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10 Commandments of email marketing

Email marketing was once the Promised Land for marketing professionals... and to a certain extent it still is. But not for everyone. So much email marketing that is executed today is passive at best, damaging at worst. Despite belief, no single email recommendation on its own will lead you to your marketing nirvana. Yet the sum of many strategies, all put in place at once, will certainly get you close. And so, we give you our top recommendations for enhancing your email marketing program.

1. Be Relevant

Fact: Email was developed for one-to-one communication and not a mass broadcast system. We come across so many companies, who, from an original list of 1,000’s of opt-in subscribers, now struggle to even get 10% open rates. So were did they go wrong? Quite simply, they did not give email, as a marketing channel, the respect it deserves. Nor did they afford this respect to their subscribers. All too often, they sent irrelevant, heavily sales focused content that wasted people’s time, usually way too frequently. And eventually, their customers began to switch off.

If declining response rates and increasing unsubscribe rates are plaguing your email campaigns, you’re certainly not alone. With email traffic higher than it has ever been, customers are demanding more from the email communications they receive. And if you can’t deliver what they want – relevant and engaging content – they will simply turn their backs on you. So, ensure that your email communications are relevant. Build better profiles of your customers using past indicators to determine future patterns and life-cycle stages. If you take the time to understand your customers, you will know exactly what they want to know about you.

2. Personalise

It has been well documented across a numerous forums and email marketing sites that personalisation within email marketing is underutilised, if not lacking all together. Non-personalised emails would be fine if it was the only one landing in your target’s email inbox. However, the reality is, it will be amongst potentially hundreds on any given day. As I write this article I have 173 from today alone! Emails that utilise personalisation the most will also resonate with your clients and prospects the most. Subject lines, names, account managers, dates, job titles, previously purchased products, birthdates or star signs, tailored offers, whatever it may be, will all make your email stand out in the inbox and cut through in both B2B and B2C markets.

It’s also important to remember that the point of personalisation is not to show off our knowledge of the customer by including some of their details in an email. Nor is it to show off our ability to incorporate such information in the message. It is an opportunity to validate our marketing endeavours. Our efforts should demonstrate we know and understand enough about the recipient and their interests to have deduced that our offering is relevant to them and that the offering has not been indiscriminately blasted to the entire database.

3. Test

Email has so many benefits when compared with traditional channels such as DM. One of the biggest benefits affords you the ability to test your creative and messaging at a comparatively low cost in real time. Could you imagine doing the same with a DM piece or outdoor ad program? Forget about it. Email marketing is not an exact science, but testing variations of copy, images, subject lines, broadcast times and the like, will arm you with valuable knowledge of what works and what works even better. Don’t be frustrated by a seemingly incremental change in response – it is still a step in the right direction. And for some, an extra one percent increase in a click-through rate for example, could have a big effect on your overall ROI.

It also pays to test a single key element at a time, rather than second guessing. Having said all this, don’t get too caught up in process-driven metrics such as your open rates and click through rates. You also need to focus on the cost per lead of each email and ultimately, conversion rates. Remember; email marketing is a continuum, not a single point in time. It cannot be deemed a success or failure by any single execution. It’s a process requiring constant analysis of customer data to determine aspects that succeeded and those that failed.

4. Maintain and grow your list

Maintaining, let alone growing our email list/database, can be the single most time consuming aspect of email marketing. It’s by no means an easy job with list decay having a major impact on the marketing efforts of businesses. Maintaining your database really needs someone completely dedicated to the task. The key to maintaining your database is consistency. Let it slip for a week or two and you’ll find it hard to recover. In particular, you will need to monitor your bounces and registrations. At a more advanced level, you should also be monitoring your non-responders. Re-engaging your non-responders (contacts that receive your communications but don’t open or click through to your website) can be a very worth while exercise. If nothing else, by asking them why they are no longer taking an interest, you will gain some very honest and valuable feedback.

Similarly, growing your email list should be a key objective to your email marketing program. Like maintenance, no single action will give you large and continued growth of your email list. You will need to have several strategies in place to make sure you maximise the number of individuals opting in to your email communications.

