Advanced Email Marketing Techniques: Upping Your Email Ante

You’re ready. It’s time. You’ve mastered the key points of email marketing basics, and now it’s time to to hone your email marketing skills even further. Integrating some or all of the following techniques into your email marketing best practices toolbox will set your email marketing campaign apart from the majority of email marketing messages out there, and that means more interest, increased subscriber numbers, higher level of open rates and engagement, which all translates into increased ROI for your bottom line.

It might seem intimidating to adopt some of the more advanced email marketing techniques available, but it doesn’t have to be. In the latest issue of the ClickMail Marketer we take you step-by-step through some of the most common and most effective advanced email marketing techniques, including automated emails, integration, and trigger-based messaging.

Here’s a quick and dirty summary on how to ante-up your email marketing strategy:

Automate your emails with a CRM and/or API: Automating will save you time and money while increasing your ability to be relevant and targeted.

Create quality content: Make sure your content is varied, interesting, and useful. Don’t make all of your messages sales pitches, coupons, or “exclusive offers.” Change up your message types for increased interest!

Tailor messages: Create relevant and interesting content that includes specific messages based on purchases, transaction confirmations, browsing behavior, and other things like demographics and birthday information. Automating messages is one way to actually increase the specificity of your email messages, and trigger-based messaging is another.

Track and mine your data: Track the preferences of your prospects and customers when they subscribe to your newsletters, fill out forms, open emails, click through links, visit your site and buy products. Use this data to further refine your email marketing campaign strategies.

If you’d like more details on these and other super-effective and easy-to-use (once they’re implemented) advanced email marketing techniques, check out the November issue of the ClickMail Marketer. And if you’d like CRM or API-integration assistance, or would like further information on any of these implementations, give ClickMail a call. Taking some time now to learn about and implement some advanced email marketing techniques will benefit your bottom line later. Find out how to get started in the November ClickMail Marketer.

Clean up Your Email List for Improved Email Deliverability

Summer’s officially over, and with the waning warmth we’ve traded our swimsuits and outdoor grills for briefcases, renewed time with our computers, and fresh new notebooks. Yes, there’s just something about fall that means it’s time to say goodbye to vacation memories and get back to work. And what better time to jump into work than with a good hard look at your in-house email list? Just as fall and spring are excellent times to clean house (literally), it’s also an ideal time to clean out your email list. It might not sound fun, but it is smart. Every list, no matter how good the processes behind building it, will need a scrubbing every once in a while to keep deliverability high and spam complaints low.

It might seem like a big undertaking to scrub your list but it doesn’t have to be. In the latest issue of the ClickMail Marketer we list the steps you should take clean up your list, including removing duplicate email addresses, fake or spam addresses, and inactive accounts, among other things. Ensuring your list is clean and up to date ensures your subscribers are real and interested in your emails, which means a better sender reputation for you! And having a good sender reputation leads to increased email deliverability, more email opens, higher click-through rates, enhanced customer loyalty, decreased unsubscribes, and increased sales. In other words, everything you want out of your email marketing campaigns.

And remember, the more you’re adhering to email marketing best practices in your signups, the less house cleaning your list should need. So next on your list might be taking another look at your signup processes!

But if you’re not sure how to get started with your list cleanup strategy or implementation, check out the October issue of the ClickMail Marketer. And if it still sounds difficult (or if you’d rather not take it on yourself), let ClickMail help. List scrubbing is an investment now that will definitely pay off later. Find out how to get started in the October ClickMail Marketer.

Email Marketing Best Practices: Make Your Email Newsletter More Personal?

A thought for 2011: Make your email newsletter more real.

The world is increasingly social and connected. I predict we’re starting to expect that we’ll only hear from real people and buy from businesses we can associate with names and faces.

It’s only a prediction, mind you. Most websites I visit and email newsletters I receive remain generic. Only blogs are typically personal, meaning you see a name and a photo of a real person. Websites and email newsletters, on the other hand, often lack names, faces…any real people at all.

What if you changed that? Changing your website is a big deal, I realize. But changing your email newsletter? What if you made the From address a real person? (With some kind of branding, of course, so the recipient would know whom it was from. For example, an email newsletter from ClickMail might be From: Marco Marini, ClickMail Marketing, instead of simply from Marco Marini. Your subscriber will know the ClickMail name but not necessarily your CEO’s name.

