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Eight Email Marketing Improvements for ‘08
The holidays are over and employees are excited
about the possibilities for the New Year. Each
year you make New Year's resolutions to improve
your life. This year, why not improve your email
marketing with these eight helpful hints:
- Clean up your
lists – The beginning of the year
is a good time to go through your database and
just make sure you clean things up. All those
failed emails and unsubscribed records that
are still in the customer file should be purged.
There is no need to keep and maintain useless
addresses. If the records must be kept, move
them to a separate table or database somewhere
else.
- Segment your
list – Sending smaller highly targeted
email campaigns typically results in higher
ROI. Whether you currently segment the email
addresses in your list or not, there is always
more segmenting that can be done. Segmenting
can be based on location, previous purchases,
domain name, or anything else that would allow
you to identify additional message personalization
opportunities.
- Update ancillary
email messages – Your main email marketing
messages may be clean and updated, but other
areas might be lacking additional punch. Add
some marketing information and calls to action
on your ancillary email communications like
sales confirmations, support issue tracking,
and other email correspondence. Each time you
connect to your customer, make the most of it.
- Personalize
more – The more email messages you
send, the more data you have on your customer.
Use it to your advantage by personalizing more.
Try to start a conversation with customers,
as though you were speaking to them one-on-one.
Avoid using a "no-reply" email address in your
email messages, and if someone does reply, answer
the email.
- Update your
mail servers – ISPs, network gurus
and spam police are continually updating and
making improvements to their servers and directories.
Make sure that your email servers are updated
and compliant with as many of the new technologies
as possible. Some of the new technologies to
investigate are SPF (Sender Policy Framework),
DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail), and other
authentication processes. Make sure your DNS
(Domain Name System) and MX (Mail Exchange)
settings are also resolving correctly.
- Update your
messages – Review your email messages,
especially the ones you send out automatically
on a routine basis. Make sure they are not loaded
with outdated material or old dates. Over time,
some of these messages may get outdated without
anyone being aware. The start of the year is
a good time to refresh your memory on all the
email messages that are leaving your server.
- Eliminate
old campaigns – Email campaigns can
go stale if not kept fresh and up to date. If
some of the campaigns in your list are no longer
used, get rid of them. Make sure that there
are no more write backs occurring for those
campaigns and simply delete them from your list.
This will not only free up space on the Campaign
Enterprise database, it makes campaign management
much easier.
- Participate
in best practices workshops and webinars
– The only way to stay abreast of new
developments and standards is to participate
in email marketing workshops and seminars. By
participating, you can provide input on the
standards and rules that are implemented and
hopefully, drive the direction of the debate.
Consider it a networking or marketing opportunity
as well as a way to ensure email marketing best
practices are defined and followed.
By working together to maintain a community
of legitimate email marketers we can affect change
in the way we are treated when sending out email
messages. Make it a point this year to stay abreast
of email marketing trends and issues, and adopt
them as they appear. The only way to separate
legitimate bulk email marketers from the spammers
is to isolate spam-like behavior and avoid it.
Let's make 2008 the beginning of the end for spammers
by conducting email marketing the right way. --
Arial Software
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