Good Monday morning, marketers! Let’s get the work week off to a productive start with a few news items from the world of email marketing.
Driving revenue with email marketing
Writing for Marketing Land, columnist Mary Wallace looks at how the marketing function is evolving in organizations and offers suggestions for email marketers to ensure that their efforts are supporting this strategic shift. “Marketing organizations are no longer measured on customer acquisition and brand awareness,” she writes. “Rather, according to a report from The Economist Intelligence Unit, they are evaluated based on their impact on revenue and customer engagement.” She offers “six keys for leveraging technology and data that, when coupled with high-quality content, will ensure your email marketing efforts drive revenue.” They include creating strong, personalized content; determining optimal email frequency; and ensuring key data is available for segmentation.
Reputation scoring a key to delivery success
Klint Finley, writing for Wired, goes behind the scenes at Mailchimp to see how the service’s focus on reputation scoring ensures that most of the more than one billion (yes that is “billion” with a “b”) emails it sends every day stay out of recipients’ spam folders. “Most of today’s biggest email services, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook.com, use reputation scoring to rank the likely spamminess of a server that’s sending an email. Think of it as a sort of credit rating for email senders,” Finley writes. “Reputation scoring is a big part of how email providers keep your inbox from completely overflowing with spam. It also helps them protect you from phishing scams and malware. But these little-known barriers also make it much harder for just anyone to send group emails, even in small amounts.”
The six most effective e-commerce email tactics
Marketing Profs’ Ayaz Nanji reports on the results of a recent survey indicating that e-commerce marketers consider sending subscribers exclusive offers to be their most effective email tactic. Other tactics they deem effective include cart-recovery emails, product-status-change emails, offers in transactional emails, birthday/reminder emails and email address collection at registration. The survey of 300 marketers who work for e-commerce companies around the world was conducted by the commerce marketing automation company Bronto.
The importance of clean subscriber lists
Writing on the Return Path blog, Joanna Roberts urges email marketers to pay close attention to the cleanliness of their email subscriber lists. “Maintaining a clean subscriber list is so important to the success of an email campaign, as the quality of your list can determine whether your email lands in the inbox or spam folder, or gets outright blocked by the mailbox provider,” she writes. She advises that email subscriber lists be free of spam traps (email addresses that don’t belong to active users and are used to identify both spammers and senders with poor data quality practices), unengaged subscribers, and unknown users. “As the golden rule of email marketing states, it’s important to send timely, relevant emails to people who want to receive them. Sending to people that want to receive your emails means that you are working with an opted in list of valid, engaged subscribers, and are regularly cleaning your list to ensure it stays this way,” she writes.