The Whitelist

Although email marketing happens online, and no hammers or drills are required, it’s still a craft that calls for the right tools, knowledge, skills and dedication to create a great end product. As a reminder as the boy scouts would say—expect the best but prepare for the worst, make sure your email marketing toolbox is fully loaded with all of the following now…before you find yourself in a pinch, with no email hardware store to run to:

• A top tier ESP, such as BlueHornet, Silverpop or ExactTarget
• A subject line test tool
• A rendering test tool like Pivotal Veracity’s eDesign Optimizer
• An email designer or email design team that can design emails effective even with image blockers on, who know email HTML vs. HTML used for the Web, and the limitations of email clients such as Outlook 2007
• An email copywriter or email copywriting team that understands best practices for copywriting emails and landing pages
• Web analytics
• An email marketing consultant or vendor/partner like ClickMail Marketing, to help you stay compliant, aware of best practices, and current with email marketing trends
• An email testing strategy to learn, over time, what your audience responds to (e.g. subject line, email copywriting, email design layout, timing, etc.)

If your email marketing toolbox is missing any of these items, start looking around now to make your toolbox as complete as can be. Because the better your tools and the more complete your toolbox, the higher your email marketing ROI. And in the end, isn’t the ROI what you’re striving to create?

Tags: email copywriter, Email design, Email marketing, email marketing consultant, Email marketing ROI, email marketing toolbox, ESP

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Email marketing tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.