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.

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.

Discussing email integration with web analytics with our CTO Cameron Kane, I realized there’s another kind of expectation consumers have that we as email marketing must live up to: the speed with which a transactional email is delivered.

Cameron pointed out that consumers have expectations based on what kind of email it is. If they’ve signed up for your email newsletter, they likely won’t mind a slight delay before the confirmation email arrives, for example. But if they’ve just purchased something from you, their expectation is an immediate email receipt.

Add this to your list of email best practices: Make sure your transactional emails are timed to match people’s expectations.

Transactional emails are frequently used for order confirmation, shipping confirmation, renewal notices and much more. And they enjoy a much higher open rate than promotional emails. But it’s perfectly okay to put promotional messages in these otherwise straightforward emails.

To start doing so, or to improve the way you’re currently doing it, learn from Loren. His article presents and explains seven transactional email best practices, including:

• Make transactional emails part of marketing’s domain
• Use a separate IP address
• Use a friendly From name
• Use a specific email subject line
• Make sure the transactional content is the focus of the email; any promotional messages should be below
• Follow the usual email design best practices to make sure your message gets through

Marketing via the transactional email doesn’t mean just selling. It means getting any kind of action from the recipient, like subscribing to your email newsletter, or updating their personal information. Anything that takes the engagement one step further. So when they do get a promotional email from you, they are much more receptive to it!

See Loren’s article by clicking here

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!)

2. Email marketing tools are reusable. For example, you design an email template, then you can use it over and over.

3. Email marketing is cheaper to test than direct mail. With direct mail, the cost of printing a smaller quantity makes testing a financial challenge.

4. Email marketing can react within a day. A direct mail campaign can take weeks or even months to get from concept to finished and mailed piece. Reacting right away can have a huge impact on your marketing ROI.

5. Email marketing can be one-on-one yet still less expensive than telemarketing.

6. Email marketing is easier to track than any other marketing medium, allowing you to adjust and increase your response rates, and therefore email marketing ROI.

7. Email marketing is easier to defend. Reporting gives you hard facts to present to your boss.

Here’s wishing you a profitable Cyber Monday and holiday season!

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!

The report claims that switching from text-based, information only transactional emails to html emails that include ads and offers could generate $2.9 million annually in additional revenue. And we’re predicted to send out even more transactional emails as time goes by. The JupiterResearch E-mail Marketing Forecast indicates as consumers we’ll receive 146 transactional messages in 2012, almost double that of 2007.

If you’re going to transition to marketing via transactional emails, you’ll need to take a look at how you’re doing it right now. Often transactional emails aren’t owned by marketing, so your first step is to figure out who owns them and if you can usurp them. That can even help with email delivery, according to the report: “…respondents [who] indicated that IT owns their transactional e-mail efforts cited the highest instance of deliverability issues (31 percent).”

And as Jamie Schissler pointed out in MediaPost’s emailInsider, you’ll want to take a look at your platform before switching your transactional emails from plain text to html:

“In all likelihood, you will have to migrate to a more robust email delivery platform, or augment your transactional infrastructure to accommodate the reporting, delivery, and creative (HTML) requirements of rich transactional email. Most transactional email is deployed and managed off a basic MTA (Mail Transfer Agent), which does little other than send a text email.”

When you’re ready to add transactional emails to your email marketing tools but you’re not sure if your platform is up to the task, ask ClickMail. We can take a look at what you’re using and suggest an alternative if you need it. Simply email us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com for advice.