I wish there was more we could do to get email marketers to use the tools available to them to help increase reader response. So much effort is put into making campaigns look beautiful but often the technology to help increase reader statistics are never used. So, on your next campaign, please consider the following tools to help make your emails a success.

1. Split Testing

This one is a no-brainer.  How awesome would it be to be able to test which headlines or titles would be most successful before sending a newspaper or book to print?  I guarantee if an author could do this he would because more purchases equal dollars in his pocket.  With email marking, this is easy and it’s called split testing. With split-testing, any reputable email platform will allow you stage a few options, hit send and let the system pick the winner based on the criteria you choose (opens and click-thru’s) and then delivers the remainder of your campaign to the winner. We’ve seen open rates at 20% spike to 45% and click-thru rates jump from 4% to over 10%, just by trying two different subject lines.

Benefit? Find out quickly what works and get a better response rate.

2 . List Segmenting

OK- another no brainer: Targeted emails are obviously more well received so let’s stop batching and blasting those emails to the entire mailing list and take a minute to segment that list.  By importing contacts into a single list with relevant fields of data for your market you can then search for specific criteria within that one list.  For instance if you would like to send an email to everyone on your list with a 92009 zip code you can, or even what products or services a group purchased previously and so on.

Benefit? Cleaner management of data, more targeted mailings, greater response rates.

3. Triggered Mailings/Auto-responders

Let your email marketing go to work for you…and forget about it.  It just takes a little time to set up a series of timed emails but once it’s done you can put your feet up and know that your customers are being informed or reminded of your services automatically.  Scenario: Someone visits your web site and requests a white paper or a trial of your software or perhaps they made a purchase.  Connect that information to your platform and stage mailings to “auto” deploy based on the criteria you set.

Benefit? Let technology go to work for you and keep the right (timed) communication in front of your audience.  Multiple touches and BAM!  They take action!

4. Personalization

This is email marketing 101, but do it in a creative fashion.  Think outside the box and work with the data you know about your subscribers.  Why not personalize an email with some details you know that wouldn’t be what you’d typically store in an email database.  Here’s one, “Hi Brett – we feel horrible.  Your birthday was yesterday and we were late.”  How clever.  Now, I may know intuitively you automated this somehow, but you cleverly spin it to sound human (we made an error!).  Have a purchase history on your customers stored somewhere?  Why not use that to merge the last product purchased or the last interaction with you.

Benefit? Email is all about relevancy.  You must know who your prospects and customers are, right?  Why not demonstrate that?  You’ll keep them engaged MUCH longer.

5. Social Follow & Social Sharing

At this point, if you are not working your email marketing and social networking together, you’re probably living under a rock.  You have to go where the eyeballs are and email/social is a powerful one-two punch.  If you have a Twitter feed or a Facebook fan page like us, you need icons in your emails to not only prompt your customers to follow you, but also to share the content inside your emails with their networks.  Forward to a friend is still a standard and many subscribers will use this, but the NEW forward is really the share feature.  It allows folks to connect this with their personal and professional networks quickly and easily and may garner you some new subscribers.

Benefit? Everyone knows hundreds, sometimes thousands of people you or I don’t. Why not tap that? Let them remarket on your behalf.

So there you have it.  These things are within your grasp today, and as always, the eConnect Email marketing platform lets you set these things up quite easily.  If you need help setting any of these things up in your account, as always, you can reach out to us at anytime.

This month we will focus on some simple rules to follow for email marketing compliance, delivery, and the respect of your readers.  Also, make your emails pop with our Spring Fever Sale…details at the bottom of this email (ends April 1st)!

http://econnectemail.com/images/Newsletters/March/index.html

Our newsletter this month focuses on helpful tips to engage your reader, when to connect with them, and keeping your relationship clean with simple ethics reminders.   We know that you will think about email marketing in a fresh way after reading this month’s tips and you may see your relationship with your readers in a whole new way.  Also, check out our special offers this month at the bottom of this email!

http://econnectemail.com/images/Newsletters/Feb/index.html

For essential tips on creating interesting emails that will get your message delivered and keep readers subscribed, check out our January Newsletter:

http://econnectemail.com/images/Newsletters/Jan/index.html

Here’s how to make your product remarkable, according to Seth Godin – it’s about getting your ideas to spread, and to get your ideas to spread, you must be remarkable so that your ideas are “worth making a remark about.”  Godin uses a Japanese word called “Otaku” to describe what he’s after.  The word has a bad rep in Japan, but is used elsewhere as a slang word for fandom.

So here’s the million-dollar question for legitimate email marketers – how do you turn a newsletter subscriber from your regular site-surfing reader into an Otaku?  Godin says it’s about getting the right target audience, and not about getting 10,000 new sign-ups per week for your newsletter.

Unfortunately, the latter seems to be the obsession with many email marketers nowadays.  What Godin is proposing, is for marketers to sit back and study your audience – the genuine subscribers, not the ones who are just in it for the free whitepapers and perks.  If you start focusing on those who are listening, on those who want to listen to you, you would have found yourself an Otaku base, who will read what you write and help you spread your message.

Now, that’s the very reason we’ve integrated Tagging into our email marketing system.  When we started to redesign our email marketing system to reach the masses, we asked ourselves: What do marketers want?  What do marketers need?  What’s missing in all the email marketing systems out there?  Is it about the ability to send 1 million emails in five seconds?  Is it about the ability to have unlimited lists and subscribers?  Is it about making sure all your emails get to your subscribers and not their spam boxes?

Then one day, Johnny said, “Let’s tag,” and we realized we’d just found the missing link.  Imagine a simple tool that could give you the ability to really understand your subscribers.  You could then target the right people in your mailing lists, ensuring that everyone always receives information that’s relevant to them.  Once that happens, your readers will spread the word.  And here’s how you do that on eConnect Email – by tagging all your links with carefully chosen tags, so that in time, you will know exactly what your subscribers want.

So take some time, watch the video and see how you can relate it to your own email marketing campaign. Again, it’s all about getting the right people to read what you have to say, not about getting as many sign ups as possible for your newsletter.