The Whitelist

An Email Marketing Best Practice: Ask for Email Signups in Print

With the publication of our last email marketing newsletter on list building do’s and don’t’s, it seems I’m seeing examples left, right and center! I don’t know if that’s just because I’m paying attention because it’s top of mind, or if it’s because our email newsletter article was so timely, but all these other instances are helping us at ClickMail drive the points home! Here’s to better, and more successful, list building for everyone!

And here’s a technique I hadn’t considered before…

At email marketing vendor ClickMail, we encourage businesses to “sell” their email signups on their websites. You can’t simply ask someone for an email address. You have to tell them what they will get from you in exchange for surrendering that valuable piece of personal information. Quite often, a sample newsletter or email will help you convince a potential subscriber.

But here’s a new twist on that, from Eric Groves, SVP, Global Market Development, Constant Contact, quoted in a recent MarketingSherpa article.

Groves suggests having a print out of a sample email for people to see when you are asking for their email addresses in person, say at your brick-and-mortar location or at a trade show event. That’s a great idea that’s easy to do…super easy to do, in fact.

Always remember that an email address is like a form of currency, and just like someone won’t give you money for no reason, no exchange, nor will they give you their email address without something in return. Anything you can do to make your case, to persuade them that entrusting you with their prized email address is a good thing…and printing out a sample is certainly an easy thing!

Let’s add that to our do’s of list building!

An Example of an Email Marketing Best Practice not Practiced

Don’t you just love serendipity? Or maybe I should say, don’t you just love when you say something to the world, and then you see what you’re proposing being put into action?

That just happened. We at ClickMail, an email marketing vendor, are publishing our newest email marketing newsletter chock full of email marketing best practices for list building tips, and then a great example of one of those tips happens to me in real life. Good! On the other hand, there’s plenty of room for improvement with this example too. Bad! Which drives home the point that it’s not enough to know about email marketing best practices. You must put them into practice.
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Email Marketing Best Practices: The Do's and Don'ts of List Building

Who doesn’t want more names on their in-house email list? As an email marketer, you’d be crazy to think your list was ever big enough.

And therein lies a problem: We sometimes get too focused on the quantity of our email lists, and not the quality. Which doesn’t sound like a problem, until you realize a list based on quantity will decrease your email marketing ROI, negatively impact your email deliverability rate, and have other not-so-nice consequences.

For a list that works, you have to focus on a quality list. Don’t worry! You can still grow your list, just maybe not as quickly or carelessly.
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Email marketing expertise can now be had in the most unlikely of places: YouTube

The Email Experience Council has put together a YouTube channel just for you as a marketer striving to find the best practices for email marketing.

Best practices for email marketing covered range from email deliverability best practices to email subject line best practices. And you’ll find a range of approaches too. From simple videos of experts giving advice, to story-telling, to a clever use of illustrations to make a point.

It’s surprisingly compelling content! The presenters are engaging, and the videos are short and sweet and really to the point. Yes, you can get real insight in a minute and a half! That’s the other reason these are so compelling: Each is essentially an email marketing best practice sound bite and it works.
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Sometimes Email Marketing Best Practices Require Ignoring the Media

If you saw the headlines this week that email is too slow for the class of 2014, did you have a little panic attack as an email marketer? Or did you take it in stride?

I’ll admit when I saw the headlines around the new Beloit College Mindset List and the assertion that these young folks find email too slow, I had a reaction. But it wasn’t panic. It was “not again.”

It seems like the media wants to see the end of email, since we keep hearing about its demise. And here again was another supposed symptom purporting to make us believe email suffers from something incurable and deadly.
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Best Practices for Email Marketing: Capture Email Addresses on Your Website…Now

One thing about email marketing: It is not a standalone channel. Not by any means. As an email marketing vendor, we at ClickMail continue to teach best practices for email marketing. But if you get too focused on email marketing best practices, you might lose site of the bigger picture, of email’s part in your organization’s overall marketing strategy.

Email can be a complex part of your overall marketing practices and strategy. But you can think of it rather simply as the trifecta of online marketing:
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Track Email Marketing ROI With This ROI Worksheet From MarketingSherpa

As an email marketing vendor and deliverability consultant constantly encouraging our clients to learn and use best practices for email marketing, we at ClickMail consider actionable worksheets like the latest from MarketingSherpa absolute gems. Anything that takes email marketing best practices from theoretical to actionable is a great tool.

The latest great tool from MarketingSherpa is the email marketing ROI worksheet for automated emails.

This ROI worksheet was designed to help you measure the real value and return of your transactional and automated email messages. This becomes useful information for you as you see the strengths and weaknesses of the different components of your program, so you can make improvements…or do more of what’s working. And it’s useful when you need to report numbers to the higher ups.

Download this email marketing best practices worksheet today, because it’s only available to nonmembers until August 22^nd.

Striving to Be the SAME: When Sameness Is an Email Marketing Best Practice

So maybe the idea of being all the SAME won’t sit well with marketers because we spend so much of our time trying to be, well, different. We want to stand out from the competition, in the inbox, in the mail box, on the Internet. Standing out is even an email marketing best practice. So why would we want to be the same?

Because unlike direct mail and other Internet marketing, email has a problem. And that problem is metrics. Oh, not that we don’t have metrics! We do! Plenty of them! And that’s the problem! Too many metrics, too little consistency.

This is a particularly sticky issue between marketer and vendor, as Ivan Chalif so accurately described in a blog for the Email Experience Council (EEC): 
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We Hire Smart People Like Stefan as an Email Marketing Best Practice

Among the email marketing best practices we try to follow, as email deliverability consultants and an email marketing vendor is hiring great people.

The newest addition to our email marketing team is Stefan Eyram. Stefan joins us as the Toronto-based Director of Business Development for ClickMail Marketing.
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Dynamite! Dynamic Design Is Your Next Email Marketing Best Practice

You’ve heard of dynamic content, but what about dynamic design? To keep up with email marketing best practices, you’d better add dynamic design to your list! We’ll tell you why in the latest issue of the ClickMail Marketer.

If your demographic is aged, your creative is tired, or you’re noticing signs of list fatigue, definitely think about a redesign. This article on dynamic design will help get you started, with tips for making sure it’s a dynamic design, one that will enable more one-to-one marketing, and will move your forward, not keep you stuck in the same old way of doing things.

Read the article on dynamic email design, and be ready to add that toolset to your email marketing best practices.