Back in May I moderated the “Monetising your email marketing” panel at the annual IIA Congress.

In the quick kick-off of the session I presented what I consider to be the 7 essentials to have in place if a company wants to see Return on Investment on their email marketing campaigns.

1. Set goals

What do you want to accomplish with your email marketing? Overall and with this send? Is it sales (immediate, repeat, cross-sell, etc.)? Traffic to the website? Is it ot nurture a lead or a customer relationship? This will inform your content and who you target. (I’ve written about this here.)

2. Know your subscribers

The more you know about your subscribers, the easier it will be to craft emails that are relevant to them. By being relevant, the email is more likely to turn into a sale. You can build profiles on your subscribers through your opt-in form, by their actions in emails (with metrics such as clicks), as well as their inactions. (I’ve written about this here and here.)

3. Understand life cycles

Knowing about the life cycle of your products and services will help you set the frequency that best matches where your recipients are in the life cycle. This includes the cycle through the lifetime value of your customer, the cycle of repeat purchases, and the cycle through from obtaining to retaining customers. (I’ve written about this here.)

4. Target by segmentation

By moving beyond one-size-fits-all, or broadcast, emails, you can tailor emails to groups of subscribers. Segmentation can be based on geography, demography and/or activity status, among many other attributes. (I’ve written about this here.)

5. Inspire action

What is your Call To Action (CTA)? This is what you want people to do - which is probably the essence of your monetisation goals. Are you actually making it easy for people to act on your email? Make your CTAs clear, easy and prominent. What do you want them to do? Purchase? Register? Download? Forward? (I’ve written about this here.)

6. Test for best results

Being able to measure your results has to be one of THE top tools available to you with email. With today’s technology it’s also quite easy to accomplish quickly - so there’s no excuse not to test. Elements to test include time, day, frequency, the sender line, subject line, layout, copy and call to action. You’ll be seeking best results that match your goals - not simply most opened or most clicked, etc. (I’ve written about this here and here.)

7. Measure and learn

Email marketing is an ongoing process. You should establish your own benchmarks and create an ongoing trend sheet to assess what’s working, what’s not working and spot trends. Metrics include delivered, bounced, clicks (overall, individual, articles), opens, subscribers (signed up, signed off) and conversions. (I’ve written about this here.)

Companies often say to me “but our products and services aren’t very interesting - how do we create an email newsletter that will be interesting and compelling?”

Well, you know what? I don’t care what your company’s products and/or services are. Wing nuts? Great! Because I really, really believe that every single company has a great email newsletter in them.

And here’s the secret: You just need to be passionate about your subject. Your company should strive to produce the best [insert your product/service here] email newsletter out there! Passion and knowledge jump out from the page - and it will get your readers excited as well. Let them know they’re making the right choice by listening to you because you know your product and service inside out. You are PASSIONATE about the beauty and design of what you offer. No one in your industry offers the customer service you offer … you get my point.

Here’s the best place to start. Your database. Send only to the people that want to hear from you. Who you are sending the newsletter to? If you have a huge database and you have no idea who’s on it, you’re wasting your time. By being savvy in the building of your database, e.g. having a well-crafted opt-in form, you will attract and create a list of prospects who WANT to hear from you, who WANT to get your newsletter because they have expressed a specific interest in your products and your services.

That’s the first part. Next you need to assemble a newsletter that delivers PASSIONATE content about these products and services. Useful information. Valuable information. Information that saves them time and helps them make a wise decision in their purchase (with you!). Your newsletter is friendly and conveys that passion YOU feel about what you have to offer.

Now you need to spend time designing a newsletter of beauty. Well designed and well rendered newsletters help convey your passion. (Both HTML and text can be things of beauty.) People are drawn in by good design. Design that is easy to read, appealing to the senses and easy to navigate.

Finally, get the send rhythm right. This is the frequency. You do that by matching the purchasing lifecycles of your products and services with where your prospects are in that lifecycle.

Okay, yes, these are tall orders. But in today’s world where people can find anything faster and cheaper on the internet … this PASSION is what is going to make you stand out.

Read more about this:

Why do people like (and don’t like) email newsletters?
Ten things to spice up an email newsletter
Ten things you should have in your opt-in form

I recently spoke at the Inbox/Outbox conference held in London 17/18 June. I sat in on Nate Elliott of JupiterResearch’s keynote talk (very informative) about email trends in the context of online communications … and something he said just jumped out at me.

The practice of using Do-not-reply email addresses in the from field.

He says do-not-reply email addresses should be considered an obsolete 20th practice.

I couldn’t agree more.

We no longer live in a do-not-reply world. Companies need to realise that we, ALL of us, want and now expect to be able to reply - to engage with, to interact. Immediately. From facebook, articles posted within online publications, blog posts to websites that feature user-reviews of products and services … we now live in a “we want to reply” kind of world. In fact, it’s heading quickly towards the “we have a right to reply”!

