The Strategic Checklist for Email Success

A

nother key to email success is developing, reviewing and refining

a comprehensive strategy. We have defined a checklist of strategic

imperatives based on our experience in working with some of the world’s

leading organizations to develop and deliver successful email initiatives. This

checklist can serve as a guide in identifying and determining the strategic areas

that will help your email campaigns succeed today as well as into the future.

Use this checklist as the cornerstone of your email efforts. If you can address

each of these areas with detail and certainty, your email campaigns will most

likely be effective and rewarding to you and your audiences.

Brand Affinity

More than ever, your brand is important to your audiences. In this age of

information overload, people create perceptions of organizations in a split

second, and expectations are driven higher with each touch-point. Every

aspect of your email marketing campaigns needs to be audited against your

brand personality.

Strategies for ensuring your brand is represented and strengthened through

your email campaigns.

Message Design:

Are your messages accurately reflecting your brand? The

design and appearance of your email messages create a lasting impression to

your audience.

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Relevant Content:

Does the content and the tone of the message you

communicate through your email campaigns complement and strengthen

your core brand messages?

Landing Pages:

Can you and do you control the branding of your landing

pages and the destinations to which you are sending responders? The

places they will go to need to reflect your brand as much as the email

message itself.

Opt-in Processes:

Do your opt-in pages and processes accurately present

your brand? Remember, first impressions count, and opt-in pages often set

impressions and expectations.

Welcome Messages:

Do your welcome messages accurately present your

brand? Just like opt-in pages, first impressions count, and welcome

messages often set impressions and expectations.

Strategic Partners:

Can you and are you aligning yourself with valuable

partners in order to expand your reach? Try to identify other organizations

that can help.

Segmentation

Remember breaking an audience into distinct, more manageable segments that

are likely to behave in a similar manner has long been a fundamental principle

of marketing. Email provides for some incredible segmentation power, as well

as the ability to truly take advantage of small audience segments that might

otherwise be too costly to communicate with.

Segmentation strategies to help you better target, communicate with and

create actionable items for various groups within your lists.

Demogra

p

hics:

Are you using every piece of data you have on a person to

its fullest? Beyond first name, state, or other basic data, what opportunities

can be uncovered by focusing on demographic segmenting?

ClickStream Activity:

Are you segmenting based on what a person does

after they click on a link? Web site activity can often provide some great

segmentation opportunities.

Conversion/Purchase Activity:

Can you segment lists based on purchase

or conversion history? Try to integrate any conversion data into your

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The Strategic Checklist for Email Success

segmentation processes. Remember, conversions don’t always need to

be purchases.

Gathering Additional Information:

Do you have strategies for gathering

more data about each of your recipients? After you gain credibility, try

asking for a few small bits of information within your email messages.

Email Activity:

Are you utilizing email activity to segment? Try

segmenting on email opening, click-throughs or repeating behaviors.

Variable Content:

Are you providing different segments with different

content? Variable content will provide more relevancy and stronger

actionable items.

Polling/Survey:

Are you taking short polls or surveys with your email

recipients? Quick polls often get good responses and let your recipients

interact with you.

Compliance

With so many changing areas of technical and marketing compliance, you need

to revisit your email initiatives and audit them for compliance.

Compliance strategies that will ensure you are ahead of the curve on legal

and best practice issues.

CAN-SPAM:

Are you aware of CAN-SPAM regulations and confident you

have all of the pieces in place?

Sender ID and SPF Records:

Have you published SenderID and SPF

records and tested them?

Unsubscribe Processes:

Are you confident your unsubscribe processes are

consistent, accurate and immediate? Are you confident unsubscribe data

is getting distributed to the necessary data repositories for consistency?

Bounce Management:

Are you confident your bounce processes are

consistent, accurate and immediate? Are you confident bounce data is

getting handled properly by applying rules to specific bounces?

Privacy Policy:

Have you reviewed your privacy policy for accuracy? Are

you confident it is up to date? Has it been audited by legal counsel?

The Strategic Checklist for Email Success

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Metrics

Email marketing creates many specific data points that can be used to gain

insight. Understanding what you are capturing and putting that data to

its best use can result in continuous success and provide knowledge about

your audiences.

Strategies for utilizing metrics to gain insight and drive further success.

ClickStream:

Can you and are you looking “beyond the click” at metrics

within your Web site or email click destinations? Oftentimes, considerable

insight can be gained when you can see where a recipient went after they

clicked on a link in an email.

Conversions:

Can you and are you looking “beyond the click” at

conversions within your Web site or email click destinations? Conversions

could be actual purchases, contact forms, or anything that is a “valuable

action” for your organization.

The Basics (opens, clicks):

Can you look at open patterns and click-

through details? Are you comparing messages?

Long-term Trends:

Can you and are you looking at message “cycles”

over longer periods of time? Often, looking at longer-term trends can

give you a different perspective than looking at specific and individual

message results.

Testing

Because of the immediacy of email data, testing should become an integral

part of your email efforts. Knowing what to test, how to test it and what to

glean from the results will make your email initiatives perform to their fullest.

Consider strategies for gaining insight and optimizing performance of email

messages and campaigns. Email is a perfect medium for testing many aspects

and gaining results quickly and accurately.

Subject Line:

Do you test your subject lines for optimal open rates

and activity? Oftentimes, specific variations of subject lines clearly

outperform others.

Creative:

Do you test different styles of messages with various offers and

graphic treatments?

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The Strategic Checklist for Email Success

Content:

Do you test messages with different content and content types to

gain insight on what your recipients are responding to?

Landing Pages:

Do you create and direct your audience to different

landing pages and review what destinations performed the best? Creatively

testing where the click takes them and what that looks and acts like can

give you considerable insight.

Segmentation:

Can you and do you segment your audiences in creative

ways and review any differences in performance or behaviors? Creative

segmentation often leads to breakthrough communications.