Introduction to Email Marketing - Part 2 of 3

posted by WEBSITES.COM // March 18, 2009 // Market Your Website

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Continued from Introduction to Email Marketing - Part 1

Email marketing is a cost-effective and proven way to get your message across to a targeted audience. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to conduct an email marketing campaign. Here are the steps you need to take to launch a successful campaign.

1. Obtain a List of Email Addresses

Perhaps the biggest challenge is obtaining a list of qualified email addresses. You can take two different approaches: build your own list, or rent a list. One way to build your list is to ask your website visitors to sign up for further information about your company, its products, and services. The advantage to this method is that you collect a relevant list of pre-qualified customers who have expressed interest in your company. The disadvantage is that it can take a long time to build a list. You must also be vigilant about following the CAN-SPAM Act laws. Keep the following in mind as you build your list:

Obtain your customers' permission to send them email by giving them a way to opt-in. Make it clear that you are asking them to sign up to receive commercial information about your company, products, and services. Make the form they fill out short and easy. Ask them about their interests so that you can send them targeted email.
Clearly explain your privacy policy (what you will do with the personal information they give you) and adhere to it.
Offer something free but of value to your customers to entice them to sign up. Some examples are: free information or research, product discounts, a chance to win a prize, personalized customer service, access to additional services on your website, or notification of future events.
You must also provide a clear and easy method for your customers to opt-out of further email.

The second method is to rent a list of email addresses from another company. This can be a quick-fix solution, but ratchet down your expectations: rented lists are normally only one-third to one-half as effective as lists you build yourself. If you rent a list, you must manage the process closely. To get your money's worth and avoid legal issues, ensure that:

The company you are renting the list from follows all rules of the CAN-SPAM Act.
The list contains qualified email addresses; in other words, the people on this list have indicated that they want information about the type of products and services that your company offers.
The list has been kept up-to-date and contains only people who have recently opted-in or that communicate regularly with the company you are renting the list from.
The company guarantees useful results. Guaranteeing that a percentage of customers open your email is not nearly as useful as guaranteeing a percentage of responses or click-throughs. Be wary if no guarantees are offered.
You are comfortable with how the campaign will be managed. Will the company provide you with the list so that you can physically send the email, or do you have to submit the email message to the company so that they can send it. The latter is very common when the company wants to protect the privacy of their list, but it also means you must rely on the accuracy and timeliness of their reporting mechanisms.

2. Define Goals for Your Campaign

Like any other marketing effort, you should define goals for your email campaign. Are you trying to increase brand awareness, drive customers to your website, increase sales, or improve customer relations? Once you've decided on your goal, define what success will look like. If you want to drive customers to your website, you should already have several weeks or months of traffic statistics to use as a baseline for measuring the success of your email marketing campaign.

3. Determine Customer Segment to Reach

Once you define goals for your email campaign, you need to define the customers that can best help you get there. If you took the time to ask your customers several questions about their interests when they opted-in to your email program, it will pay off now. Being able to send targeted email to specific customer segments is usually much more effective than sending generic email offers to your entire list.

4. Create the Email Message

With a campaign goal defined and a customer segment identified, you can now create the email message. One of the keys here is personalization. Any marketing piece must appeal to its intended audience, but this is especially important in email because customers are so inundated with spam and junk they don't want. When your email lands in your customer's in-box, it must stand out from the clutter; it must be clearly and immediately obvious that it is of interest to the customer. Here are some proven techniques to help you out:

The "To" line of the email should include your customer's name; even this simple level of personalization increases the chances of your email being read.
The "From" line should clearly indicate your company's name, or the name of someone associated with your company (and preferably known by the customer). A recent survey by Return Path revealed that recognizing a trusted company's name in the From line helped influenced 60% of customers to open an email. If the customer does not recognize who the email is from, they are much less likely to open it, fearing spam or viruses.
The most important line is the "Subject." It is vital that these words accurately describe the value proposition of the email, but most importantly, they must grab the customer's attention. However, don't overplay your hand. For instance, putting the word "free" in your Subject line is more likely to cause suspicion than excitement. It is also a good idea to keep the Subject as short as possible; recent research by EmailLabs found that open rates were 12.5% higher and that click-throughs were 75 percent higher when the Subject line contained 50 characters or less.
The body of the email should begin by addressing the customer. As in all direct marketing pieces, it is generally best to make your message as short as possible. Also, end with a call to action: if you want to drive traffic to your website, provide both a link and an incentive for clicking on the link. If you provide a link, be sure it takes the customer to the specific page on your website that provides the information or offer mentioned in your email.
Using HTML to create vibrant, professional email messages not only increases the appeal of the message to customers, but it is an excellent way to extend your branding. You can even format the contents of your email to look like a page from your website. However, you should avoid loading your marketing email with lots of graphics--customers with older computers or dial-up Internet connections may become frustrated if the email takes too long to download and open.

5. Measure Your Success

An enormous benefit of using email marketing is the speed and precision with which you can measure customer reaction. You can conceive of a campaign, execute it, and measure its effectiveness within a matter of days. Following are some of the most important metrics to track for each email campaign:

Sent: This is simply the number of email sent and functions as a baseline for several other metrics
Bounced: The number of email that bounced back because they were undeliverable. Some email may not be deliverable for temporary reasons (such as a failure at the customer's ISP); other email may be undeliverable because the customer's email account is no longer active. If email is undeliverable to a customer after three consecutive campaigns, their contact information should be considered invalid and deleted from your list.
Delivered: The number of email sent, minus the bounce back rate, equals the number actually received by customers. DoubleClick reports that the average delivery rate is 90 percent.
Opened: The actual number of email opened by customers. DoubleClick reports an average of 34.3 percent. If your average is significantly lower, consider changing the text in your email's Subject line.
Opt-Out: The number of customers who opted-out of receiving future email from you. Obviously a high number here means that customers reacted poorly to the message or offer in the current email.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The number of customers who responded to the call to action by clicking on a link in the email. DoubleClick reports the average is 8.2 percent.
Conversion: This is the ultimate number of successes, the people who were motivated by the email and acted on it. If the goal of the email was to sell more cameras, this is the number of people who bought cameras.

The inexpensive nature of email marketing encourages experimentation; its ability to reach segmented audiences encourages refinement. Test variations of your messages on small groups of customers to find the most successful solution. Keep your email lists fresh and relevant by constantly working to add new customers and weeding out old, expired, and invalid data.

In part 3 of this series, we'll touch on the many resources available to help you manage successful email campaigns.