Email Marketing in 1,500 Words or Less

I have a friend applying for a project management job with a local company that focuses on email marketing. She’s an excellent project manager, but doesn’t have much experience with email marketing. I don’t have anything else going on, so I wrote up a primer to get her through the interview.

I can’t say it’s the best organized writing in the world, but perhaps handy if you’re trying to quickly understand email marketing.

How Marketers Measure Success in Email

1. Numbers of emails successfully sent: Sometimes you get bounces, spams, or bad emails. It’s good to track those numbers and clean the list occasionally.
2. Open rate: Total emails sent out / Emails opened = open rate percentage. The biggest three contributors to whether people open an email are:
   1. Do I know who sent this to me? The name and email address in the from: field.
   2. Is the subject line interesting to me? Words like “Free” usually end up in spam, but knowing that it’s the user’s birthday or that their anniversary is coming up can generate interest. The more relevant personal information you can add in the subject line (in a way that’s not creepy), the higher your open rate.
   3. Is this a good time to talk to me about this? Emails about insurance sent at 5 pm on a Friday? Not going to get opened. Emails about “three fashion tips you already have in your closet” at 4 pm on a Friday might get opened for the “going out” crowd.
3. Click-through rate: Total emails sent / # of clicks in all emails. Typically, just like a web page, the biggest visual will get the most clicks. And the stuff at the top of the page will get the most clicks. Know what your client really wants from their email campaign, and put it up there.
4. Spams and Unsubscribes: A certain number of people will categorize your email as spam and a certain number will unsubscribe. Marking an email as spam is easier than unsubscribing, and many people use it. It kinda sucks, but you’ll get a few. Unsubscribe is fine, because you can  at least offer them incentives for staying in the course of unsubscribing, like a free flashlight or something. Or you can ask why they’re leaving: “Hey wow, bummer. Did we not send you interesting content? Maybe you could choose from one of these three things to help us do better next time.” At least you get a very short exit interview.

Just like online ad campaigns, the email campaigns are tracked on the website to see what people who clicked through did.

• Did they buy? What? How much? Did they abandon?
• How much time did they spend on the site?
• How many pages? Where did they go?
• What was the bounce rate?

Custom Content and Measurement
Email, like every other type of marketing and advertising, is about relevance. And prior behavior tells you a lot about future behavior.

You can start to tell patterns about people based on how they click. Some people are female, but only shop for males. Maybe they’re buying gifts. Other people only click-through when there’s a deep discount. Some people want the newest thing, like “see what Hollywood is wearing this spring.”

Those patterns are important, because you should choose to send emails with dynamic, auto-generated content based on click patterns. This dynamic email content is the backbone of the company’s system. So basically, if the client is offering a 35% coupon, the email system will let you create a group that’s based on prior click patterns (“give me everyone who clicked on a discount link between Q1 2008 and Q1 2009.”)

Plus, you can create a regular email where there’s a bucket of content that’s subject to different rules: if they like discounts, fill it with discount copy. If they like new stuff, fill it with the hot newness content. If they like men’s stuff, fill it with men’s stuff.

Different types of campaigns: awareness vs. sales.

• Awareness: We want people to know about this product or service, and we want them to want it. Typically, there’s a click-through to a product page. Once there, maybe people will even buy. With a campaign like that, you want to try to use as much information as you have about the customer to focus on what they might be interested in. And you want to keep your design and offer language streamlined — don’t try to squash too many options into a single email or people don’t know what to click on.
• Sales: With a sales email, you’re probably offering an incentive to people to buy something. Or at least to check it out. The key is to know what motivates different people in your email database. Some may be motivated by discounts, others free shipping, and others just want the newest and hottest and fastest thing.

List Building
OK, we want to send an email, but where do we get all these people? I’m sure there are other ways, but here’s the four big ones.

1. Email sign up form on the website, perhaps during a purchase.
2. Product registration online or mail-in cards.
3. List rentals or purchases: With these, you can only send the list one email where your call to action is “please subscribe because we have a lot to offer you.” If they don’t actively subscribe, you can’t send them any more emails.
4. Salesforce.com or whatever customer management system the client uses: With this, you have to be careful. Small businesses often get away with importing from their CRM, even though people didn’t explicitly say, “sign me up for this list.” But this company probably has a policy similar to the list rental or purchase policy due to spam issues (see below). It’s not cool, and I always recommend against it.

List Cleaning
List cleaning comes after a mature list has been used for a while, and there are people who simply aren’t opening or clicking. It’s not inherently bad, especially with the economy like this, but it screws up the numbers on which you are judged. It makes you as the project manager look bad.

So maybe once a year with a big account, you might send out an email that says, “Hey, if this email newsletter isn’t right for you, maybe try different content that you WOULD like. If not, this will be your last email. Click here to keep receiving it.”

Techy Stuff
Different email programs (technically, these are called “clients”) have different HTML rendering issues. It’s a giant pain in the ass for the industry. Your programmers will know all the ins and outs of this, but sufficed to say, they need to time to test their HTML in different email programs. And email will not render (look) the same in every email program. It’s the same as testing web pages in different browsers, except instead of four major browsers, there are like 10 major email clients. SWEET!

The good news is that the company’s database will tell you what the lion’s share of recipients use. That lets you focus the team’s time.

One other thing: most email is designed using very old-school HTML with tables and junk. It’s TERRIBLE. Most web designers would hate it. But that’s just the way things go with email due to all the conflicting programs/clients.

Spam
The company probably has a long list of prohibited words that tend to set off spam filters. Stuff like “free” and “discount.” Your writers will need to get creative to work around that. But again, you should be sending content that is relevant to the user, so hopefully there are multiple subject lines depending on the user’s prior click pattern. Content within the email might also set off alarms, so… you know, work with your writers.

This company, like all email service providers, is likely in a constant battle with Internet Service Providers about spam. Being very diligent about having a good list, not renting or buying lists very often, and unsubscribing people quickly are all critical. This lets them avoid being “blacklisted” by email powerhouses like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and others.

Text Only
Most emails sent via email service providers are probably HTML based. Some users may choose to have text-only emails sent. Or increasingly, they may have a mobile version sent. Those emails need to be much simpler. Line breaks, ALL CAPS, lines of hyphens, and bullets are all good ways to get people to read text-only email