The Art and Science of Email Marketing
By Megan Ouellet, Director of Marketing for Listrak
October 25, 2007
In order to craft an effective email marketing campaign, you must carefully balance the needs of your audience, the message you want to communicate, and the technology that allows you to manage the interaction. In order to increase your response rate, you must be sure that your email has all of the correct items in place - appealing subject lines, exciting graphics, inspiring content, clear calls-to-action and tempting offers. Art is all about form and content, and like art, your emails must inspire your audience to perform your end goal.
However, unlike art, there are certain guidelines that have been tested, measured and proven that you must follow in order to ensure your messages reach your audience. This is the science behind email marketing and it includes things such as acquisition strategy, customer segmentation, relevancy, and deliverability.
Listrak has put together the following white paper to help you learn how to combine engaging message tactics with established procedures to create email messages that are meaningful and important to your audience.
Emotions verses Evidence
Art is a combination of creativity and skill in a chosen medium or form. It is an appealing and thought-provoking expression of the artist’s beliefs and desires that he or she wishes to communicate with the world, and it evokes an intuitive, emotional understanding from its audience.
The same can be said for email marketing. You must develop creative email campaigns that connect with your subscribers. You must use attractive graphics, engaging content, and alluring offers to capture the attention and interest of your audience. And your emails must be compelling enough to persuade the readers to take action.
However, where art might take decades or even centuries for the audience to notice and appreciate it, emails only have a matter of seconds. And while great art is always open for interpretation, emails must be clear and concise and drive the readers to perform a specific goal. This is the science behind email marketing.
Science is about discipline. It is the system of acquiring knowledge through study or observation, and it is based on reason, logic, and fact. It uses rational theories and proven formulas to create the same results and conclusions time after time.
It is important for email marketers to follow certain guidelines, regulations, and best practices when crafting their email campaigns. You must track your results and build benchmark reports so you have indisputable proof of your campaign performance. And you must continually test your campaigns to find what works best for your recipients.
Like a masterpiece, the art and science need to work together to create effective email campaigns. An artist needs to know that combining equal portions of blue and yellow paint creates green paint. But if he only ads half as much yellow paint, he gets teal, while a quarter amount of yellow paint produces aqua. Similarly, email marketers must use the correct combinations of creativity and technology in order to build a successful email campaign.
