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3. Take the time to do it right

Image 5 - The more effort email marketers put into their campaigns, the higher the return. Source: MarketingSherpa's 2010 Email Marketing Benchmarking Report

A MarketingSherpa report, shown on the right, proves that the more effort you put into your email strategy the more effective your campaigns will be.

Here are some things you can do in 2010 to do it right:

Organically grow your list - Email best practices begin with the opt-in process. While it might be tempting to purchase a list of email addresses, it's not worth the risk. Purchased lists have the worst performance metrics. Even if you follow CAN-SPAM rules, recipients can report your messages as spam, which will damage your reputation and ruin your deliverability. Instead of spending the money purchasing email addresses of people who don't want to hear from you, put that money towards an organic list acquisition strategy. You won't capture the addresses as quickly, but everyone on your list will welcome messages from you - as long as the messages remain relevant.

Segment - The MarketingSherpa chart shows that relevant emails outperform all others. It's no surprise - relevant emails engage subscribers by giving them only the information they want, the information that is most likely to convert.

There are a number of ways to segment your list. Even a simple segmentation, such as sorting subscribers by locations, preferences, past purchases, last open dates, etc., will increase the response rates of your campaigns. But the more targeted you get, the more relevant and effective, your emails will be.

The best way to create extremely targeted and relevant messages is to use dynamic content. Also called dynamic message assembly, it is a way to create individualized messages based on subscriber preferences and behavior. From a single template you can create hundreds of different versions of each message. A study^vii performed by Listrak found that dynamic content emails had click-through rates 41 percent higher than batch emails. Dynamic message assembly takes more time - you have to collect more data, develop more content, and set up the business rules so the email templates can populate on the fly - but the results are well worth the effort.

Automate message deployment - Event triggered messaging is another way to increase the relevancy of your emails and improve response rates. At its simplest, event triggered messaging is an email autoresponder. For example, when someone subscribes to your list, you can send an automated welcome message that further engages the subscriber. Welcome messages have the highest open and read rates and provide a great opportunity to make offers or promote preference centers and ETM allows you to easily capitalize on this.

You can build ETM messages to be as detailed as you need them to be. For example, you can build different paths that lead subscribers through the sales cycle based on their responses, or you can automate follow up from trade shows or other events. ETM requires some pre-planning, but because subscribers trigger deployment, the messages always reach the right recipient at the right time.

2010 is the year of consumer engagement, and an integrated marketing strategy that follows the examples above will help you interact with your customers and subscribers in meaningful, beneficial conversations.  To learn more, contact one of Listrak's experts today.