The Whitelist

If your company is blogging, do you still need an email newsletter? Yes, if you want to improve your email marketing ROI. There are several reasons for this:

One, this is the age of integration. (For proof of that, see our new 2010 guide to choosing an ESP.) Just because you are doing one thing (blogging) doesn’t mean you should not do the other (email marketing). The more marketing channels you have, the better. Plus blogs and emails are delivered differently. A blog must be found by a reader, and then subscribed to, to be read. An email newsletter can be part of your email marketing program, sent to people already on your in-house email list. You can actively recruit email subscribers via a multitude of channels. And people are less likely to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed than they are to your email newsletter. Using a blog in combination with an email newsletter simply increases your reach, and therefore your ROI.
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If you like numbers, and everyone in email marketing has to be a bit of a numbers geek, you’ll like this website! The Email Stat Center offers all kinds of numbers and stats that could help you possibly improve your email marketing ROI.

From branding to budgeting, from lines to subject lines, this website serves up numbers, stats and data on a full range of email marketing topics. Choose a topic, and you’re presented with a laundry list of stats.
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Time and again in this email marketing blog, we preach relevance as key to email marketing ROI.

But what is relevant? Relevant to me could be ridiculous to you.

Regardless of varying interpretations of the word’s meaning, the concept remains critical to your email marketing success. So let’s clarify.

Relevant email marketing means your email marketing subscriber gets emails from you when she wants, how she wants and with information she wants.
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Are you measuring the right email marketing metrics the right way? As much as we as an email marketing vendor love metrics and share that love with our email marketing clients, we also see the danger in how easy measuring can seem to be.

That’s because email marketing serves up plenty of numbers, whether you’re doing a good job or a poor one. And as with politics, these numbers can be skewed if you’re not sure what you’re measuring and why.
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Email marketing is made up of many moving parts. There are technical parts like the software, policy parts like CAN SPAM compliance, tricky parts like the email delivery, email design parts like alt text, and last and certainly not least, the word parts.
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To up your email marketing ROI, look past the inbox because the landing page is where the action’s at, once you get that click through.

This month’s ClickMail Marketer email newsletter offers tips for optimizing your email marketing landing pages based on knowledge gained from Marketing Experiments’ professional certification program.
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Confused by social media and how it relates to email marketing? You’re not alone in your confusion! But help is on the way on June 25th when Michael Kelly, our Biz Dev Whiz, takes part in a panel at the Online Marketing Summit in San Francisco.

The panel presentation is titled “Chicken & The Egg: In a Web 2.0 World, Does Email Drive Social Media or Social Drive Email Marketing?” During it, you’ll hear email marketing and social media experts talk about the push-pull mechanisms that drive real social media success.
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If you’re in Denver on June, 4th, you’re in luck for two reasons. One, ClickMail Marketing’s Michael Kelly is presenting at the Online Marketing Summit in Denver that day. He’s presenting a favorite email solutions provider topic: Email Marketing Makeover! Michael loves the before and after stories of email marketing, and how email marketing makeovers can improve email marketing ROI. Among the topics he’ll cover are:
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It’s admittedly easier to execute an email marketing campaign than it is to measure, learn from and improve upon one. Maybe that’s why as an email marketing vendor, we see so many companies relying on simplistic metrics, unaware of how to make changes that matter to their campaigns.

If you’re wondering  whether your metrics are providing you with any real actionable insight–and how to act on that insight–good news: The newest email marketing whitepaper to be added to our growing email marketing library will take you beyond measuring open rates and click-throughs, to some metrics that really matter.
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It’s springtime! The birds are singing, buds are bursting and grass is greening. Could your email marketing results use some freshening up too? If so, check out MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Awards Gallery for inspiration.

With 43 inspiring email marketing award winners’ examples and descriptions, you could consider this an email marketing best practices tutorial. Seriously. Take some time to skim it, then go back through and learn from tried-and-true techniques for:
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