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Best Practices - Preparing Your New Email Marketing Campagin

More and more small businesses seem to be signing up to use various email marketing software applications. There are two questions to ask yourself if you are in the process of building your own email marketing campaign:

1. Do I have the skills and knowledge that I need to succeed?
2. What tool is the best to help me successfully reach and affect my target audience?

Other questions to ask as you begin designing your email marketing program:

1. Who is(are) my target audience(s)?
2. Do I have permission to email them, how do I get permission?
3. What are the goals of this marketing strategy?
4. How often should I email in order to achieve my goal?
5. When should I email in order to achieve my goal?
6. What action is my email asking the subscriber to take?
7. Is my message written as concisely and effectively as possible?
8. Is the design of my email going to work in their inboxes?

Like any fully functional web site design or effective and attractive ad design, email marketing requires a trained professional and a well developed strategy in order to succeed.

My favorite tool is ExactTarget.  As an alternative, iContact has a nice platform.

Read more about email marketing tools:

http://www.email-marketing-options.com/providers

http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/2008/05/hosted-email-service-price-comparison.html

Best Practices - Call to Action

Read through your email that you are about to send out to your target audience.

How clear is your call to action?  What are you asking your reader to do?

I am amazed at how often this obvious feature of a good email campaign is missing.   Even if you are sending a news item or a transactional email, a clear and well placed call to action will elevate the response of your email. 

Examples include:

• Order by Monday to receive the 10% discount.
• Download the report for more information
• Try our new recipe using Mesquite Marinade.

I enjoy the emails sent by Blue Moon Dueling Piano Bar & Restaurant.  The call to action is obvious in the right top corner, where it says, "$1 Margarita Click Here" and that takes me to a printable coupon.  (However, the same email requires me  to scroll down to find information about the promotional event, which I may never see because I have clicked to print the coupon.) 

Preview emails for the call to action and see what you find. 

Best Practices - Apply the "BEEPD" Strategy...

Struggling to figure out how to manage your social media marketing? 

Struggling to find the right route through the web of social media?

Stop straying in all different directions, quit wasting time in the wrong traffic.

Get BEEPD!

Here's a simple process that will work.  Keep it handy, the world of social media can be very enticing.   And so far, there are a few spots that have proven to be worthwhile for business marketing:

1. Brainstorm at your blog.
2. Elaborate at your web site.
3. Email to announce.
4. Promote at Twitter.
5. Discuss on LinkedIn.

© Kathryn Towner, WinCommunications

Best Practices - Managing Email Bounces

Small or big business, non-profit or otherwise, it is important to understand the nature of email bounce management.  The success of your targeted permission-based email program may hinge on how well you maintain your list, and here's why:

1. Bounced emails are unreceived, and if ignored, these subscribers will forget they ever subscribed.  It is up to you, the sender, to investigate best strategies for insuring delviery to this segment of your audience.

2. A high and continuous rate of bounced emails will tarnish your email reputation with the receiving internet service providers, and that bad reputation can cause further disruptions in your email deliveries.

For more on this topic today, read J. Jennings's article at Clickz:
http://www.clickz.com/3632719/print

Best Practices - Writing for Email

Emails are unique.  A well-structured business email will:

• Contain more content than a social media message like those posted at Twitter or LinkedIn
• Use correct grammer and spelling
• Present less information than a business document, often sent instead as attachments
• Present the most important idea at the top (See this nice demonstration from Yale >> )
• Use bullets

Make your emails more effective - write effectively, efficiently and correctly.

Best Practices - Understanding SPF Records

Email servers, whether they are owned and operated by your corporate office or if they are Yahoo or MSN, are bound by rules and algorithms that determine the validity of the emails they receive.  Obviously a great focus in recent years has been on creating rules by which to sort out the unwanted emails.  By checking the actual behind-the-scenes "envelope" information of an incoming email, the receiving server decides if the sender if valid, forged, or possible SPAM - and all of this is automated.

