If you'd like to address the contacts in your email database based on customer life cycle, but don't know where to start, I recommend that you read my latest article in BtoB Magazine.

Knowing where your customers are in the customer lifecycle and sending them relevant messages for each stage is an effective way to increase conversions and customer satisfaction. As I write in my article, you can start out small and then expand your campaigns as you get more comfortable with it.

In today's MediaPost Email Insider Column, I use the game of football to provide some insights into how email marketers can improve the success of their programs. I break it down into investing in the quarterback (you) and having a good offense (driving innovation) and defense (accessing quality data). Read the article for more information and to find out my favorite team.

As StrongMail spends more time working with email marketers to accelerate their program through the social web, we find ourselves constantly reminding clients that email is still the preferred channel for customer communications with brands.

Nowhere is this more true than in service-oriented or transactional emails. Read my latest MediaPost Email Insider post as a reminder about how critical it is to ensure that your transactional email streams are just as relevant as your Facebook Fan page!

I had the opportunity to speak at the Canadian Marketing Association annual meeting in Toronto this week, and the topic was email marketing ROI. As some of you may know, I was a CPA before I jumped head first into digital marketing and, in particular, email. So I feel just as at home in Excel as I do in email marketing applications. Now, I know what you are thinking -- how does one go from accounting to blogging about email marketing? Well, it probably has something to do with the fact that I was a terrible accountant. However, I was able to learn a few things that have served me well over the years, and believe it or not, a few of the lessons provide insight that is easily applied to the email channel and how we can look at calculating program effectiveness. Read the full article at my MediaPost Email Insider Blog!

It seems our clients are becoming more and more focused on automation. How can email marketers leverage technology to automate communication workflows, enhance relevance and in general, do more with less? Read my latest Email Insider Blog for some ideas on how StrongMail's clients are marching towards email marketing automation.

With the hundreds of emails that I receive on any given day, an email looking like this would get passed over very quickly in my inbox.

With so much competition in a person’s email inbox, it is critical to design your email to be effective with images on and off. With the images turned off, the majority of the email above does not tell a reader who it's from or what's the call to action.

Let me walk through an example that highlights the potential impact.

 > One in five emails is invisible and ineffective due to blocked images.
    - Email Experience Council (Jan 2007)

> Let's apply the statistic above to a mailing with 1 million delivered messages. 
    - 800,000 delivered with images on
    - 200,000 delivered with images off / blocked

> Assume 50% of emails with images off / blocked were opened.
    - 100,000 total emails potentially looked over in your readers' inboxes.

In this example, wouldn't you want to have an extra 100,000 people read your email? Especially when this can be easily accomplished by tweaking your template so it still offers valuable information when images are turned off.

In terms of ROI, a few small adjustments to your emails will allow you to see improvements across every category.

By Peter Norton

As I speak to clients and prospects, one of the top questions I’m inevitably asked is what they can do to grow their list. While there are numerous ways to do this, I always like to respond with a question of my own: "Do you have any old email files?"

Almost every company I ask has an old list. And, I am not talking about a few thousand email addresses; many were in the hundreds of thousands to a few million. Not surprisingly, none of them wanted to admit that they had so many potentially good email addresses just sitting there.

Companies list several reasons for having these old files, and the top explanations include:

1. These were there before I started. (My favorite)
2. We did not know what to do with inactive emails, so we put them on one list.
3. They were incomplete. (missing first name or missing zip code)

So, my next question to these clients is simply "Do you have a plan for the list." The two most popular responses to this question are "No, because we don’t think we would be able to do anything with it" and "No, because using it would hurt our reputation."

"Fear not email marketers!" I typically exclaim. A strategic, well-executed re-engagement campaign can turn those dusty old filed into gold. The following example is based on actual results from one of my clients.

Example Re-Engagement Scenario

1. The client had an inactive list of opt-ins that had not responded to an email in over one year.
2. List size= one million.

Example Re-Engagement Strategy

1. Created a mini-series of 4 - 6 emails/surveys sent only to the inactive, opt-in list.
2. Delivered the emails over an IP that was different from those used for main list.
3. The purpose of this program was to recapture a portion of the lost audience.
4. Analyzed results after each mailing and made necessary tweaks for the next email in the series.
5. Provided a powerful incentive (if they did not respond, it’s safe to assume they never would.)

Re-Engagement Results

Here are the results achieved by following the strategy outlined above.

