This post is intended to be a resource for those who, admittedly, know that they could be deriving more value from the email channel.  No matter if you decide to hire outside professionals, such as an email marketing agency, an email consultant or in-house talent; this guide will help you to assess and reevaluate your current email marketing efforts.

Let’s Look at the Numbers

Email has been the marketing workhorse for a decade, and that’s unlikely to change in the near future.  It allows targeting because it’s data driven. It drives direct sales. It builds relationships, loyalty and trust. It also supports sales through other direct and social channels:

• According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing generated an ROI of $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2008, that’s twice that of the first runner-up.
• A recent summary by MarketingSherpa states, “Those that see the effectiveness of their email programs diminishing are much more likely to have short-sighted organizational attitudes toward the tactic. Organizations with investment-oriented views of email reap the rewards.”
• The CMO Council‘s Marketing Outlook ’08 Report reviewed the plans and opinions of 650 marketers. Email marketing was the top target area for investment.
• In a 2008 survey of retailers, Shop.org stated that “E-mail is the most mentioned successful tactic overall”.

Handle Email Marketing In-house?

If you don’t have an existing agency relationship or do have sufficient in-house talent, consider this:

1. You (meaning you or your team) know your business; are you also well-versed in email marketing?
2. If yes, do you have time and energy to optimize the effort?
3. How does your integrated marketing and CRM compare against your competitors?
4. Does your email marketing drive sales, build loyalty, and reduce marketing costs?
5. Is your email program founded on research and/or historical data?
6. Does your in-house work save or cost you money?

Already Have an Expert?

If you already have a marketing agency or other outside help, ask yourself:

1. Do they specialize in email or are they “full service”?
2. Do they generate an ROI that’s in-line with the findings above?
3. Do they think about us without being prodded?
4. Do they understand our target market and business processes?
5. Have they explored and monetized all the options?
6. Is their work for you fresh, exciting, and reflective of best practices?

Pieces of the Email Marketing Equation

Email marketing can involve customer acquisition, lead nurturing, client reactivation and retention, and of course direct sales, which means that a host of processes and services are potentially involved, including:

• Strategy & Research
• Editorial & Promotional Planning
• Copy Writing & Content Development
• Design & Coding
• List Growth & Community Building
• List Segmentation & List Enhancement
• Behavioral & Customer Profiling
• Message Delivery & Deliverability Monitoring
• Cross-channel Integration
• Email Service Provider (ESP) or In-house Mailing Solution Evaluations
• Lead Nurturing & Direct/Up/Cross Sales
• Multivariate, A/B Testing & Program Optimization

If the list above encompasses more than you’re doing, this may be a strong indicator that you’re under-utilizing this lucrative channel. Perhaps it’s time for a fresh marketing partner or maybe you need to reallocate budgets and/or provide your in-house team with more training.

If you’ve (officially) determined that you need help, stay tuned. In the next installment we’ll discuss HOW to find and evaluate qualified talent that fits your unique needs and meets your budgetary restrictions.

Takeaway: So many companies struggle with their resources and don’t get to reach their potential. That’s where partnering with experts, particularly in the email marketing arena, be they in-house or outsourced, is often a great decision.

A new Ninja in the hive!

Topica Email Marketing!

The eMail Guide hive of Ninjas is buzzing with news that yet another email marketing Ninja has joined our ranks! Please welcome Topica Email Marketing!

It’s great to be able to welcome yet another email marketing Ninja to The eMail Guide! Make sure you check out Topica’s brand new Ninja listing! Topica is well known as a great email marketing solution for small to medium size buinesses!

You too can be an email marketing Ninja!

Here’s a snippet from Topica’s Ninja listing at The eMail Guide to give you an idea of what Topica is all about:

For more than a decade, Topica has been helping thousands of satisfied customers use email marketing to grow and improve their businesses – with no software required. Our pay-as-you-go online application allows you to:

• Grow your email list of subscribers with signup forms for your website.
• Create a professional eye-catching HTML newsletter and send it out to a targeted audience.
• Deliver your emails. Our service is backed by whitelisting, feedback loops and reputation monitoring.
• Manage multiple lists from one account. Topica is perfect for any size list.

At Topica we think it’s important to be there for you with resources and email marketing tips to help your email campaigns reach their goals. We can help you manage and grow your email list and we offer a hosted email database solution too!

