BUSINESS.COM GUIDE TO EMAIL MARKETING

CONTENTSOVERVIEW OF EMAIL MARKETING 3

TRENDS 7

CHOOSING A VENDOR 9

CALCULATING COSTS 10

COMPARISON CHECKLIST 11

GLOSSARY OF TERMS 12

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WHYEmail marketing is a broad category of services that encompasses everything from one-time emails, to newsletters, to systems that analyze customer behavior and tailor messages with tremendous precision. Here’s a rundown of the kinds of messages you can send using email marketing services:

Newsletters. Send company newsletters once a day, once a week, once a month, or once a year. Send different newsletters to different segments of your list, such as customers, employees, or investors; or covering different topics.

Acknowledgment Emails. Send notifications that you’ve received a communication, that a transaction has been processed, or that a package has been shipped.

Direct Email. Marketing communications that are simply messages, not regularly scheduled newsletters. They could be triggered by event promotions, coupons, discounts, new product announcements, earnings reports, milestones, or any other reason for reaching out to the mailing list.

Reminder Emails. These emails might remind customers about an event they indicated they wanted to attend. They might also serve as reminders about an action that hasn’t yet been completed, such as items left in an online shopping cart, or a registration that hasn’t been verified.

Notification Emails. Subscribers to some systems can specify when they’d like to be notified about certain tasks. These are used, for example, for low-balance

OVERVIEW OF EMAIL MARKETING

“SEND DIFFERENT NEWSLETTERS TO DIFFERENT SEGMENTS OF YOUR LIST, SUCH AS CUSTOMERS, EMPLOYEES, OR INVESTORS; OR COVERING DIFFERENT TOPICS.”

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notifications by banks, or notifications that a new comment or message has been posted or sent.

Timed Messages. These are often used in “lead nurturing” or “drip marketing” to check back with prospects on a timed schedule with a series of messages designed to increase engagement.

Autoresponders. These are email addresses that automatically return a preprogrammed message in response to any email received at that address. An example would be an email address such as contest-rules@company.com, which would instantly send rules to a contest in response to any email sent to that address.

Lifecycle Messages. Messages that are sent depending on a person’s level of involvement with the marketer. For example, lifecycle lists are often divided into prospects, customers, and lapsed customers. Different email messages are then sent out depending on the person’s position in the cycle.

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HOW You might have heard that email marketing is illegal. It’s not. Like everything else, it’s governed by the laws of the land where the marketing takes place. For example, laws against making fraudulent statements apply to commercial email. In the United States, email marketers are required to follow the rules outlined in the CAN-SPAM Act or be subject to possible fines.

Perhaps the most important prohibition in the CAN-SPAM Act is that it’s illegal to send unsolicited commercial email (UCE, or “spam”). Unless others have agreed to receive email from you, or “opted-in,” it is illegal to send them a commercial pitch. Because of this law, many email marketing services require you to prove that the people on your list opted-in. Some email marketing services will ask you to write to everyone on your list and have them subscribe in order to verify that you have their permission to communicate via email.

“SOME EMAIL MARKETING SERVICES WILL ASK YOU TO WRITE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR LIST AND HAVE THEM SUBSCRIBE IN ORDER TO VERIFY THAT YOU HAVE THEIR PERMISSION TO COMMUNICATE VIA EMAIL.”

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WHAT You should avoid services that offer to sell you email addresses. No reputable email marketing service will allow you to import a list of purchased email addresses, because there’s no way to guarantee that the people on that list opted-in.

That doesn’t mean you can’t market to people who aren’t already on your list. You can often send marketing messages through companies that have large opt-in lists. But buying email addresses for the purpose of email marketing is not a best practice and could get you into legal trouble.

You should also avoid vendors who’ve been reprimanded for violating email marketing rules. By searching for the vendor’s name along with the word “blacklist,” you should be able to quickly find out if a company is listed on any of the major blacklists of known spammers. If the vendor is on a blacklist of spammers, there’s a high likelihood that messages sent through that vendor will get trapped in spam filters and will never reach the people on your list.

“YOU SHOULD ALSO AVOID VENDORS WHO’VE BEEN REPRIMANDED FOR VIOLATING EMAIL MARKETING RULES.”

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Email marketing is the art and science of communicating a marketing message using email. It involves creating compelling marketing messages, gathering email addresses of prospects, using software to deliver messages to prospects, and tracking the results of email marketing campaigns.

But is it effective? Absolutely! A 2011 study from Ziff-Davis showed that email marketing is the most effective marketing technique used by businesses-with twice the performance of direct mail marketing and five times the return of television advertising!

Forty percent of businesses expect to spend more on email marketing next year. At the same time, Forrester

Research shows that people have a better attitude about receiving email marketing communications than they used to. From 2006 to 2010, the percentage of people saying they received “too many” email offers dropped from 77% to less than 50%.

TRENDS

“IT INVOLVES CREATING COMPELLING MARKETING MESSAGES, GATHERING EMAIL ADDRESSES OF PROSPECTS, USING SOFTWARE TO DELIVER MESSAGES TO PROSPECTS, AND TRACKING THE RESULTS.”