   1 million inactive opt-ins @ 90% delivery = 900,000 delivered
                                        15% open rate = 135,000 opened
                                   10% click through = 13,500 clicked through to offer
                                  5% conversion rate = 675 purchased
   675 purchased @ $100 conversion value = $67,500 total revunue

While these results might seem high, remember, they are the actual results from a past client. For such little effort, they were able to grow their list and create net-new revenue.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you go rushing off and start mailing to your inactive lists. You must be careful and take a methodical approach. However, after properly vetting the opportunity and executing it correctly, the gains can be quite rewarding!

By Peter Norton

One of my favorite questions to ask clients is, “Do you know if you are sending the right amount of email to your subscribers?” Most of the time, the answer is “I think so…why?”

For such an important question, I prefer to hear a definitive answer. The point is that guessing is not enough – you need to have the hard data to support a “yes” or “no” answer.

Of course, the next question is typically, “How can I figure this out?” While there are a few different ways, the following testing matrix below is a great resource to get the answer.

The matrix above represents an example mailing list of one million records that has been divided into 4 groups of 250,000. Let’s say you are currently sending 10 times per month to your entire list. What you need to do is break up it into 4 equal groups to test different sending frequencies. Over the course of a 30-day period, you could try sending 2 emails a month to Group 1, then 4 emails to Group 2, and so on. At the end of the cycle, you can tally and compare the results to see what performed best. The following chart breaks out sample response rates for this particular example.

After reviewing the results above, you can see that 2 to 4 emails per month seems to be the sweet spot for this example exercise. The last line that refers to “No Response to emails” is probably the most important area to focus on. The goal is to have as many people possible open your emails, not just for 1 mailing, but for all your whole series of mailings over time.

As you can see from this test above, there still was a great deal of people who did not even open one email. The next step would be to see how these results stack up to your typical 10-mailings-per month metrics.

You can conduct this test anytime, but many of my clients do it when they make a message change to the email channel or with the addition of a new section to an email template.

Of course, there are many other metrics that you should be testing as well. The bottom line is that you should always be thinking of how you can make your email channel more effective, and that includes considering how your recipient sees it.

The goal is to remain top of mind with them and create excitement for the next email to come – and email frequency plays a big role here. If you don’t know whether your subscribers are getting tired of all of your emails, you will find your emails being filed away for a rainy day…along with another thousand or so!

Recently, I participated in a discussion about event-based email marketing, and the best way to manage them. The question came down to whether it made sense to leverage enterprise marketing management systems (EMM) or technology from an on-premise or hosted email service provider.

First, based on what we are seeing in the market, there is certainly a healthy trend towards leveraging event-based email streams for marketing purposes. Not surprisingly, companies are working to improve the customer experience and the related value of their event-based email streams. When choosing the best solution to deliver these critical communications, the deciding factors usually boil down to these three:

Integration: Email solutions need to connect to core data sources in order to fully leverage significant investments in EMM and CRM systems. Email solutions also need to be able to write data back to these systems. While most leading ESP solutions have web services API’s that enable data transfer, the integration options are typically not flexible enough for an enterprise's IT department. This is the leading reason enterprises look to email modules within EMM solutions to handle email deployment.

Delivery Management and Transparency: If integration is the reason companies look to leverage an EMM or CRM solution for email deployment, delivery management and transparency is the reason they look elsewhere. Most EMM solutions lack strong deliverability management solutions. Reporting of failed deliveries is often weak, and that information is critical, particularly with event-based messaging. I have seen some scary cost modules that outline how expensive it can be in the call center when 10% of an enterprise's purchase confirmations are blocked or end up in the junk folder. Furthermore, reputation is becoming the key driver for inbox penetration. EMM and CRM solutions simply have little depth in this area.

Features: Finally, companies that look to enhance event emails are typically already using the email channel for promotional and marketing messaging. They require a level of features that enable flexible dynamic content, web-analytics integration and other advanced capabilities. Most EMM and CRM solutions have email “modules,” and these modules are not core parts of their applications, which can leave their capabilities “lacking” in a marketer's eyes. The result, EMM and CRM may be OK for some email streams, but will rarely meet an enterprise's broader requirements. Feature requirements are also the reason that enterprises are trashing their own home-grown applications and turning to technology providers for help.

The bottom line is that you want to verify that the solution you choose justifies the cost, meets your integration requirements and has the features you need. Regardless of how you decide to manage your event-based marketing streams, you'll also want to make sure you do it in a way that meets the recipient's expectations. Obviously, the email needs to arrive at the right time and contain pertinent information about the event at hand. Any promotional messages should be seen as relevant and adding value. If you start overstepping your marketing bounds, you'll pay the price in customer dissatisfaction and attrition.