Give us a call today or sign up for a no-risk free trail.
Experience the Topica Email Marketing soultion today!

The email marketing solution for small to medium size business!

We get a lot of referrals at Topica because our current clients love the personal service they get from our dedicated account managers!

For more than a decade, Topica has been helping thousands of satisfied customers use email marketing to grow and improve their businesses – with no software required. Our pay-as-you-go online application allows you to:

• Grow your email list of subscribers with signup forms for your website.
• Create a professional eye-catching HTML newsletter and send it out to a targeted audience.
• Deliver your emails. Our service is backed by whitelisting, feedback loops and reputation monitoring.
• Manage multiple lists from one account. Topica is perfect for any size list.

At Topica we think it’s important to be there for you with resources and email marketing tips to help your email campaigns reach their goals. We can help you manage and grow your email list and we offer a hosted email database solution too!

Give us a call today or sign up for a no-risk free trail.
Experience the Topica Email Marketing soultion today!

Email Marketing Expertise
Have the advantage of working with the email experts. We’ve been doing it for over 10 years! We want to be your email resource to help you reach even higher success with your email list management and growth!

Deliverability
Your customers can’t respond to what they can’t see. We make sure your mail gets to their inbox, or tell you why it doesn’t.
Auto-responders
No need to worry about the little things. Automate welcoming subscribers and time responsive campaigns down to the second.
Marketing Support
With some of the best customer support out there, we walk our clients through every step of the way to success marketing to their email list.
Real-Time Reporting
Track opens and clicks of every subscriber for every link on every campaign – rich information at your fingertips.

If you’re looking to build a comprehensive email strategy, then use the Topica Resource Center to get the latest and greatest webinars, tips, whitepapers and best practices. Topica is your resource for for email marketing tips to help grow your email lists and produce winning email campaigns!

101 Ways to Grow Your Email List

Download Now
One of the biggest struggles for email marketers is growing their email list organically. Therefore, to celebrate our 101st blog post the Topica Customer Success team put their heads together to create this practical (and a bit comical) how-to guide featuring the Topica Seal.

Creating a Successful Email

Download Now
Everything from the subject line to the appearance of your text will determine whether or not your message gets opened, read, and produces the results you want. In this whitepaper we will describe hints and tips to make sure you’re getting the most out of your newsletters.

Social Media Networking

Download Now
Becoming a part of the social networking phenomenon does not mean having to take part in virtual speed dating. Read this powerpoint resource and learn how to get your word out to millions. Find out what all the chirping is about and why you should join in with the chorus.

Outsource vs. Inhouse

Download Now
To Outsource or Keep Email Marketing In-House? This whitepaper will look into the areas of cost, time and reliability to prove in a simple manner that the benefits of outsourcing a company’s email marketing outweigh those of starting an in-house solution.

Email Marketing Expertise Have the advantage of working with the email marketing experts. We’ve been doing it for over 10 years!
	Deliverability Your customers can’t respond to what they can’t see. We make sure your mail gets to their inbox, or tell you why it doesn’t.
	Auto-responders No need to worry about the little things. Automate welcoming subscribers and time responsive campaigns down to the second.
	Marketing Support With some of the best customer support out there, we walk our clients through every step of the way to email marketing success.
	Real-Time Reporting Track opens and clicks of every subscriber for every link on every campaign – rich information at your fingertips.

Source Blue Sky Factory

By Ben Landers

Targeted, opt-in email campaigns can be a powerful and cost-effective way to generate more business from existing clients and strengthen relationships with new prospects making them more likely to become clients in the future. However, like any other marketing strategy, you cannot maximize the return on investment (ROI) from your email campaigns without proper tracking.

As the president of a marketing analytics and optimization consulting company, one of the primary reasons I use Blue Sky Factory is the detailed tracking built into the Publicaster platform. It’s also very easy to connect Publicaster to common website tracking tools such as Google Analytics. If you’re intelligent enough to spend your free time reading BSF’s blog, surely you’re already leveraging these aspects of features (wink, wink)! But even with the Google Analytics integration, there’s still one email marketing metric that’s often missing and, for many companies, it’s the most important metric.

Reaching the inbox of your customers and prospects and generating high response are inextricably linked.

Subscribers quickly tire of irrelevant messages and will complain by clicking the “report spam” button, depressing response rates for all campaigns. The only way to improve inbox deliverability and response is to create compelling subscriber experiences.