And what if you added a photo of that person? And included a welcome letter written more like it was from a single person, not a marketing department?

The bulk of your email newsletter content would stay the same. But it would be in a much friendlier, more “social” context. You might just improve email deliverability as a result, as your subscribers are more receptive to an email newsletter perceived as more personal than a corporate one!

Just something to think about! Or test!

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.

Two, the one can refer to the other, so they support each other (and cut down on the amount of content needed). Let’s say you have an email marketing program, but you don’t do an email newsletter because you’re concerned about coming up with content and getting it pushed out on time every week or month. (And anything that takes more staff time admittedly impacts your email marketing ROI.) You can repurpose the content from your blog to create that email newsletter content. Pick a few of the best blogs from the last month and include a compelling sentence about each in the newsletter, linked to that blog. You will reach a different audience, your in-house email list, while driving traffic to your blog. Conversely, your blog can refer back to your email newsletter. That’s what we do at ClickMail. We publish a monthly email marketing newsletter, then summarize that month’s issue in a blog post, linking back to the newsletter now archived on our website.

Three, this is the age of choice for consumers, even if your audience is B2B. They can choose how to communicate with you, and how you can communicate with them. They might choose Facebook or Twitter or signing up for your emails or subscribing to your blog…or a combination of two or more of these channels. If they prefer email and you’re only offering a blog, you might lose the opportunity to build a relationship with them when they decide to simply skip it and you. And any lost opportunities mean a lower ROI.

Which leads to reason four, email as a relationship building tool. Blogging can’t replace email for relationship building. Nor can you effectively use blogging for specials and promotions, or even surveys! There are still certain types of content most appropriate to email. Just like you might miss out on a subscriber (i.e. prospect) if you only offer a blog, no newsletter, so might you miss out on marketing if you don’t have the email list and channel for certain types of messages.

Blogging and email: You need both for maximize email marketing ROI. And if you need help with the latter, you know where to go.

The publisher of Email Marketing Reports, Mark has put out another brilliant email marketing video. This time he takes on B2B marketing emails. He pretends to be one, an email newsletter, as he talks “at” you, the viewer/reader. With humor that’s painfully on target, he talks through the major sins B2B email marketing commits on a daily, if not hourly, basis:

• The email arrives 8 months later than expected
• The email isn’t targeted to the recipient
• The email is self-serving
• The email lacks any real personalization
• The email content is irrelevant
• The email is one-sided
• The email offer is unrelated to the recipient

There’s more, and every second is worth your attention. You’ll definitely snicker if not guffaw, and might cringe a little too, if you are in B2B email marketing.

This also might serve as ammunition to get upper management to listen when you’re trying to convince them the email marketing ROI would be higher if the email newsletter were better! So maybe this bit of viral video can be put to good use.

Watch Mark act the part of a B2B email newsletter by clicking here.

Looking around as the year came to a close, we as an email marketing vendor saw all kinds of advice online about tips for improving your email marketing. So we decided to take a different approach: We put together a list of the email marketing mistakes we most often see, and addressed those instead. Because sometimes you need to fix what’s broken before you start taking on new email marketing tools and tips!

• Email Marketing Reports 
• MediaPost’s EmailInsider (free registration)
• MarketingSherpa
• The Email Experience Council 
• Silverpop’s newsletter

Do you have a favorite email marketing blog or email newsletter to recommend? Let us know!

Content is what gets people to sign up for your email newsletters, it’s what makes them anticipate your e-newsletters, and it’s what keeps them subscribed to your email newsletters.

Offer better content than your competitor and over time you will win the subscribers…and the forwards and viral marketing too, if your email newsletter content is really good.

By posting your e-newsletter content on your Web site in an archive and you’ll win searches too, as potential subscribers who haven’t maybe haven’t even heard of you use Google, et al. to look for information…and find you! And then subscribe to your email newsletter.

Offer the best content, be the resource they rely on the most, and you’ll win trust, subscribers and even searches. And that all adds up to better email marketing ROI.