There are three fundamental types of email advertisers can send to customers and prospects:

1. Relational: Relational emails convey special entitlements or recognition of the recipients. Examples include frequent customer discounts, early-bird specials, holiday or birthday salutations, thank you notes, newsletters, etc.

2. Promotional:  Promotional emails invite recipients to participate in special sales or discounts.  These can sometimes overlap with certain relational emails and should include a strong call to action surrounding the limited time frame for the promotion.

3. Informational:  Informational emails seek to ingratiate your audience to your product or service by providing added value outside of the express product offering.  These emails seek to enhance customer or prospect relationships by offering educational materials, advice or information that might not be readily available elsewhere or is particularly insightful or novel.

It is important to be consistent in your approach to email marketing.  By carefully creating customer and prospect expectations, your emails will have a higher likelihood of getting opened, read and acted upon.  Also, do not underestimate the significance of the “From” line in your emails.  DoubleClick, which is now a part of Google, has completed consumer surveys where responses indicated that 60% of consumers contend that the “From” line is the most instrumental determinant of whether they open or delete an email.  One final consideration should not be overlooked in your email efforts: CAN-SPAM compliance.  All emails should include the address of the sender and an option to unsubscribe in addition to other compliance requirements. The Federal Trade Commission provides a primer on compliance at:  http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business.

Email marketing is a cost effective means of engaging your audience.  According to the Direct Marketing Association’s “The Power of Direct Marketing”, carefully constructed email campaigns can deliver return on investment in excess of $40.  We encourage you to contact Rise Interactive if you would like to explore our email services further.

1. Targeted Mailing Lists

A company’s message is only as good as its list; a list is only as good as you make it. In order to obtain desired results, companies must be aware of their target market. It is neither efficient nor effective to send your email campaign to “everybody and their mother.” Getting the results you want—whether it be brand awareness, an increase in sales, etc.—requires a well-trimmed list that is all encompassing of your ideal audience. With well-targeted lists, companies are more likely to remain in the consumer’s mind and less likely to end up in the trash.

2. Impactful Subject Line

You will never get a second chance to make a first impression. That one initial glance is typically all you get before people will cast their judgment. If you don’t break away from the clutter, you will be lost among it, or worse, disposed. To effectively capture the attention of your audience, it is imperative to craft your subject line in a way which will entice the recipient into opening it. This may not be the easiest of tasks, but if executed properly, you’re one step closer to getting your company’s message across to its potential customers.

A great subject line should be three things: enticing, concise and relevant. There’s nothing wrong with a little word-play, or even adding a bit of drama to a subject line, if it will catch your audience’s attention and adhere to your company’s personality. Keeping your subject line concise will increase your email’s chances of being read and ensures that your entire subject line meets the character limit (in order to be completely visible to the viewer). Finally, a subject line that is relevant to the recipient will increase the chances of him or her reading your body copy.

3. Smart Formatting

Have you ever heard the phrase, “all fluff and no substance”? This is something that companies want to avoid with their email marketing campaigns. It’s great that you want to attract potential customers with a bunch of pretty graphics, but let’s be realistic: the more graphics you have, the more likely your pretty email will end up in the spam filter (as it will appear to be direct mail marketing). To avoid this, have enough text in the email so that the recipient can understand your message without needing to see the graphics. Many times, graphics will show up as blank boxes and some people will not want to download email content, anyways. Make sure your message is received—choose substance over fluff.

4. Relevant Content

Now it comes to the “meat and bones” of your entire email campaign—the body copy. The key to getting peoples’ eyes on your email content is to ensure that it is fully relevant to the subject line. With a relevant email body, you will be less likely to disappoint and more likely to, once again, stay out of the trash. Most importantly, the body copy must be relevant to the recipient. There are no added benefits in blasting your email campaign to people who will not find your content relevant in some way. Keeping your content relevant with your readers will solidify your company’s credibility and hopefully, help your company to boost customer loyalty.

5. Effective Call-to-action

So now you are aware of some useful tips for your company’s email marketing campaign—targeted mailing lists, impactful subject lines and relevant content. There’s one thing missing: encouraging the recipient to act. An effective call-to-action will motivate the reader to complete an action (e.g. visit a website, become a Twitter follower, etc.) and be accessible enough through the convenience of clicking on a direct link to the related URL. Understanding the importance of a call-to-action will set your company apart from the competition.

With these five must have’s for an effective email marketing campaign, you can be one step closer to gaining credibility from potential customers and growing your business.

Among the many individuals who are already utilizing Wufoo, there are a number of companies who use this handy tool, as well. Microsoft, Twitter and Sony—to name a few—have implemented Wufoo’s form-building capabilities onto their homepages. Judging from their pages, one would think their forms were created by the work of IT personnel over a span of a few days. In reality, someone from the company spent a mere couple of minutes designing each form!

The magic behind Wufoo’s lightning-fast form-making is its automated script, backend and database builder. With Wufoo, a user can choose from over 80 themes and templates to create in a matter of minutes. These themes and templates are customizable to reflect each company’s unique brand identity in their forms. In regards to price, the services range from entirely free up to $199.95 per month. This range is beneficial in that it caters to a wide variety of users and their respective budgets.

