Checklist:

1. Make sure you have a clearly stated frequency policy on your sign-up page.  “Occasional” means different things to everyone.  You’re best bet is to be specific.
2. Have the consultant test days of the week and hours of the day to identify the best open and click through rate for your mailings.
3. Have the consultant review the unsubscribe vs. new subscriber rate.  If it’s regularly increasing, you may be fine with the unsubscribe rate.
4. Clearly tell the consultant how you’d like your statistics.  Do you want PowerPoint?  Excel spreadsheet?  Charts?  Conclusions or just raw data?

Prior posts in this series:

Working with Email Consultants Part 1

Working with Email Consultants Part 2

This time, we will discuss the receivers of your emails. Whether you’re a brick and mortar or virtual, your customers have one thing in common: they wanted to buy what you had.  So take a moment to think about what you are selling.

Let’s say for example you’re selling dairy products.  More specifically, organic dairy products that can only be purchased in health food stores.  Ok, you can figure out that your customer is someone who cares about their health, and is willing to pay a premium for that peace of mind.

But, Lara, you’re asking, what if I’m selling a variety of things? Or what if they want my products for a variety of reasons?

This is where segmenting comes into play!

Perhaps you know some people want organic dairy for their children.  You can send them a one off advert for your new frozen yogurt pop.  Probably a coupon would help.

And even better, some suggested placers in their area where they could redeem it.

So how do you learn all of this information?

Well, you could set up a few different newsletters and see which are the most popular.  And then send the targeted coupons to that distribution list.

More importantly, this is something you should be capturing as soon as possible.  Name, email address, gender, zip code.  The more information you can get up front, the better your targeting will be.

You will have far better results if you send a mailing to 10 people that you can say with confidence will want your product then you would blasting it out to 10,000 people who won’t read it.  Worse, some may unsubscribe because of it, and you dilute your effectiveness.

Now, what does this have to do with a consultant.  Well, if you know exactly to whom you’re emailing, you can tell your consultant to generate a mailing segment with specified demographics.    Knowing who your customer is will also help the copywriter come up with a few solid subject lines that can be split tested.  And it will help your graphic designer choose what to put in the creative.  (i.e. photos of men vs. women, adults vs. children, etc.)

And here’s the checklist:

1) Have you been capturing demographic data?  If not, start a plan to capture it.

2) Who is your average customer.  What are they going to want to see and hear from you?

3) Work with the consultant for creating a solid test segment, copy, and creative.

4) Test, Test, Test.

Next time, we’ll talk about the frequency of your mailings.

Prior Posts in the Series
Working with Email Consultants Part 1

Should you outsource. Of course you know what I’m going to say. It Depends.

Outsourcing the email marketing ads is a good idea of you don’t have the staff in house for designing the creative, creating the mailing segment, testing, tweaking and sending. This frees you up to analyze your client base to create a more focused message, and then pass off that message and specifications, review the tests, give the final approval, and then see how well the campaign fared.

Outsourcing newsletters could be a good idea if no one enjoys writing the copy or if you have a few different departments, and you outsource the editing. Newsletters are different then ads in that you’re having a personal conversation with your client. Your business’ voice should come through clearly. If you have a warm and friendly knitting store, you want to ensure that the newsletter has warm language, beautiful images, and avoid cold bullet lists.

So, this part’s checklist is:

1. Decide what do you want to outsource. Newsletters or one offs?

2. Decide if you have the extended staff to handle any parts of this mailing.

3. Write up what your goal is. Clearly decide what you want to happen. Do you want someone to gather up information from 3 areas and create a professional sounding newsletter twice a month? Do you want a graphic artist on call to design coupons once a month?

4. Research who your customer is. And we’ll talk about this more next time.

Thanks for reading!

Recently, there were headlines that open rates are dropping in 2007 (From DMNews) which in a nutshell says that the trend is decreasing open rates from 16.11% to 13.98%.

The article said that click rates stayed the same, but they decreased from 3.18% to 2.9%

So, are people getting more cynical? Are email spam filters getting more restrictive and therefore, they’re not even seeing the emails? Have we gotten bombarded by useless newsletters that only contain requests for more money or ads that we just ignore them?

Here’s more to chew on. DMNews also had an interesting article on e-mail marketingas being a rising star. In a nutshell, the author Jordan Ayan feels that e-mail marketin gplans should be recession proof. And he’s correct.

If you have a solid list of people who opted in to receive your information, and you’re regularly providing useful and pertinent information, they’re going to open your emails, and click through to get more details for the snippets that caught their attention. And if they feel they have a relationship with you, then they’re going to be open to receiving ads and requests to purchase.

And to conclude, target, target, target.

I’m helping keep them focused on quality while still making solid revenue ROI. And there’s the rub. Companies will need to find a way of making money while sending out and making accessible useful information, otherwise, they’ll stop doing it. Or they’ll turn everything into a pay only model.

My goal with this site is to provide guidance in this crazy, wild world of online marketing.  I’ll tell you what worked, what didn’t, what email program you should use, and how you can master email marketing strategies.  I will start a podcast soon so it can become a conversation between us.  I look forward to your comments which will help make it truly a dialog.

Thank you and Welcome!