Subscribers want email that has valuable and interesting content that promotes products they want to buy and that comes at a frequency that is neither too often nor too seldom

Focus on building a relationship
A single email can make or break a valuable customer relationship. So why are 89 % of today’s marketers still sending low-value, one-off broadcast email campaigns? It’s wiser to plan strategically and execute high-value individualized lifecycle marketing programs.

A Jupiter Research study unveiled that – despite the extra costs – engaging your audiences in more relevant communications increases net profits by an average of 18 times more than broadcast mailings. Even more important, relevance is of major influence in your email deliverability.

A Return Path study confirms this and highlights that most deliverability failures are caused by the marketer’s poor data collection habits and complaints from email recipients in response to the content and frequency of the marketer’s messages. Even the best email service provider cannot control these factors.

These factors rest in the hands of the marketer alone.

You have the data, now use it
In order to better understand your subscribers needs, you can analyze your transactional data (e.g. e-commerce sales), preference data (obtained through surveys) and behavioral data (e.g. clicks in an email).

Analysis will give you a pretty good understanding about what interests and drives email newsletter readers.

A professional email campaign management platform should provide you with plenty of data on your readers’ preferences and behavior.

Is your reputation at stake?
Marketers who believe that only the ESP (Email Service Provider / Platform) is responsible for deliverability to the inbox are wrong. The reputation of the broadcasted email is what determines inbox placement.

ESPs have no control over what kind of email gets sent, whether or not the subscribers value that email or how the marketer has collected his email addresses.

The vast majority of factors that affect inbox deliverability are about targeting the right offer, to the right subscriber, at the right frequency; data collection practices; and list quality.

Email service providers do have a ‘limited’ amount of influence, though. The infrastructure of the supplier – meaning how the servers are configured and whether or not the proper authentication and security protocols are in place – is an important factor to consider.

Email sent from improperly configured servers will be blocked by ISPs. Your service provider’s other clients can also have an impact on your deliverability. ISPs look at reputation on IP addresses as a whole – and sometimes groups of IP addresses.

So if you share an IP with marketers who engage in poor sending practices then your reputation will be tarnished, too. Check it out when you decide to work with an email service provider.

Takeaway: Make sure you know what factors affect your reputation with subscribers and act accordingly.

One thing I enjoy about the blogosphere is how a good post can be missed by most of us initially but, then get picked up later by someone and suddenly get the attention it deserves. Such was the case yesterday with a post made by Bronto’s Julie Waite regarding online customer reviews and how to leverage them in your eMail marketing. It seems this gem went unnoticed by most of us the first time around.

I’ve always believed that if you focus on building relationships with your customers, sales will come.  One way to build relationships with customers is to let them have their say on your site about the products or services they buy from you. Now, it’s natural for this suggestion to send a chill down your spine but, hear me out. This whole idea is based on the truth that communities drive the web and without them it’s one big strip mall with infinite (empty) parking. It’s also based on my observation that like water, communities find their own level. In other words, they self regulate themselves (to some degree) and balance out any extreme views or behaviour.

My experience has been that people tend to disregard the extremely positive comments and the extremely negative and average out their impression of the comments. People know when it’s too good to be true and they also know when someone just has an agenda or chip on their shoulder.  Sometimes people will even intervene to correct an inaccurate or very critical post but, most often they tend to gloss over the extreme – we all have enough negativity and conversely, sugar, in our day already.

Practical examples from buyers about what did and didn’t work well with a product carry the most weight while editorializing and opinion usually become more or less background noise. Again, we have enough negativity in our days already and most of us won’t spend too much time on someone else’s opinons if they are light on facts and heavy on emotion.

There’s a positive message from negative customer reviews, without them the positive comments lack credibility but, more importantly this offers you a golden opportunity to showcase how you respond to customers who may not be happy with your service or product. Do you pride yourself on how you service dissatisfied customers? If so, why aren’t you highlighting this?

Takeaway: People learn about your good when they see you deal with the bad and the ugly.

How do you deal with unhappy customers in your eMail campaigns and sites? Love to hear your thoughts.

Testing something new or changing something seemingly small in your email campaigns can definitely tell you something about how your recipients will respond. You’ll either get more open & clicks or you won’t. But you won’t know until you try.

