Wendy Boyce
I just ripped the cellophane off my newly redesigned DMNews magazine. I’m already happy with the newly resized format of the magazine, but what caught my attention was the E-Mail Marketing Guide 2010 Supplement that came with October’s issue. What a great piece for DMNews to include.
Whether you’ve dabbled in the email marketing space, or you are a proven expert, this supplement include page after page of tips and tricks, insights and things to think about to make your email campaigns even more successful. I’ve been doing email marketing for years, and recognize that the industry and technologies are always evolving.
DMNews 2010 Essential Guide to Email Marketing
Here are some of my favorite snippets form the E-mail Marketing Guide 2010:
- If you’re not a spammer, don’t act like one.1 We need to identify ourselves clearly in our email. Use the proper mix of graphics and text that will engage your audience. Know the basic elements of email authentication. When we lose sight of the fact that we are a legitimate email sender, we sometimes mask the relevance of an email by being too “salesy.”
- Get your search marketers and email marketers working together.2 Yes! Finally someone gets it! If your email marketing folks are not working with your search marketing folks, there is a breakdown in communication. Your search marketing team has a sound understanding of the types of language, keywords and phrases you should be using in your email campaigns. No… emails don’t get indexed by search engines, but readers do comprehend what they read. Fill them up with appropriate search terms – and create a well thought out, and keyword-optimized, subject line. When they land on their favorite search engine page, searching for something you provide, you’ll have planted that seed on how they might find it.
- Add strategies for localized email campaigns.3 This is great for the franchised businesses! Equip your local store managers/owners with the tools to promote local store events via email. Local store managers will know their community better than those sitting in a board room. Give those local leaders some leverage to impact sales at their local level.
- Multichannel data capture is essential to your email marketing success. 4 Could not have said it better myself! The point is, we send out campaigns, ideally to foster relationships with our customers, whether it’s through providing helpful information, incentives, product offers, downloads, or promotion of a brick-and-mortar storefront. At the end of the day, we do want to collect data out of our efforts, so we can continue to improve upon them. Email campaigns that don’t generate dialogue will lose steam, and future campaigns will be less effective. Speaking from experience, I know this to be true of campaigns I’ve run in the past.
- Include triggered responses to outperform typical marketing messages.5 Do organizations avoid triggered responses based on actions because they fear privacy invasion? Or it is because marketers don’t have access to the right tools? Triggered-Response campaigns can better promote your brand and cross-selling efforts. Remember, your readers have opted in. Sending a triggered response is not an invasion of privacy. Transactional responses, account alerts, shipping alerts and purchase confirmations are great examples of triggered responses.
- And finally… leverage social media with your messages. 6 Social media… do we really need to say more? Well, referral marketing is one example of how you can integrate social media into your email campaigns. Give your readers a simple method to share your offer or message with everyone they know. Expand your reach and build strong social ties.
I found useful insights on all 30 pages of this DMNews email marketing supplement, but I didn’t think it would be fair to give away the farm. Hopefully you’ve got a snapshot of where you can begin to look inside your organization to improve upon your email and multichannel messaging campaigns. (If not, you can always purchase the guide following the DMNews links below.)
Read more from DMNews on E-mail Marketing.
Resources:
2010 Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing (Available for Sale through DMNews)
- David Caciappo, emfluence “Marketing e-mails can prevail in an age polluted by spam.”
- George DiGuido, Zeta Interactive “Search and e-mail team up for syngergized marketing”
- Betsy Miller, Blueport Commerct “Local strategies add energy to e-mail marketing efforts.”
- Rusty Warner, Alterian “E-Mail creates a doorway for dialogue and data capture.”
- Kevin Mabley, Epsilon “Unlock transactional e-mails and boost corss-sell rates”
- Sam Cece, StrongMail “Leverage social media with the inbox for better returns”
About the Author:
Wendy Boyce is the Social Media & Marketing Manager at SIGMA Marketing Group, an integrated marketing analytics firm. Connect with Wendy on , Facebook or .
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