5. Copy before creative

Email is a great platform for showing off creative talents, but often the core messages can get overwhelmed and lost amongst misguided imagination. The email creative should always support the product message and business objectives. Email is not about design, but rather its content – as it was always intended. And please, keep your emails short and punchy and reduce the clutter! Your recipients will be able to scan the information a lot more easily. You should also be mindful when using images of keeping the file size reasonable so the email loads quickly.

Here, we are touching on the whole HTML vs Plain-text debate and there are arguments for both, but I won’t go there for now – we could be here all day! What I will say though is this... some of the best campaigns we have ever been involved with and have returned the best ROI, have been plain-text emails. Nothing fancy, just a highly relevant and personalised email with a very compelling offer. If in doubt, why not test it yourself?

6. Sort out deliverability issues

Deliverability of email is a very hot topic at the moment in marketing circles. Essentially, it refers to anything that affects your email appearing in front of your intended recipients. A common misconception is that email doesn’t get through or is filtered because it contains words such as ‘free’ in the subject line or body copy of the email. ‘Free’ on its own won’t get your email blocked. Rather, it is a combination of elements within the email including HTML code, copy and the use of images that may get a message filtered. ‘White listing’ or including ‘safe sender’ instructions for your subscribers is now common practice across the industry.

With recent additions to Outlook and similar email client programs, you need to be mindful of your audience and the technology they use to view your email communications. Always send pre-campaign test messages to uncover delivery problems before sending the actual message to recipients. Again, you will never be able to cure problems in a single go, however, testing your email messages on different platforms such as PC and Macintosh as well as different email clients such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, Eudora AOL, and web versions like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail will help to correct many potential problems.

7. Know your email legislation

Although legislation surrounding email marketing has been in force for some time now, many marketers are still unclear as to what they can and can’t do when it comes to marketing via email in the UK. There are also some differences you need to be aware of when it comes to B2B and B2C dos and don’ts. Having said this, permission-based email and in particular, the double opt-in process, has become standard practice across the industry. So it’s probably a good time to review your permission practices right across your company’s email activity and customer contact points including your website.

8. Get frequency right

Achieving the optimum frequency of your email communications depends on a number of factors. You need to spend time on mapping out all your email communications to give you a clearer picture. And for larger companies, make sure that divisions and departments are coordinated. The most important thing to remember in answering the frequency question is – always put relevancy before frequency when it comes to all email communications. Better even still, stop playing the guessing game with your subscribers and ask customers directly what frequency they would prefer at the time of subscribing and opting in.

Infrequency can also be a big problem. Think about it: You may have signed up for an email newsletter and updates from a website you researched or a website where you have already transacted. What happens if you don’t hear from them as often as you would have liked? In the time that has lapsed, you may grow disinterested, or worse, forget that you granted them permission to send you email communications in the first place. Infrequent messaging is a dangerous scenario for businesses and could lead to a big rise in unsubscribes and dramatically reduced response rates.

9. Integrate your email campaigns

There is no doubting the superior ROI that email delivers when compared to more traditional forms of marketing. However, in the last few years there has been a growing case for marketers to integrate aspects of their email communications with other channels – especially channels in the digital arena. Search, for example, is now a very popular and effective means to acquiring leads and hopefully, customers. However, if you don’t integrate your email marketing efforts with your search strategy, then you are throwing your search pounds down the drain. The inclusion of an email offer as a secondary objective to the search landing page be absolutely mandatory. Invite those visitors to opt in to a newsletter, download a case study or even a whitepaper – however, don’t ask them to give you too much. After all, you wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on a first date would you?

10. Subsidise your costs

In my experience, this still appears to be the most underutilised area of email newsletters – vendor and partner funding. How many of you are actively searching for vendor funding to put towards the production and delivery of your email newsletter? It may come as a surprise to some that many suppliers are often very willing, if not begging, to sponsor articles within your newsletter. And why not? You’re providing them with a very targeted vehicle that delivers a powerful message to a very valuable data list – yours! Beyond article sponsorship, you could also try the introduction of banners that have exclusive offers from suppliers for your readers. This will go a long way to building upon the loyalty you have already worked so hard to create.

Recently, ad networks have started to emerge in this area. These ad networks will actually sell advertising space on your email newsletters. The network provides advertising sales for email newsletter and list publishers, as well as ad placement services for advertisers interested in reaching targeted audiences via email newsletters and discussion lists. This is an area that looks set to grow and will no doubt help you to fund your email newsletter production costs in the future.