So why will the e-mail marketing strategies of yesterday not work for e-mail marketing success today?
A few key answers and issues that I would like to stress are
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Deliverability
- Test and measure
Deliverability
There are far more distractions as well as competition than in past years with social, mobile and other technologies. Additionally, there is the deliverability challenge caused by the ever-changing list. With roughly 20 percent of people changing e-mail addresses each year to avoid spam and/or to start fresh and escape the e-mail account that has gotten out of control, it is difficult to keep in touch with your opt-in audience.
Another deliverability challenge is the growing number of savvy e-mail recipients that believe that a good way to unsubscribe to an e-mail is to simply click the spam button and, in essence, eliminating your reach to that person going forward. (Of course, it is key to deliver content that is important to the recipient to avoid your audience from opting out.)
Deliverability of e-mail messages to the mobile-device users is also going to be a growing challenge since messages displayed on mobile devices will look, feel and likely interact with the recipient differently than when viewed within a traditional e-mail account.
As can be expected, with the deliverability issues noted above, reaching the target audience is and will become more difficult in the future. Through careful monitoring and adjusting to the audience that is responding, however, as well as those that are not responding, it will be possible to achieve successful results to e-mail marketing programs.
Test and measure
To understand the success or failure of an e-mail campaign it is imperative to look at the results of e-mail campaigns to learn from them for future campaigns.
You need to learn everything from the standard statistics such as opens, click through, opt-outs, etc. to more of a “total reach” analysis of who is opening, who is clicking and how the campaigns will move the products/services marketed.
Measuring the frequency of campaigns, and whether or not there are more opt-outs when campaigns are sent weekly versus monthly or daily, is an area to focus analysis on. Adjusting the frequency of the campaign accordingly and continuing to test and monitor the results will hone the right frequency mix for your company.
Analysis of e-mail campaigns stats in conjunction with web statistics (whether it be with free analytics packages such as Google Analytics or with paid packages such as Omniture) is also very important to the success of your e-mail marketing program.
You can’t walk in everyone else’s shoes, and everyone’s e-mail marketing experience will be different. Embrace the change we are experiencing in e-mail marketing and make that change work for you!
