Better Late Than Never: New Year’s Resolutions for E-mail Marketers

Sure, by the Gregorian calendar we’re a month late with the new year’s resolutions... but according to the Chinese calendar we’ve got two more weeks till the new year. Regardless, for something as vital to your business as e-mail, it’s never too late (or too early) to resolve to do better. With that in mind, we asked industry leaders for their suggestions as to what marketers should strive to improve in the year ahead.

Greg Cangialosi, CEO of Blue Sky Factory, a Baltimore-based e-mail service provider.

If e-mail marketers make one resolution in 2010, it should be to incorporate social sharing into their e-mail programs. With e-mail service providers offering features like share-with-your-network (SWYN) and share-to-social, it’s easier than ever for marketers to integrate e-mail and social media. By allowing subscribers to share e-mails with their social networks—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.—marketers can leverage their subscribers’ networks of influence, making the message more powerful and effective. It will extend the e-mail’s reach, build the e-mail database, and allow marketers to pinpoint influential brand ambassadors. This is the year of social acceleration, so marketers need to provide shareable content, incentivize their subscribers to share, review the metrics, then test.

Andrew Paul, CEO of Boca Networks, a web marketing solutions provider based in Boynton Beach, FL.

The biggest mistake most e-mail marketers make is not choosing their subject lines wisely. A good subject line can make or break your e-mail campaign. Using a spammy subject line will get your message mistaken as spam and cause your e-mail to end up in the junk folder or to be deleted before it is even opened. Not only must subject lines be informative, eye-catching, and brief, but they must also assure recipients that they come from a trusted source.

The easiest way to find spammy subject lines is to patrol your inbox and junk folder to see what spammers are using for subject lines and message content, then steer clear of these in your own copy. If it's a particular hot-button word, use it only in message content, not in the subject line.

Kelly Lorenz, e-mail marketing strategist at Durham, NC-based solutions provider Bronto Software.

I believe one of the resolutions for 2010 should be to take a hard look at your e-mail list. First, much like the word "blast," perhaps the terminology is the first step in rebuilding perceptions around your subscribers. It's important that marketers begin to see their subscribers as part of a community and not just a cold "list" of names.

Beyond just rethinking the naming convention, as ISPs start to measure marketers more and more by engagement metrics, it will become of the utmost importance to provide timely, targeted, relevant information to permission-based subscribers. Your e-mail "list" is a vital piece of your company's customer base and revenue. Those on the list can be your brand advocates, new converts, undecideds, and so on. If you don't know where each and every one of your subscribers fits on that list or in your e-mail community, you are leaving a huge chunk of potential revenue and customer relationships on the table—and now with the engagement-based deliverability model, you are potentially hurting your relationship with brand advocates if you can't reach their inbox.

Scott Hardigree, CEO, Indiemark, an Orlando, FL-based e-mail marketing agency.

1) Deliverability will be among the top challenges in 2010. Permission is not enough; list engagement is the key to deliverability this year.

2) E-mail is the glue that holds digital media together. So you have no business investing in social media until you have your e-mail house in order.

3) Let the customer drive. From the onset and through preference centers let your customers dictate how much and what sort of e-mail they want to receive.

Blaine Mathieu, CMO, Lyris, a provider of online marketing solutions based in Emeryville, CA.

E-mail marketers are now involved in a wealth of other marketing channels such as social media, but many are struggling to manage and integrate these disparate channels. In learning to embrace new, interactive channels, marketers will need to start to integrate multiple touch points and initiatives to increase their chances of success. E-mail marketers are already, to a varying degree, involved in virtually all aspects of online marketing. The desire to integrate these efforts is real—and now is the time to make it happen!

Additionally, we can expect the lines between online channels to continue to blur. This will extend messages to wider, more-targeted audiences and engage them more meaningfully, on their timetable and in the medium they prefer. This integration and orchestration of online channels is what we refer to as tri-messaging. Tri-messaging is not a fad but instead an integrated marketing best practice for 2010 that facilitates conversations, commerce, and loyalty that can be managed, measured, and monetized.

Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations at Atlanta-based Silverpop, a provider of engagement marketing solutions.

The biggest threat to e-mail's future comes from marketers and/or their managers who simply send more e-mail, rather than more-relevant e-mail, to try to achieve business goals. I would like marketers to resolve in 2010 to reject this mindset and instead send more meaningful email, using these techniques:

* segmentation based on data collected from customers and subscribers, at opt-in and throughout the relationship;

* triggered messaging based on customer or subscriber behavior, integrating customer/subscriber actions and click-stream and purchase data; and

* personalized messages that incorporate this implicit and explicit data, resulting in highly personalized messages that reflect the customer/subscriber's interests, preferences, demographic data, purchase history, and relationship to the sender.

Kara Trivunovic, senior director, strategic services for StrongMail, an online marketing solutions provider based in Redwood City, CA.

Marketers should really work toward effectively engaging their subscriber base this year. Go beyond relevance—what difference does it make if the message is relevant if it isn’t delivered in an engaging wrapper? This is an effort to not only provide the recipients information and content that resonates with them, but to really provide an e-mail experience that is captivating in an ongoing capacity. Achieving engagement requires some serious planning on the marketers’ part. All the same, engagement is this year’s “relevance”!

Michelle Eichner, vice president of product marketing for Waltham, MA-based Unica, a provider of interactive marketing solutions.

1) Maximize your mobile e-mail marketing impact. Make sure your templates are designed to sell on the small screen and tap into the benefits of a new consumer e-mail experience that is always on, and on the go. For example, there is a huge opportunity for retailers to drive measurable offline sales by sending highly relevant, timely, and geo-targeted e-mail offers and coupons directly to customer inboxes.

2) Evolve and survive. What we are seeing on the deliverability front is nothing less than "deliverability Darwinism." ISP spam-filtering technologies and policies are rooting out the bad senders and forcing the good senders to become even better. With the ISPs looking for positive signs of subscriber engagement, marketers need to limit the number of mailings to inactive segments of their lists and monitor what's going on in terms of deliverability and folder placement at the customer level.

3) Be creative. It’s not just a crowded inbox that marketers have to contend with anymore; social networking Web sites, mobile apps, and a host of other media and platforms are all competing for your customer's attention. Standing out in the crowd is tougher but also more important than ever before if you want to run an effective e-mail marketing program.