Testing something new can SEEM like a lot of work but it’s really not. If you’re going to create an email marketing campaign anyway, it’s just three more tiny steps.

One: Make a copy of the campaign you’re creating
Two: Change a little part of the campaign (see below)
Three: Test with a small portion of your list or split your list in two

These three simple steps could get you a better response to your next email campaign and it takes just minutes for you to do. Unleash the mad scientist in you with these 5 easy things to test within your next email marketing campaign.

1. Subject Line – If no one opens your email, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is on the inside, so why not test two different subject lines? Here’s an idea; look at your past campaigns and see what your recipients are clicking on, then include that offer or article in your new subject line. After you send it out compare your open and click rates to see if you got a better response than normal.

2. Offer - Test a % discount vs. a pricing discount like 20% off vs. a $10 savings. Run a test with free shipping vs. no free shipping or with an expiration date vs. no expiration date. Then roll out to the rest of your list the winning offer.

3. Format – Instead of including a sidebar in your emails, try removing it so that perhaps more of your content is “above the fold” or the part of an email or web page that is visible without scrolling. Make sure you’ve got some links above the fold so you can tell if it’s working. If you get more clicks you may want to consider changing your format for good.

4. Links – If your email has 5 links to your offer, try including 5 more and see if your response increases.

5. Images – Try removing images and see if a text version of your email works better. How 90′s of you!

You can either split your list in half and do the test or you can break off a small piece of your list and do the test a day in advance of your real email campaign date. Then roll out to your bigger list with the winner. Here is how you can do it using VerticalResponse.

One last thing, if you are going to test any of these make sure you test them one at a time so you know which change actually made the difference.

Got any other testing tips you would like to share? Post them!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:Upcoming tips focus on advanced email marketing with the use of multimedia

Campaigner’s Tips Help Small Businesses Coordinate SEO and Email Marketing for Best Results

OTTAWA – November 12, 2009 – Campaigner, a leading email marketing solutions provider, launched 101 Tips for Getting Started with Email Marketing this year to help small business owners implement and enhance successful email marketing campaigns. Sent weekly, Campaigner’s tips continued through October offering free advice to help small businesses enhance the performance of their email marketing campaigns.

October tips provided a series of search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that enhance campaign performance. Topics included maximizing messages and keywords for SEO, coordinating SEO and email marketing for best results, the use of program-specific landing pages, and among other strategies, the repurposing of email content into a blog to boost SEO visibility.

Tips in the month of October also offered guidance on how to get customers involved in marketing your business.

To learn more about these tips, listen to Campaigner’s most recent podcast, Getting Started with Email Marketing: More Tips to Enhance your Campaign Performance.

“If you’re a small business – don’t be intimidated by SEO,” said Steve Adams, vice president of marketing for Protus, the provider of Campaigner. “It may seem like a luxury you can’t afford, but its importance in driving traffic is monumental. Email marketing and SEO complement each other and utilize the power of the Web to connect buyer intent, relevancy, frequency and conversion rates. Also, remember to engage your customers as ambassadors. Asking questions and soliciting their input will build a strong relationship with your subscribers.”

Upcoming tips will focus on using multimedia to create a more engaging and exciting customer experience. Sample tips planned for November include:

- The reasons for using multimedia
- How to use multimedia with purpose
- Using graphics to add personality to your email
- Integrating podcasts into an email campaign
- Advantages of video

Small business owners can find the archived email marketing tips and sign up for free weekly tips throughout the 101 Tips for Getting Started with Email Marketing campaign, by visiting the Inside Campaigner blog or by visiting the 101 Tips website.

Key Links:

101 Tips Homepage: http://campaigner.com/lp/101tips.aspx

Campaigner podcast: http://blog.campaigner.com/2009/11/101-tips-for-small-business-october.html

Inside Campaigner blog: http://blog.campaigner.com/

About Campaigner:
Campaigner email marketing enables small, medium and large businesses to strengthen customer relationships and drive sales by connecting to their customers quickly, simply and affordably. Features include professional-looking email campaign creation, multiple ways to grow and manage lists, integration with CRM and the utilization of campaign metrics and reports to increase results. Campaigner is part of a total Software as a Service (SaaS) business communications offered by Protus that also includes MyFax, the fastest-growing Internet fax service; and my1voice, the cost-effective, feature-rich virtual business phone service. Additional information is available at www.campaigner.com.