do’s and don’ts to get you started.

Planning & Goal Setting

Don’t just work and email marketing campaign into your mix because you’ve heard how great it works. That’s a sure sign of failure. First, identify the purpose of your campaign - is it to build awareness? present an offer? generate a sale? - and then set some goals accordingly.

Make sure you’ve got reasonable expectations. Effective email marketing campaigns can pull in a response rate between 5 - 18%?but that’s when it’s working and well-planned. Factors to consider in a well-planned campaign include:

• Clearly identified target audience(s) - sometimes, it’s best to define this audience more narrowly. For example, trying to effect a response from “online shoppers” might be more difficult than if you specify “female online shoppers who like sports.”
• What’s your offer? Most email marketing campaigns work best when the recipient is given a compelling reason to click through on a link. Offers can take the form of a special incentive, a discount, a freebie, a contest, or a limited time deal.
• Where on your site will you be sending your traffic and is that location as optimized as possible for these visitors? If you’re not going to create a unique “landing page” for your email campaign, you better decide where exactly it is you want your visitors to come to and be sure that that page speaks to them in a way that they can relate to. Don’t make it like a scavenger hunt, enticing your visitor with some sort of offer but having to unearth it from the vastness of your site. On the ‘Net, that’s just not going to fly.
• Work out technical glitches - the worst thing you could do is run an email campaign that works in driving traffic to your site, but then your site’s system couldn’t handle the flow. Beef up your site for technical readiness and put it through it’s worst case scenario paces to avoid such a catastrophe.
• Lead time - give yourself some adequate lead time to prepare for your campaign. You’re going to need to select your offer, write copy, prepare the site, and in general, get organized.
• How to handle opt-outs & unsubscribes - always give your recipient a way out of your list. These days, that’s just common courtesy; some day, it might be the law. Plan how you’ll handle these requests.

Who Are You Mailing To?

In-House Lists: There are several sources of emails you can mail to, the first (and best) being your own in-house list. If you have an extensive in-house list, you may want to look to a third party firm to handle the delivery, mail failures and unsubscribe requests so you don’t have to. These services can also help you collect, manage and analyze response data. They also help free up your servers from the load of large deliveries and communicate to ISPs with spam blockers that an impending delivery is not spam. Depending upon what you need done, services like these can run you from $.05 - $.10/name on up.

If you want to develop an in-house list with a strong response rate, one thing that’s important to do is to educate your subscriber. Don’t just ask them to check off a box to receive your mailers - how many of those mailers do you think will be read over time? Instead, give them the option to learn a little bit more about your mailers and to see a sample of one. Tell them how often you plan on delivering these mailers, and what kinds of offers might be included within. You might not have as large of a mailing list, but you’re likely to have one that reads what’s received.

List Services: If you don’t have the benefit of an in-house list or the purpose of your campaign is to acquire new customers, you can go to outside sources to rent email lists and delivery services. Buyer beware, however! Try to deal only with reputable, well-known companies whose email lists are comprised of “opt-in” subscribers (that is, if you’re trying to conduct an ethical, no spam email campaign). Be sure to get as much detail from them as possible so you know all about things like lead time, delivery costs, bounce-backs/undeliverables, tracking capabilities, and so forth.

Swapping: Another option may be to list-share/list-swap with a company that has a similar target audience to your own. They may be willing (for a fee or a trade) to “sponsor” your message delivery.

Testing & Frequency

All too often, companies undertake an email marketing campaign and expect instantaneous results. If the campaign doesn’t work the first time, they think it’s a failure. Perhaps, but this illuminates the need for testing. Rather than undertake a huge mailing right off the bat, better to do several small mailings, testing things like the message, the offer, the delivery day, and different target audiences. Monitor the response rates and then optimize those that do well by then distributing the best of the lot to the entire mailing list.

Likewise, it’s unrealistic to expect that a single mailing might generate a huge response. Better to plan for multiple mailings, several weeks or months apart before expecting a response. The more a recipient reads your message, the more likely they’ll be to remember you and respond to you over time.

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