E-Mail Secrets Exposed

While the list of best practices, which is intended to keep the world of e-mail marketing free from rude, unethical, and unscrupulous behavior, is always evolving, many of the rules are just good common sense: Make it easy for people to unsubscribe. Remove e-mail addresses from the list that have bounced more than once or twice.

Your Target Audience

There are many ways to go about serving your audience to maximize returns while minimizing the possibility of sending an unwanted message.

First, make sure the people you plan to send e-mails to really want them, Parks says. You should have a link to your Web site where users can sign up for e-mail updates, newsletters, or special offers. “Not having an e-mail signup on your Web site is a completely missed opportunity,” Parks continues, adding that even if you haven’t started an e-mail campaign yet, put a message on your Web site saying you may start one and would like interested people to sign up.

And while you’ve got their attention, Eklund says, ask them questions that will help you determine how to send them messages they’ll want to read. “Ask people what services they’re interested in and whether they’re thinking of buying today. Being able to turn around and deliver information based on what they told you can have a gigantic effect on your campaign.”

After you’ve been e-mailing to a group for a while and tracking their responses, you can segment your list into categories, such as buyers versus non-buyers or male and female. “It’s amazing what you’ll see,” Baranowski says. “We had a client that had some e-mail names and the first couple of e-mails they sent were to everyone. But after they targeted the buyers and non-buyers with messages specifically for them, they got much better responses.”

The better you know your audience, the better your click-through rate will be, Parks says. Food companies, for example, might want to include a recipe someone could click on. If you get a great response for something chocolate, for example, you just found yourself another niche to target messages to. “It sounds geeky,” Parks says. “But there’s so much junk e-mail out there that people don’t even open. It feels good when you create a message people are responding to. It makes you feel like your efforts are worthwhile.”