The Whitelist

Email Marketing Best Practices: Pull the Trigger and Stop the Sends

Not only was Trigger the name of Roy Roger’s trusty steed, a horse with a lot of tricks up his sleeve. It’s a key word for email marketers in 2012 as well…and it might be a trick you want to keep up your sleeve for improving ROI in the year ahead.

We all know about overcrowded inboxes, email-weary consumers, and overzealous marketing that sends emails far too often. The answer is to send fewer emails by using triggered emails instead.

Does that sound counter intuitive? Probably. But then our emphasis on building quality in-house email lists over quantity lists does too, yet it’s email marketing best practices to do so.

In reality, sending less by triggering more might not mean fewer emails sent. But it will mean more targeted emails because each one sent will be triggered by the consumer based on an action or an event. In comparison, plain old sending can look like old fashioned batch-and-blast because those messages are going out to a group based on the marketer’s needs or schedule, not the user’s actions.

By their very nature, event-based emails are extremely targeted and relevant. Whether the email is sent as a confirmation of a purchase, a welcome after a subscribe, a reminder about a renewal or a follow-up after abandoning a shopping cart, these email messages speak directly to the recipient in a way a general “send” can not.

If the relevancy argument doesn’t sway you, consider the potential ROI. These kinds of targeted triggered emails have a higher open rate which usually translates to higher ROI: The more emails opened, the more potential for action on the part of the recipient.

Your sends will never cease. Emails such as newsletters or promotions still have their place in your email marketing program. But cutting back on the big batches and focusing resources on the triggered type will definitely benefit your email marketing bottom line…and your customers too.

How to Improve Your Email Marketing Program in Six Months or Less

It’s the beginning of a new year. Advice is flying at you from all directions. Predictions too. 2011 this and 2011 that… It can be a little overwhelming for an email marketer, especially in light of the growth of social media and all the buzz about content marketing!

At the risk of tossing even more advice your way, we want to suggest you review some of your email tactics. But rather than overwhelm you, we’ll make it easy on you: Here’s a six-month plan for improving your email marketing program.

We’ve chosen six often overlooked email marketing factors. Simply do one of these tasks below per month between now and this summer. Or if you’re on the fast track, make it a six-week plan, or even a six-day plan if you’re super ambitious. The point is, break it down into smaller pieces and you’ll be more likely to do it.

Task 1: Review your welcome message. Does it reflect your brand or is it boring and generic? Do you confirm what you promised, meaning if you’ve promised a monthly newsletter, does your welcome message confirm that? Are you offering any special rewards to people who sign up? Are you selling in your welcome email? Are you tracking the results of your welcome email over time? Choose one factor of your welcome email and run an A/B split test on it.

Task 2: Review how often you’re sending out your newsletter. If you’ve been sending out your email newsletter on the same schedule for over a year now, you might want to reconsider it based on results. What does the trending show, an increasing or decreasing open rate or is the open rate holding steady? How about click throughs? Do you have a preference center that lets subscribers choose how often they want to hear from you? Have you done any testing to see if more or less often gets better results?

Task 3: Review your transactional emails, including your confirmation and shipping emails: Give them the same once over as your welcome emails.

Task 4: Review your email design. Use a tool like eDesign Optimizer from email marketing vendor Pivotal Veracity to make sure your email marketing renders correctly in all email clients.

Task 5: Review your list building efforts. What are you currently doing to grow your in-house email list? Is there anything not working? Can you add one more technique this month, like adding an email sign to your company’s Facebook page?

Task 6: Find a reputable email marketing vendor to partner with when you need a little extra help. The time to find an email deliverability consultant or technical services agency isn’t when you need them. Find them when you have time to do your homework and make a good choice.

This is a doable list, right? And in six months, weeks or days, you’ll likely be seeing better results from your email marketing!

Email Marketing Best Practices: Yes, You Can Sell More With Transactional Emails

As one of the email marketing vendors striving to help clients know about and implement email marketing best practices, we push clients to market in their transactional emails too. A transactional email might be a welcome email, a shipping notice, or even a confirmation email.

And now a MarketingSherpa case study demonstrates that not only is this an email marketing best practice, but a profitable one too.

In case Study #CS31735 titled “Cross-sell in Confirmation Emails: 111% Higher Conversion Rate,” reporter Adam Sutton writes about the email marketing success of Isabella, a health and wellness company.

The team at Isabella used personalized recommendations in confirmation emails, and, as the article headline proclaims, saw a 111% higher conversion rate. See the details of the case study and the steps the email marketing team took to make personalized recommendations part of their confirmation emails.

But hurry, this case study is only available until November 5th! If you miss that deadline, and still want to talk about how to add personalized recommendations to your company’s confirmation emails, contact us.

Again and again, you’ll hear those of us at email marketing vendor ClickMail Marketing talk about relevance and expectations as part of your email best practices. That’s because your subscribers and customers have all the power. They can unsubscribe. They can report you as spam. They can choose to delete your email. They can choose not to open it, or click on a link, or forward it to a friend.

Really, we can’t make a recipient do anything. We can just try our hardest to make our emails appealing, engaging and relevant. The better we do at meeting customer expectations (by adhering to email best practices), the more likely we are to succeed in the inbox.
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You’ve seen it here before, you’ll see it here again: Transactional emails are a much-overlooked marketing opportunity! But as much as we tout transactional emails, we tout email best practices even more. And as an email marketing vendor, we’re always on the lookout for straightforward, easy-to-digest and easy-to-apply email best practices to share with you. Today courtesy of Silverpop’s Loren McDonald, we get to share with you the best of two worlds: email best practices and transactional emails.
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It’s Cyber Monday, the email marketing equivalent of Black Friday, and the perfect day to remind ourselves why email is so cost-effective, especially in a tougher economic climate like we’re experiencing right now. Off the top of my head, I can think of seven reasons our clients appreciate email marketing:

1. Email marketing costs less than direct mail. You create one email message and design and send it to as few or as many people as appropriate, only incrementally increasing your costs. (The price you pay to your email service provider is literally pennies compared to what you’d pay for printing and postage of a direct mail piece!)
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A new report from JupiterResearch says it’s time to market with your transactional emails too.

Titled “The Transactional Messaging Imperative,” the report encourages email marketers to take advantage of their transactional messages to build brand, increase revenue and, surprisingly, decrease calls to support centers. As an email marketing vendor, we’re always on the lookout for ways to improve email marketing ROI, and this definitely fits with our mission!

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