Speaker Jim Porzak, Senior Director of Marketing Analytics, The Generations, will talk about how to get the best performance from your direct marketing campaigns. He’ll present a quick survey of methods with examples from three key areas:

1. Test to Tune, a review of A/B testing, including examples
2. Segment for Understanding, with real-life case studies where customer segments helped target messaging
3. Predict for Profit, how to use modern methods for response rate modeling

Then boost your direct marketing know-how even more by staying for the Bonus Workshop: Using RFM+ to Understand your Customers. Jim will show you how to apply RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary) using sample data representative of real customers. You’ll walk away ready to apply it to your own direct marketing right away.

Sure, ClickMail is about email marketing best practices, but email marketing is only part of your direct marketing efforts. That’s why we’re a Charter Sponsor of DMAnc, to make sure you have ample opportunity to learn and improve all your direct marketing efforts, not just your email marketing results.

Learn more about next week’s DMAnc event by clicking here.

With 43 inspiring email marketing award winners’ examples and descriptions, you could consider this an email marketing best practices tutorial. Seriously. Take some time to skim it, then go back through and learn from tried-and-true techniques for:

• Testing
• Auto responders
• Opt-in campaigns
• Lead generation
• Relaunch
• Welcome emails
• Triggered emails
• Email newsletters
• List growth
• Email for internal promotions
• Email contests

Email marketing ROI can always be improved even a little by tweaking your email marketing best practices. Take advantage of the lessons learned by other email marketers to get better email marketing results. MarketingSherpa does a fabulous job of explaining each campaign and why it was a winner. Perusing the winners’ samples will inspire you to improve your email copywriting and email design too.

See the winners’ email marketing results by clicking here

And as part of our ongoing role as an email marketing company keeping you up-to-speed on the latest email marketing best practices, we’re spreading the word.

On Monday, join Austin Bliss, President and Co-Founder of FreshAddress, and Kevin Senne, Director of Deliverability at Premiere Global Services, as they help you learn more about managing your email subscribers. During this email marketing webinar, you’ll learn:

• Acquisition and subscription strategies

• The importance of retention in a recession

• Healthy housefiles: Address hygiene and audit, append, ECOA

• Proactive deliverability: Focus on reputation and complaints

• Engaging your Universe with 1-to-1 loyalty and lifecycle strategies

Find out more about the email marketing webinar by clicking here.

ClickMail is also proud to be a Premiere Global Services partner and reseller. See a complete list of our ESP and other email marketing offerings.

Email marketing vendors Smith-Harmon and Responsys released their joint Retail Welcome Email Benchmark Study earlier this month, with good news and bad news about how well the email marketing industry is doing when it comes to using the welcome email. Some of the stats are admittedly surprising.

For example, only 76% of the retailers surveyed sent out welcome emails. That’s only three-quarters! A welcome email is easy and powerful, it starts building your relationship with your subscriber and gives you a chance to up-sell or cross-sell. Can someone give us a good reason not to do a welcome email?

Two more surprising stats from the study:

• 23% of retailers took more than 24 hours to send out their welcome emails–A welcome email should be prompt, giving the subscriber confidence that they made a smart choice when signing up

• Only 76% explained the benefits of being a subscriber–Again, this is about confidence. An email signup is akin to money, because a value is being exchanged: An email address is being handed over to you in exchange for something. Help the subscriber feel good about the decision to trust you with their email address

• Only 87% included a link to their homepage—The welcome email’s primary purpose is to instill trust and get the relationship off to a good start. But you can still doing some marketing! That’s why you include a link back to your Web site

Now for some good news, areas where email marketing best practices are improving:

• More than 89% of retailers sent HTML welcome emails (instead of text), a 20% increase since 2006

• More than 68% of retailers’ welcome emails asked to be added to a subscriber’s address book, a 19% increase since 2006

If these stats don’t mean anything to you, you as an email marketer can learn a lot about the value and impact of welcome emails by just paying attention to those you personally receive. For example, one of the ClickMail team signed up for Staples Rewards program and received a welcome email…two weeks later. Despite the lag and the awkward subject line (“Welcome. And thanks for joining.”), Staples did send a welcome email and it does a lot of things right. Their welcome email:

• Asks to be added to address book (with compelling text even: “Don’t miss the savings”)

• Is branded

• Reminds the recipient what they’ll get as a Staples Rewards member

• Links to the Web site so the recipient can buy, buy, buy

• Uses alt text for the images

• Includes contact information in case there are questions

• Includes an unsubscribe link

Our favorite part of the email is this line: “Some of our best offers are sent by email. Add Staples to your address book.” Good reminder that one wants to get these emails, for the best offers.

The Smith-Harmon/Responsys study shows us where we still need to improve in the email marketing industry. But so do the welcome emails sent out by our fellow email marketers.

You can download the study at http://www.smith-harmon.com/.

That’s why it was a treat to stumble on a Grokdotcom newsletter article    crammed full of 12 more advanced email marketing mistakes, like creating individual emails instead of email marketing campaigns, and confusing response with results.

The article doesn’t get into anything as sophisticated as using dedicated IP addresses for your transactional and promotional emails, but it’s more advanced than we usually see…and well-written too. Maybe the list is refreshingly different because it’s modeled after a list of 12 common advertising mistakes? Regardless of the reason, the list is worth going through, to make sure you’re not making any of those email marketing mistakes.

Effective email marketing is the result of adhering to email marketing best practices. But first you have to know your email marketing best practices in order to follow them…and to know which email marketing mistakes to avoid. Reading blogs like this one helps, but don’t hesitate to reach out to your email marketing vendor for advice too. An email marketing vendor like ClickMail Marketing can assess your email marketing practices and suggest changes if needed.

Read the Grokdotcom article on email marketing mistakes.

With that in mind, we offer you six email marketing best practices in the form of resolutions that can up your email marketing ROI. They range from easy to more complicated, but consider all six of them required email marketing tactics. We’ve linked three of them to previous blog posts, to help get you started:

1.    I will use Forward to a Friend(FTF) or Forward to a Colleague and “view online” options in all my emails.
2.    I will test how my email designs render before sending.
3.    I will start or improve upon an autoresponder program.
4.    I will start or improve upon segmenting for more targeted permission-based email marketing.
5.    I resolve to make sure my email delivery rate is as high as it can be.
6.    I resolve to keep up with changes in the email marketing industry more.

If you’re not sure how to tackle some (or all!) of these email marketing best practices, go to our email marketing company Web site at www.clickmailmarketing.com for more information. And keep checking in with this blog to help you with the sixth one. Better yet, sign up for the RSS feed, so you never miss an email marketing blog post.

It’s permission-based email marketing – meaning you got their permission, and your subscribers trusted you enough to hand over their email addresses in the first place. And you as the email marketer must guard that relationship when others in your company want to take advantage of the fast and cheap nature of email marketing for a quick financial fix.

To differentiate it from the Privacy Policy that reassures your subscribers you won’t share their email address, this policy is one that ensures you’ll treat your subscribers with respect. That means:

• Only sending them relevant emails
• Not over-messaging them (i.e. emailing them more often than they want)
• Providing them with a profile page where they can change and specify what they want to hear about and how
• Segmenting and targeting your email marketing

You as the email marketer might be adhering to these email marketing best practices already, but the above policy will ensure that the rest of your company does to. So your subscribers will continue to want to hear from you and your emails will continue to be welcome in their inboxes. And that can only help your email marketing ROI.