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Businesses report that they consider email marketing to be somewhat effective or very effective with respect to the following:

• Building brand awareness

• Supporting offline marketing programs

• Increasing website traffic

• Increasing sales revenue

• Improving customer relations and retention

Experienced marketers report that the shift to mobile delivery of email to smartphones and tablets is the biggest change happening in the industry, so be sure to ask about mobile optimization when signing up with an email marketing service.

Another trend is timed messages or drip campaigns, where messages are automatically sent to subscribers on a scheduled basis.

A major priority for email marketers is better list segmentation-the ability to divide a list by such factors as how recently a purchase was made, how often the customer buys, the average size of a customer’s order, and other factors. Be sure to ask your email service provider how your list can be segmented, and how many variables you can track (“custom fields”).

Combining list segmentation and drip campaigns results in lifecycle segmentation, where the messages are customized and scheduled based on how recently prospects engaged, and how active their involvement has been. Email marketers using lifecycle segmentation report five times the results of those sending identical messages to everyone on the list.

Social sharing features have extended the reach of email marketing messages, making it easy for people to “like” or share your emails. Almost all email marketing services now include social-sharing features in their monthly packages at no additional cost.

“BE SURE TO ASK ABOUT MOBILE OPTIMIZATION WHEN SIGNING UP WITH AN EMAIL MARKETING SERVICE.”

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CHOOSING A VENDOR

How large is your list? Most email marketing services price according to the size of your mailing list, or “house list.” There are many no-frills services that are free for less than 500 names. When you go over 500 or 1,000 names, prices start from $5 per month to $20 per month, and go up from there. For lists with more than 10,000 names, prices are often over $100 per month.

How often do you plan to mail? The second major factor besides the size of your list is how often you plan to mail to a list. Some services price by the number of messages sent. For example, a rate of 5 cents per message would cost you $50 every time you mail to a 1,000-person list. If you plan to email to your list several times a month, you might look for a plan that charges by the size of the list and not the number of emails.

What add-on services appeal to you? The third factor in helping determine the right email marketing vendor relates to the extra services you need or want for your business. Some companies offer assistance with the copy-that is, writing effective email pitches and subject lines. Other companies

will help with the creative-that is, designing good-looking messages. Some services can test different versions of a message before mailing to the whole list. And several email marketing programs are integrated with customer relationship management programs (CRM) that facilitate greater tracking capabilities and more strategic engagement tactics, such as lifecycle marketing.

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CALCULATING COSTS

Free Plans. Some of the software and services used to manage email marketing campaigns are available free of charge. For example, many email service providers will allow you to manage a mailing list of up to, say, 500 contacts, for free. However, you can cause yourself a lot of legal trouble with email marketing if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s usually worth it to pay for a service that has a good reputation.

Basic Monthly Plans. Expect to spend between $5 per month and $20 per month for an email marketing service that will handle up to 1,000 contacts and provide excellent tools to ensure your compliance with email marketing laws. Your basic plan should include some ability to segment the list, along with tracking important stats such as the delivery rate, bounce rate, open rate, and clickthrough rate.

Extra Charges for Large Lists and Frequent Mailers. You can expect to pay as much as $100 per month if your mailing list is over 10,000 names, or you send more than 10,000 messages per month. Most companies will

quote an additional price-per-contact for a very large list, or a price-per-message for very busy mailing lists.

Optional Testing, Analysis, and Management Services. Best practices in email marketing include testing different subject lines and messages first before mailing out to a large list. Many firms offer tools to make testing subject lines or messages easy. They automatically analyze the different response rates and adjust the mailing based on the analytics. Another optional service is spam analysis. Email messages are rejected for a variety of reasons, such as a wrong email address or a full mailbox. Spam analysis software examines bounced messages to determine the reason the message bounced, rather than just deleting every bounce from the mailing list. Cross-platform testing is a way to see how compatible a message is with a variety of devices before actually sending the message. These sophisticated optional services can significantly improve the results.

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This checklist will help you quickly assess the best vendor for your needs.

Cost

Cost For The Chosen Individual Item

Shipping Costs

Excess Charge for Colored Items

Cost for Sample Packaging

Discounts Offered

1st-tier Bulk Discount Amount

2nd-tier Bulk Discount Amount

3rd-tier Bulk Discount Amount

Frequent Customer Discount

Item Imprinting

Imprinted With Business Name

Imprinted With Business Logo

Imprinted With Slogan

Pricing on Front And Back

Extra Charge for Color Printing

Options Available

Packaging for Sample Items

Shirt-color Choices

Shirt Sizes Available

People to Hand Out Freebies

My Needs Vendor 1 Vendor 2 Vendor 3

EMAIL MARKETING ITEMS CHECKLIST

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Employee Motivation Objectives: A set of goals that an organization is attempting to achieve by giving staff members recognition and/or gifts to promote a more efficient and loyal workforce.

Promotional Campaign: A marketing strategy that a business uses; it offers promotional items to generate interest from both new and existing customers in the products and services the company is offering.

Promotional Items: Offered by a business to potential or existing customers as part of a promotional campaign.

Promotional Objectives: The goals that a business sets in an attempt to acquire new customers or retain old customers.

Sales Objectives: Offering free promotional items to attract customers, with the goal of reaching a specific minimum increase in sales.

Trade Show: An organized event where businesses in a certain industry can showcase products and services. Promotional items are frequently purchased for distribution at such shows.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS