Building a Foundation for Effective Email Campaigns

23/06/11

By Michael Thompson, Director, Deliverability and ISP Relations, ClickSquared

Effective email campaigns require two critical elements: good list hygiene and an understanding of customer preferences. These elements form the foundation for a successful email program. Below are some quick tips for building and maintaining a good email list and recommendations on how to capture customer preferences so that you’re able to deliver relevant and effective email marketing messages to your audience.

Good List Hygiene

Regardless of how well an email is crafted, if it’s not making it to the inbox, it has no impact. Current statistics show that more than 25% of email...

...addresses churn per year. Therefore, no matter how clean your initial list, it is imperative that you have a process in place that manages and removes bounce-backs and inactive addresses.

Are your email addresses accurate? Have they been updated? Are your prospects and customers still receiving communications at their listed email addresses? If not, ISPs will notice that you consistently send messages to bad addresses. Left unmanaged, this will have a direct impact on your organization's ability to deliver email to ANY customer’s inbox. Moreover, if a significant percentage of your emails are not being delivered, your marketing ROI will be negatively impacted; the CPM rate you pay to your ESP doesn’t discern between delivered and undelivered email.


There are a number of steps you can take to ensure your list is clean and up-to-date:


- Send a triggered opt-in confirmation email while collecting addresses. This confirms that the address is active, and gives you the opportunity to explain what communications the recipient should expect to receive from you.


- Develop a strategy to remove inactive and/or invalid addresses that bounce from your database. ISPs are increasingly measuring engagement, i.e., how many people read or click on your emails.... continued on page two >

 

 

Advertisement

Advertisement