Email Marketing continues to be a versatile, timely and cost-effective channel to communicate.  If you’re selling products or sharing information there are some basics you need to follow.  Here are five tips for creating and managing a successful email program.

1.  Have a Plan

Don’t make the mistake and create on-the-fly email messages.  Being reactionary can cost you in the long run.  Take the time to create a strategy for your email marketing campaigns.  Be sure to:

• Align your email strategy with the business objectives
• Determine and document the success and conversion metrics (e.g. increase email sign ups, increased online sales, increase in-store purchases, etc.)
• Create an editorial calendar
• Be flexible and expect to make adjustments to your plan

2.  Know Your Audience

As with any online or offline marketing and communication plan, it’s essential to know and understand your audience.  If you follow these tips you will also see a lower opt-out rate.

• Identify your audience:  MarketNet recommends identifying the primary, secondary and tertiary audiences.  The following example illustrates the possible audience segmentation for an ecommerce client.
  • Primary – Current and potential customers
  • Secondary – Wholesale and other Business to Business channels
  • Tertiary – Internal, Press and Media

Tip: Adding simple personalization elements (such as a company name) to the B-to-B audience enables you to communicate with multiple vendors, although this mass marketing approach appears to be more targeted and one-to-one communication.

• Send relevant information:  Relevancy continues to be a primary requirement for a successful email program.  Attributes and preferences are those nuggets of information that help you further segment your list so you can send targeted and relevant emails.

Here are a few tips for gathering information.

• Ask visitors to provide their name and address on the sign up form.  Our experience is if these fields are not required subscribers are more apt to provide the information.  If your email model can support it, try making only the first name (to be used for email personalization) and email address field required.

Tip: Address information helps segment lists by zip code, city, etc. for geo-targeting.

If you’re a home improvement and hardware retailer and it’s the middle of winter, your Texas audience will have very different needs than somebody in Colorado.  For example, promote snow shovels in Colorado and a more relevant product to your Texas audience.

• Include relevancy questions on the sign up form.  Simply ask a few targeted questions to learn more about your subscribers.  Let them know you are asking these questions so emails can be specific to their interests.  For example, a recipe web site might ask questions such as:  “Are you a vegetarian?” and then flag appropriate recipes, tips, and products.

• Add a quick survey to your email.  Many email marketing tools support embedded surveys.  Make your survey quick and painless to the recipients and to increase the interaction rate.  Select an email tool that provides automated reporting of results.

• Ask visitors how often they want to receive emails.  Let them tell you what is acceptable.

Continue to follow the MarketNet blog.  An upcoming post addresses relevancy (attributes and preferences) and dynamic email marketing.

3.  Design a Flexible Email Template

It’s a challenge to create a single email template to address all the content variations and messaging you want to convey in your email communication. Although; there are techniques you can implement to get the most out of a single template.

Let’s start with a few basics

• Email Types:  As you begin your email marketing program there are three initial email types you will use often.
  • Blast – an email blast is typically a single message email and often communicated visually via a large image.  Blasts are often used to promote a sale.  The benefit of a blast is that it is quick and easy to develop and distribute.
  • Welcome Email – the welcome email is the email a subscriber receives following sign-up.
    • Tip: Trigger your welcome emails to auto-send upon sign-up.
    • Tip: When appropriate, include a promotion or offer as a reward for participation and share the benefits of being a subscriber.
  • Content or Multi-message Email – The content or multi-message email is an email that displays multiple content areas and is a mix of images and text.  Because this multi-message email uses several content areas, this email will dictate the template structure.

• Template versus a Base
  • Think of a template as a structure that illustrates the number of content areas and outlines the rules for each content area (e.g. dynamic).  The template is void of any design.
    • Developer Tip
      • Develop the template so content areas will collapse and/or shift if not used, or
      • Create the template so predefined content areas can be selected.  Examples of a predefined content area can be a single width content area; two column content area, three column content area, etc.
  • In contrast, an email base applies design to the template using some, or all of the content areas available.  An additional base is created each time a different version of the template is developed.  Think of the base as the final email and repurpose these base emails for future email development.

• Content Areas:  A template is divided into sections called content areas.  Dependent on your email tool, these content areas can be:
  • Static – content that is included within the email design, such as a header
    • Tip: To create a scalable email, make all content sections dynamic
  • Dynamic – information that is uploaded to the content and image libraries and dynamically displays based on attributes and/or preferences
  • Dynamic Database-driven – interacts with a database (more advanced)

4.  Test, Test, Test
It amazing that even in this down economy people do not test their email campaigns.  eMarketer recently reported the results of a survey from May through July 2009, and a staggering 37.1% of responders said they do not test their email campaigns.

eMarketer further reports that for those who do test:

• Subject lines are tested over Calls to Action, Design, Body Copy, Offers and Timing

• The best time to send an email is Tuesday, midday with a 49% open rate

That said, every industry is different and the variables specific to your message are wide-ranging.

A recommended tactic is to factor current trends and analytics in your campaign strategy, although continue to test against your last email campaign.  Create your own baseline report against the success and conversion metrics you identified in your plan.

For example: MarketNet tracks a blend of metrics for a current luxury ecommerce client and Tuesday and Wednesday are in fact optimal distribution days; although this Client’s customers have a high rate of purchase behavior in the early morning hours in the in the Eastern Standard Time zone.

Continue to follow the MarketNet blog.  An upcoming post addresses A/B and multivariate testing.

5.  Track Results

Now your email has been sent.  Please don’t make the mistake to ignore the results.  These results will help determine the success of the campaign, as well as shape future campaigns.

At a minimum, review the:

• Open-rates – indicates how many subscribers have opened the email

• Click-thru rates:  indicates how many subscribers open the email and click on a link

• Click-thru detail – provides specific detail on the total number of subscribers who have clicked on each link

• Opt-in and Unsubscribe details – the total number of subscribers that have signed up to receive emails or requested not to receive future emails

• Soft and hard bounces – a soft bounce indicates the number of undelivered emails for reasons such as the recipients email box is full.  In contrast an example of a hard bounce is more permanent, such as an invalid email address.

Many current email marketing tools provide additional levels of detail and advanced tracking and reporting capabilities.  Some email tools even report the history details for each subscriber.  Imagine the marketing possibilities.

Follow these tips to help create and manage an effective email marketing campaign.