I contend that it reflects badly on any company that uses do-not-reply emails in any context, no matter how large the organisation. And it doesn’t matter if we don’t even need or want to communicate you the company - it creates a perception of barriers.

With companies keen to jump on the social networking bandwagon, it’s ironic that there are probably a good number of them that actually use the do-not-reply in their email marketing campaigns. Yet they don’t see the irony in this. Companies want to control WHEN customers can interact with them – and it just doesn’t work that way anymore. A company must strive to strip back as many barriers and layers as possible to allow people to actually get in contact with a real person at the company.

Every email sent from a company, even a transactional email, should allow for two-way communication. There should be processes in place to handle emails coming back into the company. If it is an impossibility to have someone to handle the incoming emails, then I would consider it acceptable to have an initial automatic reply that gives the recipient contact points in relation to the specific question they have. Sort of like that automated phone system that says “press 1 for this, press 2 for that…”

Again, in today’s world, since anything can be found cheaper and faster online, it can come down to customer care, and the ability to get customer satisfaction immediately that will retain your customers. If you don’t do this, you risk people writing about their bad experiences trying to communicate with your company on the many, many social network sites available around the internet.

I recently attended an Email Newsletter Usability one day event in London, hosted by the Nielsen Norman Group. They’ve just published the third edition of their extremely useful Email Newsletter Usability report.

Usability Guru Jakob Nielsen, who’s behind the reports, continues to believe that well-done email newsletters are one of the top investments a company can make. (I wrote about this in a previous post.)

But the points made during this event drove home the fact that it has to be an email newsletter of value to the recipient. While email marketing has a zillion benefits for marketers - in the end all efforts and time spent should be about delivering value to the recipient. This is the only way marketers will see ROI in their email marketing.

So …

What do people value in a good email newsletter?

• Enjoyable to read (offers at least one: interesting, relevant or useful information)
• Easy to sign up to (didn’t create barriers or ask for too much information. Earlier post about this here.)
• From a “good source” - known for expertise in the field, or a well-known brand.
• Easy to navigate - well designed, looks good, easy to read more then one article.
• Well written content
• Easy to share
• “Saves time”
• Provides automatic updates
• Offers exclusive content (special offers not available anywhere else)
• Arrives at times that are convenient

Some of the survey participants’ specific reasons:

“Keeps me informed about things that I wouldn’t otherwise research.”
“Reminds me of things I would otherwise forget.”
“Teaches me new things I’d otherwise pass over.”
“I do not have to fetch the information actively. I can just sit back and get the information I need”
“Free”
“I can click delete if I don’t want it.”
“Current information could lead to a competitive edge.”

OK that’s what the best email newsletters provide. Here’s why people DON’T like a newsletter they receive.

• No useful content - nothing useful. no special offers. no new information.
• Hard to read - maybe it’s one big image that’s blocked and appears to be an empty email. Maybe the design and layout of the text makes it hard to read and decipher.
• Ignores permission - comes too frequently (or feels like it does) - or more frequently than promised. Or, the sign up appears to generate lots of third party mailings.
• “Hello, are you ready to buy?” * - Each newsletter gives the same feeling you would get if you walked into a shop and five sales people descended on you immediately to ask you if you are going to make a purchase. The newsletter is all sales, no information. All pressure, no enjoyment.

(*Thanks to Stephannie Miller at ReturnPath for this great phrase.)

This is just one of the stats I picked up at the Email Newsletter Usability one day event last week in London. It was based on the Nielsen Norman Group’s recently released third edition of their Email Newsletter Usability report. The session was presented by Amy Schade, who co-authored the three studies with Jakob Nielsen. We talked about the usability of email newsletters ALL DAY LONG - a real treat for this email geek

So, back to this: why are 40% of potential subscribers not completing the sign up process?

Here are some of the reasons:

• Form not working - error messages.
• Too many pages to go through during the registration process.
• Double opt-in email (the final click) was not completed by the potential subscriber. (Reasons included: email never arrived or didn’t arrive immediately, was filtered, wasn’t recognised, never got around to clicking it.)
• Too many required fields.
• Too much personal information required in exchange for “just a newsletter”.
• An account (create a password and username, etc.) was mandatory to activate in order to get the newsletter. Too much effort for a ‘free’ newsletter.

Anything here you need to rethink about in your own sign up process? It’s apparent by the reasons given that the key to success is ease and simplicity. Easy to sign up, and fast to complete. No barriers. Don’t start a relationship by pressing for as much information as your marketing department thinks they can get away with - but instead ask for enough to allow you to send timely, targeted and relevant emails right away.

(I’ll be posting more of my insights from this fantastic day long conference.)

• Jul 15 : 7 essentials for monetising your emails
• Jul 9 : Every company has a great email newsletter in them
• Jul 2 : Do-not-reply email addresses: anti-social networking.
• Jun 23 : Why do people like (and don’t like) email newsletters?
• May 29 : 60%: The percentage of people who complete a sign up process