Tuesday, 26 April 2011, 8:18 AM

Relevant Email Marketing

Sarah and Robert Kimber of Compost (the company) gave a lecture at Internet Expo in Gothenburg some time ago – we learned a few things. We learned all about email marketing – how email’s death is far from imminent, that most email marketing today sucks and needs improvement, and the day of mail merging is at it’s dawn – we bid you farewell… spam.

Relevant email marketing: Below you will find a model illustrating the long, booby trapped journey from the North Pole to the South Pole of email relevancy. Folks, this is exactly the type of terrain we’re facing.

Here’s our model, 5 different steps, illustrated on the red equator-like lines.

1.   Email strategy

Will you be working with campaign marketing or marketing towards individuals? Mail merging or recipient adjusted newsletters? These are the questions only you can answer. We recommend the latter of both – they’re the enduring and sustainable options. But everything depends on your goals and purpose with email marketing, so it’s vital to decide that also.

2.   Email Providers

Choose an email provider who gives you all the necessary tools.

• Can they deliver good e-commerce integration?
• Do they work actively to improve the quality of your delivery?
• Do you have access to all the statistics that you need?
• Do they give you the most common web integration tools?

3.   Settings

How you configure your settings and tools is crucial for the success of your email marketing.

• Transaction messages – how do you want them to look?
• How will you collect data about your subscribers?
• Are your segmented groups optimal?
• Do you have connecting tools to social media?

4.   The user’s experience

No matter how genius your tech is behind the scenes, the presentation and communication between you and the user is what will make or break your success. When the user is pleased, you are pleased.

• What is sent to a customer in connection to or after a purchase?
• Is signing up for your newsletter simple? Does the customer have any alternatives?
• How do you treat active readers? Do you reward them, or do they get the same treatment as the recipient who never opens a letter?
• If someone is Tweeting away about your marketing, do you pay attention to them? Do you reward these customers?

5.   The users

Your precious customers, the people on the other side, the reason you stay afloat – how do you view your customers? Number One, Two, Three, and MasterCard? Or Fredric, Sarah, Christopher, and Louise? How do you like to be viewed? Marinate on that for a while…

Email is changing rapidly, and we have to be relevant. In todays’ social world, it’s easy to get left behind, especially if we’re not leading or at the cutting edge. Run through this checklist, it’ll help you get a better idea of what you want or are trying to achieve. Remember: having a strategy to be relevant will make you relevant.