Email Marketing Tips and Strategy: Dos and Don'ts

Permission-based email marketing is one of the best ways to build customer relationships and deliver a measurable return on your marketing dollar. It can be a key to higher conversion rates, greater customer satisfaction, and better monetization of existing customers -- if it is done well.

With nearly a decade of experience with thousands of customers, Savicom offers the following list of email marketing "Dos" and "Don'ts" to help you maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, and to help avoid some common pitfalls:

DO:

• Promote your email publications on your web site and gather subscriptions to build a qualified prospect list.
• Be clear to your recipients when they subscribe about the content and frequency of your mailings, and give recipients the control to choose the type of mailings they want to receive.
• Promote email subscriptions with transactions, and store transaction information in your email database. This will allow you to send relevant, targeted messages to your customer base, both to keep your customers informed so they get the most from your products and services, and to remarket with other offerings.
• Send email regularly to customers and prospects, and keep your organization "front of mind".
• Include relevant informational content in your emails as well as offers. Adding real value to your content builds trust with your recipients, and keeps recipients interested in your mailings. This translates to reduced list churn and higher conversion rates for your offers.
• Use open, click-through, and conversion tracking and reporting to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns, and continually adapt your email marketing campaigns accordingly.
• Use a 'forward to a friend" feature to increase subscriptions and conversions through pass-alongs.
• Segment and target your email list, and customize mailings to match your recipients' interests. This will minimize unsubscribes as irrelevant messages increase list churn. Controlling list churn is crucial to preserving the value of the database that your organization has invested to build.
• Preview and test your messages before sending.
• Make sure to process removal requests in a timely fashion.

DON'T:

• Fall for "too good to be true" offers. If a company claims they can send your message to 10 Million "opt-in" recipients for a low cost, be very skeptical. Most likely the recipients are not opt-in, and most of your messages will end up in spam filters, bulk email folders, or worse -- in the hands of your ISP's network administrator, who can and will take a company's web site down if they are seen sending unsolicited email.
• Buy a CD containing email addresses and try to send with them. Not only will your response likely be disappointing, it could also cause your ISP to disconnect you from the internet entirely.
• Use an email service provider without a strict anti-spam policy. Sending mail through a provider which doesn't keep spammers off their network will likely result in your messages being widely blocked or discarded simply because many ISPs don't have the resources to separate good mail from bad.
• Use ALL CAPS, $$$ signs, !!!'s or overuse the word "Free". Such gimmicks will not only reduce your conversion rates and increase your list churn, they will also reduce your overall deliverability as many spam filters automatically discard messages with this type of content.

Using these tips and strategies will give your messages maximum exposure and effectiveness, resulting in a successful email marketing program.