What’s the most important part of any email marketing program?
CONSISTENCY!
Huh? Wha-? Not what you expected? Well, think about this:
Your subscribers joined your mailing list because they love your products, they’re crazy about your service, and they want to hear what you have to say. Setting expectations around how often your subscribers will hear from you, and then fulfilling those expectations, is the key to keeping them happy and getting the best results from your email marketing efforts.
Your Sender Score, a ReturnPath metric to gauge your reputation as an email sender, is pretty important. It determines whether or not the door to recipient inboxes is open to your email communications and whether or not you’re even a welcome visitor. Heck, it determines whether or not you can even knock on that door as email marketers with poor Sender Scores are often not permitted anywhere near the premises! They either have their emails shunted to a spam folder automatically or recipient ISPs outright refuse the delivery of their messages entirely. Your Sender Score is pretty serious business.
Okay, you’ve gotten your content squared away. It looks good and reads right. Congratulations. You’ve even got your list nice and cleaned up. It’s all segmented and everything. Good job. You’re ready for the next step but a niggling doubt prevents you from moving forward: should you hit the send button now?
Mailing List Subscription Manager: Temporary Delivery Suspension
Subscribers may want to temporarily stop receiving emails for a variety of reasons. So, the more choices you can provide to them, the more likely you are to address their varying needs. By providing subscribers the ability to pause emails from your brand, you not only keep the subscriber on your list, you decrease your number of unsubscribes.
Net Atlantic knows how valuable subscribers are to the success of their clients’ email campaigns. That’s why we’re so excited about a new “Snooze” feature we developed, which enables you to let contacts take a temporary break from receiving emails instead of opting out of your campaigns completely. To be a successful marketer, you need to show your subscribers that you’re taking their preferences into account. When you give your subscribers control over their email subscriptions, you’re able to retain more of them! The “Snooze” feature makes it clear that they can do something besides opting out of your communications.
When evaluating the performance of your email campaigns, which stats are most important to track? We recommend you start with the following:
Let’s take a look at each of these stats in more detail.
You’ve probably heard a lot about “joining the conversation” and “building relationships” in the context of social media, but have you considered how these ideas could apply to your email marketing strategy? It might be time to give it some serious thought.
Periodic emails updating your subscribers about what you and/or your organization have going on may no longer be enough to get you the results you want. You need to start engaging your customers and prospects in an ongoing dialogue in order to create lasting relationships.
Read More “How to build great relationships with dialogue marketing”
Today I’d like to follow up on Friday’s post on reputation with a deeper dive into what it takes to build and maintain a great reputation as an email marketer.
Your sender reputation is one of the most–if not the most–important aspects of your email marketing program. It takes a long time to build a solid reputation as a sender, and it takes ongoing vigilance to maintain it.
Read More “Building a good reputation doesn’t just happen – it takes work”
Email marketing best practices dictate that testing be performed for each mailing you send out. And it makes sense! Why would you want to distribute what would otherwise be a broken email message to your carefully cultivated audience? So many things could go wrong (e.g., improperly formatted HTML, images not loading as planned, incorrectly entered merge tags, etc.) that it’s worth the extra few moments to ensure that your communications go out without a hitch. But that’s just testing for delivery. How about testing for effectiveness?
Testing your email content — and in a larger sense, your message — is an often overlooked step in the email marketing process despite it being a best practice. And it’s kind of silly that it’s so often forgotten about, really. Why wouldn’t you want what you send to be the most effective it could be? Much as you want to ensure the technology supporting the transmission of your communication is functioning as intended, you should also see to it that your message is producing the results you set out to achieve. But how do you do that? What do you change to make your campaign more effective? How do you measure this change?
Given its undeniable tie to the success of your campaigns, email testing is a pretty big deal. And unless you are 100% satisfied with your email marketing effort’s performance as is, it’s a big deal that you should probably address. But don’t fret; while it may seem somewhat complicated, fundamentally it’s a pretty simple process.
Our Email Testing In 4 Simple Steps infographic illustrates exactly how simple it is.
Email marketers often see their results slipping–fewer opens, a lower click-through rate and a dropping conversion rate–and panic. That’s understandable when the bottom line is at stake, but panicking won’t help you figure out what’s wrong with your email marketing strategy or how you can fix it. The only thing that can help is to test, test, test … and then test some more!
Remember that all 10 things to test below are meant to be tested over time. Don’t try to test too many things at once or too quickly, as you’re results likely won’t be accurate. Here are the main parts of your email marketing to focus on when you decide something needs to change:
Read More “Top 10 Things to Test to Boost Email Marketing Results”
How long have you been using your current email marketing template? Really, think about it. Try to ballpark it within a few months. And how often do you send email? Okay, let’s say your template is a ripe two years old and you send once a week. That’s over a hundred messages your subscribers have received that look exactly the same. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure your email template looks just fine…but think of your poor subscribers! Every week, it’s the same old thing. It might start to get mundane after a while.
Think of your morning commute. Boring, right? But what if, one day, somebody planted a beautiful tree on the side of the road? Wouldn’t that be great? It’s always been the same mind-numbing commute, but now you have that tree to look forward to every day! Sure, the tree will get boring eventually, but what if someone planted some flowers by it? Then maybe they’ll build a nice fence around their little garden…and who knows? They might even paint the fence a different color someday. Suddenly, your morning commute isn’t so boring any more.
Email Marketing Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.