Nucleus - Marketing and Design Newsletter

So now is as good a time as any for a quick refresher on a few the email marketing basics:

• Have an Email Marketing Plan
• Make sure your email strategies align with your business objectives
• Know your audience—an imperative with any marketing communication—online or off
• Determine meaningful metrics – sign-ups to your newsletters, online sales, etc.

Secure Permission
The key to email marketing success is to get people to actually want to receive your mailings. By having people sign-up to receive mailings, you have effectively secured their permission. Don’t abuse the privilege. And definitely make it worth their while.

Test, Test, Test
One advantage of email marketing is that it affords you the opportunity to test your creative cost-effectively and with relative ease. Commonly tested components include:

• Subject lines
• Headlines
• Offers and incentives

Track Your Results
You’ve determined your target, crafted your call-to-action, and launched your email missive into the ether. Now don’t forget to track your results. These will determine the success of your current campaign and help shape future ones.

Here are just a few easy, albeit important metrics to monitor:

• Click-thru rates – The number of recipient’s who click on a link
• Unsubscribes – The total number of subscribers that have requested not to receive future emails
• Soft and hard bounces – Hard bounces are a “permanent” failed delivery such as an invalid address. Soft bounces are a temporary delivery failure such as a full in-box

Email marketing may not seem as slick and shiny as tomorrow’s next, best Web 2.0 social media spectacle, but it still deserves a place in your marketing mix.