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Strategy for Email Success |
The key to email success is developing, reviewing and refining a
comprehensive email marketing strategy. Over the last months, we've
discussed areas to look at and improve upon to get better results,
including list segmentation, testing subject lines, creating a
winning welcome message, and more. This month we'll look at
identifying and determining these and other areas to form a
comprehensive strategy that will help your email campaigns succeed
today and into the future.
BRAND AFFINITY
More than ever, your brand is important to your audiences. In
this age of information overload, people create perceptions of
organizations in a split second, and expectations are driven higher
with each touch-point. Every aspect of your email marketing campaigns
needs to be audited against your brand personality.
Message design: Are your messages accurately reflecting
your brand? The design and appearance of your email messages create a
lasting impression to your audience.
Relevant content: Does the content you communicate through
your email campaigns complement and strengthen your core brand
messages?
Landing pages: Do you control the branding of your landing pages and the destinations you are sending responders? These pages should reflect your brand as much as the email message itself.
SEGMENTATION
Breaking an audience into distinct, more manageable segments that
are likely to behave in a similar manner has long been a fundamental
principle of marketing. Email enables some incredible segmentation
power, as well as the ability to truly take advantage of small
audience segments that might otherwise be financially difficult to
communicate with.
Variable content: Are you providing different segments
with different content? Variable content will provide more relevancy
and stronger actionable items.
Gathering additional information: Do you have strategies for gathering more data? After you gain credibility, try asking for a few small bits of information within your email messages.
COMPLIANCE
Regulations are changing every day in the email world. With so
many different areas of technical and marketing compliance, you need
to revisit your email initiatives and audit them for
compliance.
Can Spam: Are you aware of CAN SPAM regulation and
confident you have all of the pieces in place?
Privacy policy: Have you reviewed your privacy policy for accuracy? Are you confident it is up to date? Has it been audited by legal counsel?
METRICS
Email marketing creates many specific data points that can be
used to gain insight. Understanding what you are capturing and
putting that data to it's best use can result in continuous success
and provide knowledge about your audiences.
Conversions: Are you looking "beyond the click" at
conversions within your Web site? Conversions could be actual
purchases, contact forms, or anything that is a "valuable action" for
your organization.
Long-term trends: Are you looking at message "cycles" over longer periods of time? Often, looking at longer-term trends can give you a different perspective than specific and individual message results.
TESTING
Because of the immediacy of email data, testing should become an
intregal part of your email efforts. Knowing what to test, how to
test it and what to glean from the results will make your email
initiatives perform to their fullest.
Creative: Do you test different styles of messages with
various offers and graphic treatments?
Content: Do you test messages with different content and
content types to gain insight on what your recipients are responding
to?
Landing pages: Do you create and direct your audience to different landing pages and review what destinations performed the best? Creatively testing where the click takes them and what that looks and acts like can give you considerable insight.
Use this checklist as the cornerstone of your email efforts. If
you can address each of these areas with detail and certainty, you're
well ahead of the curve. If not, you could see dramatic improvements
by addressing items in the checklist that are not currently a part of
your email initiatives. You can download our corresponding white
paper, The Strategic Checklist for Email Success, as a guide.
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