The Whitelist

Growing a significant email list doesn’t just happen instantly: email marketers know better than anyone else that it takes time and energy. But all that effort goes to waste if your email marketing campaigns don’t continually engage and interest your hard-won subscribers. Ensuring that you maintain your focus on creating interesting and relevant copy not only keeps subscribers interested in what you have to say, it also helps your email deliverability rates.

To keep your subscribers opening, reading, clicking through, and converting make sure you listen to their preferences as they stated them in the preference center they used to sign up. You use a preference center, right? Okay, just making sure. We’ve talked time and again about the importance of email preference centers to your email deliverability rate and overall reputation, and how using an email preference center should be one of your email deliverability tools!

But once they’ve signed up and told you what they’d like to hear from you, make sure that you honor your end of the bargain by doing the following:

Tell them what to expect. By using an email preference center and confirmation messages to provide an overview of your program, subscribers will understand when to expect your emails, and what to expect from them (discounts, newsletters, or helpful tips).

Fulfill their expectations. If they signed up for bi-weekly messages, make sure that you have that system in place and stick to it. No more, no less! Your subscribers will feel respected when their expectations are met, and they won’t, if they aren’t.

Send relevant content. We’ve also talked a good amount about the email deliverability benefits to segmenting your lists. Once you have relevant data, you can send increasingly targeted and relevant content to your subscribers. And the more targeted your content, the more engaged your subscribers.

Email Marketing Best Practices: Relevant and Specific Subscriber Data Mining

In our last post, we spoke about the value of using email preference centers to ensure subscriber-centric relevance in messages and frequency. But another important issue to consider when setting up email preference centers is the kind of data you’re gathering from your subscribers. A well-designed email preference center isn’t just an opportunity to listen to your subscribers tell you what they want, but also a good opportunity for you to gather information about them (within reason, or more accurately, within relevance).

What do we mean by this? Email marketing best practices require respect in the amount and type of information you gather from your subscribers. The natural tendency of marketers and data-hungry sales teams is to gather as much information as possible about their users. Obviously, most marketers would like to know everything possible about their subscribers including buying interests, budget, online purchase history, title, name, demographic data including age, gender, household income, location, email address, etc. But it’s not really good email marketing best practices to demand that much data in exchange for what is essentially the right to market to them.

Ultimately, in this, as in many things around email marketing best practices, parsimony is best: only ask a user to provide the information that you need to fulfill their request. For example, if you’re providing a basic email newsletter, email address is obviously a necessity, but do you need financial stats on your users? Probably not, and they won’t understand why it’s being asked of them.

But if you’re segmenting the content options you’re providing by industry, expertise, or technology category, it’s relevant to gather that kind of information from your users. And if you’re offering other options like printed catalogs and mailed coupons, or something unique like a special “birthday” discount during a subscriber’s birthday month, it’s a perfect reason to ask for full contact information including mailing address and birth date.

And to tap into the world of email engagement even more, consider offering a comments or questions section: if your user actively seeks out help, technical assistance, or for more information, you can legitimately request a detailed description of their situation or problem. Just make sure to reply in a timely fashion, to emphasize your commitment to increased engagement with your subscribers.

Limiting the amount and kinds of information that you ask from your users will reinforce their feeling that they are being respected, and their privacy protected. When you consider the goals of your email marketing program, determine the user data points you need to gather that will best enhance your user’s experience. And, as with email marketing best practices in general, the best way to this is through asking: “Is this information relevant?”

For more information or assistance, please contact us.

Email Marketing Best Practices: Listen to Your Subscribers’ Preferences

In today’s world of email engagement, effective use of a preference center has to be at the top of your email marketing best practices toolbox. As early as last year, we discussed the importance of using preference centers to improve email deliverability, which by this point, we all know is of critical importance to email marketing ROI.

When you show your subscribers that their preferences are important to you, you are implementing subscriber-centered email marketing best practices. And that means your subscribers will feel more valued, which will lead to more engagement, more email deliverability, more conversions, and ultimately, more email marketing ROI.