One of the most attractive things about Wufoo is its user-friendly design. It’s incredibly simple to start creating custom forms for your website; since Wufoo hosts everything, all you need is an internet connection and a browser. When using the service, your form-building options are virtually endless: everything from Account Management to Media Collection to Online Order Processing forms—if you need it, there’s probably a way to create it! Yet another perk of using Wufoo is the user’s ability to not only harvest data from his or her form, but also manage that data. Wufoo users have the ability to view data collected via forms on their websites and even create customized reports from the information. These reports can be exported as Excel documents by the click of a mouse. Now that’s what I call a painless way to extract and organize data about your company and its products!

At the outset, for business participating in these offers, it seems like a great marketing opportunity. Companies get their name out by offering a discount on their products or services, but don’t have to pay marketing fees to drive traffic to their website or storefront. While this type of marketing has become significantly more popular, it may not be the best choice for every business.

TechCrunch has recently been running a series on Groupon and similar companies that offer coupon deals and their negative effects (http://tcrn.ch/nFMb8J). While their series has been painting a fairly negative picture of Groupon, it may be beneficial to some companies. Here are a few tips on how to decide whether or not to jump on the “coupon deal bandwagon”:

1. Look at your Company and Competitors

If you’re a small business with a tight budget, a coupon deal may not be a good idea. TechCrunch spoke specifically with a small business that tried to run a Groupon deal, which failed terribly and had a significant impact on the business. Larger companies that have the wiggle room to run with something that carries a risk are better candidates for coupon deals. If your competitors are running with coupon deals, you may want to seriously consider it as well, but not at the risk of losing revenue or your business. Despite the fact that a coupon deal seems relatively low-risk, the effects (positive or negative) will be greater in a small business than a large one.

2. Check the Numbers

It’s especially important to look at your average sale and determine if a coupon deal will benefit you in the end. Coupon deal companies take a cut (usually high) of the revenue generated from the price of the coupon, so if your average sale is low and your records indicate that a typical sale will not go above and beyond the coupon deal, it’s probably not a good idea for your business. Do the math yourself to figure out what coupon deal would be profitable and helpful to your business before deciding to run with one.

3. Consider Your Audience

If you run a business that is primarily local and caters to local interests, a coupon deal may not be right for you. While a Groupon or Google Offer may drive traffic to your business for a short period of time, the likelihood that it will create a loyal base of customers that will return to your business is low. If you’re looking for a short-term jump in your business, then you may want to consider this option. Otherwise, it’s probably not a smart long-term investment.

4. Check Your Flexibility

Most coupon deals are not scheduled or controlled by the merchant themselves, but are dictated by the deal company. If the timing of its release could significantly sway your coupon deal, it may pose a major obstacle to its success. Ideally, your business should be flexible enough to handle any fluctuations in the timeline of the deal’s release.

5. Remember the Exchange

Even though most coupon deals will allow a full payout of your revenue share within 60 days of the deal’s release, remember that you will be serving up your products or services at a discounted price until the expiration of the deal (usually a year). While the benefits might outweigh the disadvantages at first, remember that the impact on your business will last for as long as the deal is active.

In conclusion, the most important thing you can do before deciding to run with a coupon deal is to be informed. Look at all aspects of your business and try to evaluate the pros and cons before making a final decision. This decision could significantly help or hurt your business, so be 100% confident in your choice!

1. ALWAYS comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

About two months ago, I went to the website of a very prominent business and signed up to receive more information about membership. Soon after, I started getting emails almost daily from an employee using his personal email. Not only were these messages poorly formatted, not personalized and in general irritating - I had no way to unsubscribe from them. In the end, I had to send a personal email to this employee asking to be removed from his emails.

The CAN-SPAM Act includes completely reasonable guidelines, so there is no excuse not to follow them. You can find out more about it at the FTC’s website: http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business

2. Personalize

Most email marketers will include a first and/or last name when they send out their messages, but personalization to a further extent can vastly improve the success of a given campaign. If possible, gathering demographic information is the best place to start.

By segmenting your email list and customizing the content for particular age groups, certain types of buyers, people with particular habits or even geographic area will make the recipient feel like you are truly targeting them. Instead of getting a generalized message about something going on with your company, this personalization will help to increase interest along with your open rate.

3. Don’t waste your recipient’s time

This seems like a pretty common sense rule to follow, but email marketers small and large have made this mistake. I recently opted-in to the list of a national clothing retailer who now emails me daily. The content is very nearly the same and the offers are nothing new, so they are wasting my time.

Remember to moderate the number of emails you send out so that your recipients don’t waste their time deleting all your messages and then unsubscribing from your list. If you plan on sending emails on a very frequent basis, make sure that the people opting in are aware of this with terms like “Daily Updates”, “Daily Newsletter”, etc. Also make sure that the content you send out is relevant, interesting and worth the time of the reader.

If your recipients truly gain something from your emails, your campaign will be more successful. It is far better to send out one unique email that will generate interest than seven similar emails that might increase your abuse rate and unsubscribes.

