By Tom Wozniak, Head of Marketing – published on Forbes.com on 7/3/20
Creating effective and high-performing email marketing campaigns is a challenging endeavor for any marketer. While on the surface, an email seems to be a fairly straightforward marketing channel, there are many important foundational aspects that fall into areas such as legal compliance, technical development, database management, analysis and, of course, more traditional marketing aspects like the content, offer, call to action, etc.
When you dig into the details, running a successful email marketing program can seem complicated. However, if you start with some basic best practices, you can get your email program off on the right foot. Here are three useful areas to focus on as you establish your email marketing strategy and deployment plans.
Compliance And List Hygiene
Before you even worry about what we might call the marketing aspects of your email campaign (subject lines, design, images, offers, etc.), you first need to establish a few foundations of your program. Two of the most important are compliance and maintaining a clean email list.
Email compliance encompasses a variety of key aspects, but among the most straightforward and important are providing your recipients with a method to opt out of receiving future emails and a way to collect, process, store and then honor those requests going forward. Generally, this means you include an opt-out link in every marketing email you send, and that either your email platform or compliance and suppression list management platform is processing and ensuring those opt-outs are suppressed from future campaigns.
Don’t take for granted that this is working exactly as it should and in the best way for your business. Make sure you evaluate every aspect of email compliance within your email program and engage with the best technologies and partners to ensure your compliance moving forward.
(Full disclosure: My company, OPTIZMO, is an email suppression list management company.)
Similarly, you should not view your email list as an asset that you can simply let sit idle and all will be well. Email addresses go stale as people change jobs or simply stop using old addresses. Some recipients continue to receive your email campaigns but flag them as spam or never open them. All of this activity can negatively impact your email campaigns if you aren’t on top of it.