Email Marketing
Best Practices
www.inboxorange.com

Whatchu talkin’ about?
1) Why Email?
2) SPAM
3) Best Practices
4) Choosing an ESP
5) Q&A

Why Email?
Easy
Interactive
Data Driven
Inexpensive

OLD
Print
Television
Radio
Direct Mail
Web (online brochure)
Hard to measure
Hard to maximize
Lifetime Customer Value
Photo from the Tom Lennon Photographic Collection

Traditional media =
Interrupt for Awareness

Customer Relationship Life cycle

New media = Trust and Credibility

Turn Strangers into friends
and friends into customers
1999

Multi-channel Marketing
Consistency to keep your customers
connected with your brand or product
through targeted marketing mediums
Connect with customers in a way that is
comfortable for them.
The result = higher response rate, more
repeat buyers and increased revenues.
Database holds the information.

50 million people checked
email at least 5 times by
11:00 am today

How do we break through?

SPAM

CAN-SPAM It bans false or misleading
header information.
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solic-
ited Pornography and Marketing Act It prohibits deceptive
subject lines
It requires that your
email give recipients
an opt-out method
It requires that commercial
email be identified as an
advertisement and include
the sender’s valid physical
postal address.

Filters
Server Side
Email Client
Subscriber

Statistics are needed
Open Rates
Click Throughs
Hard/Soft Bounce

Best Practices
From shadphotos’ Flickr photostream

When to send?
• Industry and customer specific
• Focus on key events
• Seasonal - Email only coupon
with special code to measure ROI
• Personal - birthday, anniversary
• Follow multiple channel marketing
calendar to ti e into special events
• Utilize CRM or POS to send based
on customer behavior

1. Opt-in
How you collect your email addresses
are extremely important.
• Implicit
• Explicit

2. Welcome message
This is your first impression
• Timeliness
• Reiteration of what your
customer can expect to receive
• Reiterate selection of or invite
subscriber to select frequency.
Obtain data over a series of emails

3. Relevancy
Anyone can send an email—
engagement is the key.
Clean list
+ engaged audience
+ relevant message
= open rate close to 100%.

-

3. Relevancy
Send based on
the preferences
identified by
your subscriber

Open rates for segmented versus non-segmented
campaigns are as much as 20% higher on average
for the first 30 days.
MarketingSherpa “Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008” (2008)‫‏‬
Click rates for segmented versus non-segmented
campaigns are five times higher the last 90 days of
the year.
MarketingSherpa “Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008” (2008)‫‏‬

3. Relevancy
Dynamic Content
based on your users
profile.

4. Design
Five Stages
73% of subscribers
of Email Viewing
click “Report Spam”
or “Report Junk”
1. From Name
based on the content
from this field
source ESPC

4. Design
-
2. Subject Line • Inform-what will
they miss
• Intrigue-stand out
• Entrust-don’t mislead
• Action
• Empathy-speak
to the individual

4. Design
-
3. Preview Pane Make sure you place
branding and main
call-to-action at top
left of email‫‏‬

4. Design
-
4. Open 11% will see the
(pre-scroll) whole email
bullets, borders and
background colors
Encourage scrolling

Use ‘Alt’ tags

4. Design
5. Full Email
-
Make sure you place branding
and main call-to-action at top
left of email‫‏‬

ICI Restaurants
Timbuk2
Fifty Coins

Test, test and retest
A/B split test
• Subject lines
• Design
Different email clients render emails differently

A/B Split Test
A B

Email Service Providers
Private IP
Education
Best Practices
Tracking
Deliverability

Lisa Wester Bill Powell
www.facebook.com/inboxorange