Blog

We are over a month into the new year and if you haven’t done so already, you should carefully evaluate your email marketing practices and ensure you are making the most out of your campaigns.  I found George Bilbrey’s article “Why 2010 Could Be A Bad Year For ‘Worst Practice’ Marketers”, to be useful for any email marketer and I have summarized the four points Bilbrey makes to help decrease SPAM complaints and increase your response rates in 2010.

1) Make sure your subscribers know what they are signing up for.  Customers who are going as far as to sign up for something on your website are most likely loyal or potential customers who are looking for additional information.  Newsletters will provide extreme value for both customers and companies if treated properly.  Specify what kind of newsletters or offers your subscribers will be receiving and how frequently they will be sent.  Set up the proper expectations and you’ll see higher open and conversion rates.

2) Require an explicit action to sign up for eNewsletters.  Do not have pre-checked checkboxes in your forms for receiving emails. Intentionally or not, you do not want to trick your customers into signing up for something they don’t want.  Of course you want to grow your database, but only with people who opt-in to receive your emails. It’s a waste of time and money to send to people who are just going to delete your email or mark it as SPAM, which will result in hurting your overall sending reputation.

3) Target your messages.  There are many ways to target your messages; however, one method we have found to be extremely successful is targeting by Interests.  For example, when signing up for eNewsletters on the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development’s website, you can select which interest categories you would like to receive emails about i.e. Music and Arts, Nature and Outdoors, or History and Heritage.  By creating emails with dynamic code or segmenting your database, subscribers only receive the information they are interested in and are more likely to open and read your emails.  Make it worth their time.

4) High conversion rates are more important than the size of your database.  No matter the size of your database, it is important to routinely clean up your database.  For example, remove members who haven’t opened any of your emails within a year.  Chances are, if they are not receiving your emails (for whatever reason) for a year, they won’t start now.  Once you get rid of the “bad” emails, you’ll be left with those who legitimately opted in and are actively reading your emails - this will improve your response rates.  There are; however, those inactive subscribers who are not opening emails but haven’t yet unsubscribed.  In this case, you could run a “re-engaging” campaign to these inactive subscribers and offer an incentive such as contest, product giveaway, or a friendly reminder of the value of your company’s emails.

Be sure to continuously update your strategy and database based on best-practices and trends, and always provide your customers with added value that is informative and relevant.

• 
• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• TwitThis