Three Common Email Marketing Challenges and How to Tackle Them

In our last blog post we wrote about the upcoming can’t-miss Email Marketing Summit 2012 from Marketing Sherpa. If you attended last year’s summit, you know how valuable it is, and this year’s is shaping up to be the best yet.  One of the most important insights from last year’s summit was a roundup of the most common email marketing challenges to plague email marketers, and how to handle them. These are just a few of the challenges that were discussed, and the solutions that came out in the email marketing summit last year:

1. How do you increase engagement if you have a limited list?

Even though you may have a small email list, there are a number of ways in which email marketers can increase engagement, and ultimately, ROI. For example, you could start by expanding your company’s web presence and visibility. One great way to do this is by guest blogging for online industry publications. By getting your name out there as an expert in your industry, you’ll attract more followers and grow your list while increasing conversation and engagement. Also consider integrating social media into your email marketing program: a strong social media program will not only help grow your reach, but also show your followers that you are posting great updates (and thus encourage them to sign up for an email newsletter). Finally, consider offering incentives to your email subscribers to share your offers with others, which could be another way to integrate sharing, engagement, and social networking.

2. How can effective results be achieved through an email marketing program without being repetitive?

As we always say at ClickMail Marketing, the best way to address this challenge is to be consistently creating excellent, specific, and relevant content. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time; you simply need to get creative about repurposing your key messages in ways that draw prospects in and keeps current customers engaged. If you’re feeling stale or need inspiration, you can always develop creative content and new ideas based on customer surveys, industry trends and other insights. Be open to feedback and take suggestions from your audience. Often, your customers ask the same questions your prospects are silently wondering.
3. How are maximum results attained through optimal frequency and timing of email marketing messages?

If you’re struggling with this question, don’t worry: you’re not alone. Most email marketers wonder about the best timing and frequency to send out email marketing messages, and we’ve written about this question recently ourselves. Even though HubSpot’s social media scientist, Dan Zarrella, discovered that Tuesday at 11am is one of the worst possible times to send out email campaigns, this day and time may not apply to your audience and their behavior patterns. The best way to find out the most optimal frequency and timing for YOUR specific email campaigns is to engage in testing, another email marketing best practice we regularly espouse. In order to determine your ideal email frequency, the best thing to measure is your total open and click rates under different email frequency conditions. Consider running an A/B split test with different email frequencies and comparing the results.

For even more takeaways from the 2011 Email Marketing Summit, see Marketing Sherpa’s roundup!

What are some of the email marketing challenges you’ve encountered as an email marketer? Share them with us and we’ll try to address them in future blog posts!

We recently did that for a federal credit union with more than 72,000 members worldwide and close to one billion dollars in assets. You can imagine how much email marketing an organization that size must do. They use email for transactional messages as well as to confirm new accounts and settings changes.

Email solutions provider Silverpop was providing an email marketing solution to the credit union, including building a custom interface. But the email solutions provider’s workload meant that although they could be the ESP, they couldn’t build out the custom interface in time to meet the credit union’s schedule.

Silverpop had email marketing vendor ClickMail (that’s us!) step in and build the custom interface, while sticking to an aggressive delivery timeline.

This credit union situation demonstrates how we as an email marketing vendor work for and with our email marketing clients. We’ll help you launch your email marketing programs, and we’ll also go the next step by helping you create custom reporting tools or windows. And we’ll do it all on time and on budget, just like the case study project!

After the jump,  her Top Ten list of things to keep in mind:

10.  Know your organizational strengths and limitations;

9.  Get the IT department and your code monkeys to give their input toward the RFP;

8.  Define why you’re looking for a new solution in the first place;

7.  When writing the RFP, ask open-ended questions (‘how’ and what’) rather leading ( ‘can you’ and ‘do you’) questions: make them explain;

6.  Set reasonable expectations: the RFP process typically takes between two and three months. (NB: We can run your RFP process to completion in three weeks);

5.  Thin out the crowd through external research: try to pick only a few likely vendors instead of 2 dozen ESPs across the board;

4.  Be transparent with both vendors and internal staff;

3.  Analyze the quality of the responses;

2.  Share feedback with all participants, the vendor who won the business and why they won, and those that didn’t and why they didn’t;

1.  Learn from the process: you’ll be doing another RFP some time in future!