Scott Design

I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Stu Carty at Constant Contact last week and he did a great job of laying out the best practices in e-mail marketing. Stu first defined the basic goal of e-mail marketing: Deliver professional e-mail communications, to an interested audience, containing information they find relevant, timely, and valuable, and that conform to best practices and anti-spam laws.

Following is a summary of all the great information Stu shared, which you can read all about in his full presentation.

1. Connect: Build good, permission-based e-mail lists

In order for you to legally use an e-mail list, it must be filled with customers with whom you already have a relationship. There are some great ways to build your contact list:

• collect e-mail addresses at events, meetings, trade shows
• get sign ups on your website and social networks
• ask for e-mail addresses in person or on the phone
• ask customers to sign up at a retail location
• add e-mail addresses of your colleagues and business associates
• include all of your past and current customers

Although you can legally buy or sell a list of e-mail addresses, it is illegal to use it to send e-mails! If you want to reach out to new customers that you’ve never met, you can use direct mail, advertising, web marketing, telemarketing, and event marketing—not e-mail marketing.

2. Inform: Create and send targeted e-mail campaigns

You should create a master calendar with all the e-mails you plan on sending. There are three main types of e-mails you should consider adding to your e-mail marketing calendar:

• Newsletters—monthly or quarterly e-mails featuring educational content
• Promotions—bi-weekly or monthly e-mails featuring promotional content, offers, coupons
• Announcements—periodical e-mails, depending on content, which usually includes targeted messages about invitations, new products, or special events

When building your e-mails, consider everything that will help your e-mail get past spam filters, get opened by the recipient, and cause them to click on your links:

• Design or select a clean, well-designed template that represents your company and brand
• Use a real person’s name in the “from” line
• Write an honest, straightforward, simple “subject” line
• Catch the reader’s attention in the first lines of the body of the message
• Keep it short and simple—include 2 to 3 newsworthy topics only

For more information on creating e-mails that work, read Getting your HTML e-mails delivered, Getting your HTML e-mails opened, and Getting your HTML e-mails read, Two little words: Subject Lines, and Watch your language in your e-mails!

3. Grow: Evaluate results and refine the process

Creating a robust e-mail marketing program is an ongoing process. You should be sure to analyze every e-mail you send out to find out what works with your audience, and what doesn’t.

Most e-mail service providers offer analytics on each of your campaigns, including information on who did and didn’t receive your e-mail, who opened the e-mail, which links they clicked, and more. You should use this information to find out which types of information are most interesting to your readers.

If your readers are divided on what they like, consider splitting your list into two or more lists, each with e-mails targeted to that list. Remember, your goal is to deliver information your recipients find relevant, timely, and valuable.

A few e-mail stats (be sure to test for your particular situation):

• Average open rates = 15-20% (For large companies, this number falls to 10%)
• Expect 1 person to click on “spam” for every 1,000 e-mails you send
• Include 3 or fewer links in one e-mail
• Use 5 or fewer graphics in one e-mail
• Best days to send e-mails: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
• Best time to send e-mails: 10 am to 3 pm

Do you have any best practices you’d add to this list? Let me know in the comments section.

Tags: B2B marketing, e-mail, e-mail design, Marketing, online marketing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Marketing . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.