Using a preference center effectively lets subscribers tell you exactly what they want from you and how often they want it. Interestingly, even though by now most email marketers know the value in using email preference centers, they are still not being set up to maximize the variety of choices available to subscribers. And this is where the value of email preference centers comes in. The more choices you can offer your subscribers, the more targeted and relevant your information can become to them, which leads, again, to increased relevance, engagement, email deliverability, and conversion rates.

When setting up your preference center options, ultimately you should think about these two main categories, from which a multitude of options can be selected:

1) Content: What do they want from you? Do they want coupons? Notifications of online specials and deals? The latest updates via your weekly newsletter? Notifications of monthly webinars? Specially selected partner offers?

2) Frequency: How often do they want to hear from you? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?

Putting the control in the hands of your subscribers will ultimately work to enhance your overall email marketing best practices. Regardless of how many names you have on your in-house email list, each of those subscribers have different needs, and you can meet all of them when you offer up different options for your subscribers to choose among.  One generic message to everyone on your list sounds, well… generic. And over time, that will lead to unopened emails, automatic deletes, loss of interest, unsubscribes, and maybe even an increase in the dreaded spam reporting.

Keep your subscribers interested by ensuring your messages are targeted and specific to their needs: your email deliverability will go up, and so will your email marketing ROI!

For assistance with creating your custom preference center, contact us.

Email Marketing Best Practices - Getting Personal

I shouldn’t say “oldie but goodie” but I think something six months old is actually old in the email marketing world.

I am referring to a MarketingSherpa chart published in February 2011  showing tactics used to improve the relevancy of emails. I looked it up again as I’ve been thinking on making email not only more relevant, but more, shall we say, personal? And by personal, I mean customer-centric.

In a way, personal is what we mean when we say relevant. What is relevant email content to me differs from what’s relevant to you why? Because we are two different people with different wants, needs, interests, likes and dislikes. When an email is truly relevant, it feels personal…like it is meant for me.

When you look at this MarketingSherpa chart showing tactics used by organizations to improve relevancy, all five do just that–improve relevancy–and by making the emails not only more relevant, but more personal.

The messages are segmented: More personal.

Organizations use preference centers so subscribers can get email when and how they want: More personal.

Messages are dynamic: More personal.

And triggered messages arrive at just the right time in just the right circumstances: More personal.

More relevant, yes. But these tactics work because they make email more personal. And that’s email marketing best practices at their best.

Are you getting personal with your customers yet? If not, call on ClickMail.

If You're Not Listening to Your Subscribers, You'll Never Be Heard

In a MarketingProfs article, Michael Fischler writes that marketing is listening. You demonstrate you’ve been listening when you give people what they want. And he’s right.

So is email marketing…when you’re following email marketing best practices, that is. People might want to hear from you more often or less. They might want coupons for your brick-and-mortar store or online deals. If you’re a B2B email marketer, your subscribers might want more whitepapers on understanding the implications of implementing the new software. Whether you have 5,000 or 5 million names on your in-house email list, you have a lot of different wants to meet out there. One generic message to everyone on your list falls flat.

What do you do? Listen. And show them you’re listening.

Resolve in 2011 to be listening. That will lead to subscriber-centric email marketing best practices. What will you get in return? More relevance, more engagement, more email marketing ROI. And fewer email delivery problems too!

One of the best ways to listen when you’re an email marketer is with a preference center that lets subscribers tell you exactly what they want from you and how often they want it. Email marketing vendor ClickMail Marketing published two pieces on preference centers in 2010, and both are worth a review if you’re resolving to be subscriber-centric in 2011.

Our email marketing newsletter article explains the significance of the preference center now that email marketing has entered the age of engagement. It explains the how and why of the importance of engagement to improve your email marketing ROI but also decrease your email delivery problems.

Once you’re convinced you need a preference center, our blog published for the Email Experience Council (EEC) gives you five steps to building a preference center.

Both are quick and easy reads and highly recommended if you want to resolve to be a subscriber-centric marketer…and better listener too.