 Summary

When taking on the task of a new email marketing campaign, remember to follow common sense and to think about what your preferences are in getting emails. There aren’t many people out there who would want to receive ten emails from the same company in a week that has nothing to do with them or their interests, so remember to keep it legal, relevant, and interesting.

Brand Metrics Calculator

So how does this work?  Let’s say the following is a list of potential brand touch points that could be achieved by multiple online marketing channels:

- website Visit
- Banner Ad View
- Video Views
- Lead Submission

First, let’s take the value of the most valuable touch point, usually a lead inquiry or transaction.  Then we assign a value.  Let’s assume that the value is $100.    Next we try to figure out the rough conversion rate of each touch point to our highest value conversion such as the following:

5 Video Views = 1 Lead Submission

200 website Visits = 1 Lead Submission

10,000 banner views = 1 Lead Submission

Now we have a common denominator, and we can determine the value of these touch points:

$20 per Video View

$.50 per Website Visit

$.01 per Banner Impression

From here, we can determine how to best spend our media budget to generate brand touch points.  Long-term, the objective is to constantly measure performance, incorporate historic data and recalibrate brand metric values to determine how to best allocate budget.  Happy branding!

At Rise, we believe that developing the proper strategy for the following areas is critical to your e-mail marketing success:

-Design
-Content
-List Building
-Segmentation
-Deployment
-Analytics

Design Strategy

The design of an e-mail is an extremely important factor in leading recipients down a path to conversion. The look and feel of your e-mail must closely reflect your brand’s identity, creating a seamless experience for the user. Additionally, be sure the e-mail’s table of contents, section headers and calls-to-action are designed and placed in a way that command the reader’s attention.  This process could include adding design elements to text including larger fonts, bolding, using different colors, highlighting text, etc. If these items stand out from the rest of the content, you increase the chances of your audience reading and engaging in your e-mail.

Content Strategy

Though the design of an e-mail is very important, it is ultimately the content that will drive traffic to your site and increase conversions. It is important that you deliver compelling content whether it is an offer they can’t’ refuse, something newsworthy or it just makes them laugh.  If the information provided in your e-mail does not peak the reader’s interest and instead essentially wastes their time, the chances of them opening your company’s e-mail the next time you deploy has just been severely diminished.

One of the largest challenges in this marketing channel is getting recipients to open the e-mail in the first place.  Therefore, the most important item of content you provide may very well be the subject line.  Some best practices include keeping the subject under 50 characters, avoiding spam-identifying words like “free” and adding localized words such as city names.  Many more tips are available from Mail Chimp, one of the leaders in e-mail marketing.

List Building Strategy

Having a list of pre-qualified recipients and industry contacts that have opted in to receive your targeted messaging is indispensible.  This list can be built out by including all of the contacts you meet at trade shows and/or networking events as well as adding current and prospective customers and partners. Also, adding links to your newsletter sign up (which should be on your website) to your e-mail signatures and your social media pages will help to build out the list.

Although it is not ideal, many companies (e.g. airfare sites) will choose to buy third-party lists in order to expand their reach.  If you have to use this method it is important to check the legal status of the list, making sure you will not break any laws when you deploy.  There are many other best practices that should be considered when marketing to a third-party list that are detailed on Charlwood’s website.

Segmentation Strategy

Segmenting your list allows you to divide it into sub-lists based on like interests, demographics and so on. This enables you to deliver the most targeted and relevant messages to each member in your directory. An effective segmentation strategy will therefore reduce deployment cost, increase conversion rate and improve ROI.  If your company has multiple products or services that appeal to different demographics, you should make sure that you do not send unqualified segments of your base e-mails about offerings that they are not interested in.  For example, if you are a nationwide sporting goods store – when you run a promotion on downhill ski equipment, you probably shouldn’t include your customer’s who live in Florida.  On the flip, your customer base in Iowa probably isn’t too interested in Deep Sea fishing gear.

Deployment Strategy

The effective deployment of e-mails is an often overlooked, yet extremely important, variable towards the success of an e-mail marketing campaign. The day sent, time of day and frequency of deployments weigh heavily on what open rates will be.  Though there is no time that is officially recognized as the best time of the week to blast e-mails, most agree that the middle of the week is ideal, avoiding Mondays and Fridays as many are out of the office.  To that point, make sure you do not swamp your mailing list with e-mails, deploying only when you have relevant content to communicate.  Also, identify your company as the sender and include a compelling subject line to grab your audience’s attention and increase your open rate.

Analytics Strategy

Effective analytics, reporting and analysis are the crux to any Internet marketing campaign. Each e-mail campaign manager should be sure to have the proper tags in place and reports available in your analytics package so that you can determine open rates, what links within the e-mail are most attractive and how the user is behaving once they are on your site.  This data can then be used to optimize future e-mails and better funnel those who click through to your site towards conversion.

If you successfully carry out each of these six campaign elements, over time you will see an increase in Web traffic, conversions and ROI. Beyond that, your e-mails will deliver value to your current and potential customers, positioning you as an industry leader and valued resource and/or business partner.