8 Steps To Email Marketing Success

24/06/09

By Richard Wright, Marketing manager, Epsilon International EMEA

The nature of email marketing has changed enormously over the past few years. No longer just a tool to drive short term sales, email is a highly-valued tool to develop and maintain long-term customer relationships through an ever-growing variety of devices and formats from fixed line PCs and mobile laptops to iPhones and Blackberrys.

With these technological developments, businesses developing their email marketing might want to consider these eight key points:

1) List Hygiene - It is important to work closely with providers of acquisition data to determine their opt-in policies and quality of...

...their list, to prevent potential blacklisting. Retaining information on the age of the list, and when it was last emailed are also crucial both to prevent lists from becoming cluttered with invalid email addresses that would increase bouncebacks as well as to reduce the risk of being blacklisted by ISPs.

2) Blacklisting - Maintaining a good reputation is vital to mitigating the risk of being blacklisted. Clear customer expectations of what they will receive and how often should be set on all registration pages. The unsubscribe process should be clear, easy and fail-safe. Both of these practices will significantly reduce complaint rates and the risk of being reported as spam. Good, strong ISP Relations are also a key element to reduce potential blacklisting.

3) Subject line length - Research has shown that most consumers base their decision to open an email on the first 45 or so characters of its subject line. Word choice and word order are also key factors. "Shorter is better", although very targeted or niche audience emails can be exceptions to this rule. This is not just because time-poor consumers want subject lines that match their attention spans but... continued on page two >

 

 

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