Improving the success of your email deliveries requires an understanding of email authentication, and the main factor in this equation is your own email domain's SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record.  Read about SPF at www.openspf.org and follow the wizard under the heading Deploying SPF.

To check your record, go to to a helpful page at the Microsoft site: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/
and enter your domain name in the field on the right side of the screen.  This will bring up your SPF record if it exists. 

Best Practices - Targeting

One of the hardest concepts for small businesses to buy into is the idea of segmenting their target audience and building messages based on customer needs. 

Either time, technology or knowledge seems to hamper this type of true target marketing for smaller businesses. Email promotions or customer retention programs are usually sent out to one group all the same.  I know that large retailers and national service organizations are on board to segment their various audiences and then they can email more relevant messages and draw better results.

But what about small businesses?  If your house list is only 400 addresses, are you thinking you can treat those 400 individuals as one?  Think hard about those 400 individuals - are there even just a couple of significant characteristics that make half those business prospects unique?  If so, put those people into a group of their own and recreate your message to address that unique characteristic.  If you do, your message will more likely be opened and read!

For more on audience segmentation, see Stefan Pollard's Five Tips for Building Better Segments at http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=clickz_print&id=3630580

Best Practices - Inbox Management

My Inbox is my best friend and my worst enemy all in the same.  I click to recieve emails with the anticipation of a child at Christmas, always expecting that new inquiry or happy customer or friendly invitation.  At the same time, it often feels like a spring rain that never stops, like the summer of 1993 in Iowa or the winter of 2008.

What is great is knowing I have a system for managing all of the messages. 

And my system has a lot in common with the manamgent strategy posted at the EEC recently.  For tips on how to better manage large quantities of email in your inbox, visit this list of "Inbox Managment Tips"
http://www.emailexperience.org/resources/inbox-management-tips/

Best Practices - Good Business

I am impressed with the Hilton Corporation.  We are regulars at the Homewood Suites in Chicago and ever since our first stay, I have been an subscriber to the Hilton's email newsletter. What the Hilton does right is customer service, and their style of customer service is no longer surprising - for me it is the standard and the norm.

Of course, if I go online and make a reservation, I get an email receipt.  What's more, if I call in a reservation by phone, I also get an email receipt. 

In the receipt, I find details about the hotel location with a link to a map, as well as the weather and local events.

Their newsletter is published in very digestible size, with manageable frequency.

The hotel industry has other customer service queens - I liked something that the Minneapolis Radisson did for me back in February.  My reservation had been made 6 weeks prior to that visit, and the week before our stay the Radisson emailed me a reminder of my reservation.  That was handy to have, because once again it had the weather report - perfect for our ski trip and no icy roads!

These hotel chains are doing it right with email and customer service.  Take a lesson!

Best Practices - Email Marketing Goals

Email is the perfect way to announce upcoming events and invite our customers to visit and try out our new wines,"- Kristin McClarnon, WinM@il Customer, Summerset Winery

What's the goal of your campaign?  Did you make more money than you invested in your marketing efforts? Did you set and meet your marketing goals? How do you plan to calculate this relationship in 2008?  I am constantly surprised at how often this concept is left in the dust as businesses rush forward with an email, or even an email campaign.

Reports show that email marketing, when done correctly, returns more dollars o n your investment than any other marketing strategy. Results from email marketing are simple to measure.

And remember that the best way to measure results is to track them back to the goals of your email campaign.  What are your marketing goals?  Below are some sample email marketing goals derived from WinM@il customers in 2007:

Goal of Campaign: Raise awareness, develop sense of community, fill and retain properties
Goal of Campaign: Increase web traffic, increase visits to booths at trade shows
Goal of Campaign: Increase registrations of clinics and camps
Goal of Campaign: Increase sales
Goal of Campaign: Increased member retention, increase attendance
Goal of Campaign: Develop loyalty, bring in customers