25 Essentials for Exceptional Email Campaigns

25 Essentials for Exceptional Email Campaigns
Marketing Guide25 Essentials for Exceptional Email Campaigns
Load and send? Batch and blast? Those direct marketing concepts are ancient history in the modern email environment. Today's email marketers must navigate their way through a complicated landscape of shifting customer expectations, challenging new technologies, evolving government regulations and other issues old-school direct marketers never had to face.
To help you face these challenges head on, we've compiled a handy list of 25 essentials you can employ that will greatly improve your email marketing initiatives. While 25 may sound extensive, keep in mind that missing any one of these can affect your ROI, secure your position on blacklists, or damage your reputation with clients and prospects. And while many of the essentials on this list seem obvious, the list itself serves as a good reminder of the many nuts and bolts mechanics that you should maintain in order to keep your email campaigns performing at their highest levels.
1. Permission is not optionalWhen 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 proper, two-stage opt-in process that requires confirmation before the address goes into your database. Ask subscribers who have been on your list for more than 12 months if they want to continue receiving your email and retain all the permission data on each subscriber.
2. Manage your sender reputation Don't get on an ISP's bad side by sending too many emails too often or by generating a high number of spam complaints. ISPs will block your emails, shunt them to oblivion in the bulk folder and won't bother to tell you what you did wrong. Here are some valuable tips for managing your sender reputation:
. Honor unsubscribe requests within the ten-day window dictated by CAN-SPAM laws.. Stay off blacklists by monitoring, resolving and learning from spam complaints. If you're delivering relevant content in formats that recipients want, you'll minimize those complaints.. Use a double opt-in process and unique IP address.
3. Clean and analyze mailing listsA "dirty" list - one with too many unsolicited, incorrect, out-of-date or duplicated addresses - hurts your campaign performance and your company's delivery and sender reputation. "List hygiene" means cleaning out bad addresses, which reduces undeliverable emails and helps you spot problems fast. Review your list to see who hasn't opened or clicked for the last six months. Provide them with a compelling offer to re-engage. If that doesn't work, try changing the frequency with which you contact them to test if that makes an impact in how they engage with you.
4. Be prepared for churnWhile good email marketing will keep your list engaged, the reality is that you need to continually use opt-in strategies to keep it viable. Not only should you have subscriber retention programs in place, but you'll also need acquisition programs since as many as 30% of email addresses churn each year.
Marketing Guide 225 Essentials for Exceptional Email Campaigns
5. Focus on list quality over list size to force a schedule or terms on an unwilling recipient and risk Growing your mailing list is important, but don't do it at the their unsubscribe.expense of quality. While it may look impressive to have a large 9. Design for the Inboxlist, quality names should be your highest priority. Make sure your Poor design and improper formatting frustrate users. If they can't company has defined its target audience and focus your efforts on easily navigate your email or find the information they want at a adding names that fit this target. You may not have a large number glance, your messages will fall flat. Your email has to stand out in a of names in your database, but careful targeting will mean you crowded Inbox. Here are some tips for designing for the inbox and have a list of high-value prospects and customers that result in optimizing deliverability:higher response rates and greater success. . Be sure to test sample messages to see what performs.6. With opt-ins, establish and build trustAn opt-in is a statement of faith from your subscriber. Respect . Put your company name in the "from" line for fast that by asking only for the most necessary information ... [download for more]