Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing - Haymarket

Which audience is yours?
If you keep all eight audiences in mind when you design your emails,
you multiply your chances of reaching the broadest spectrum
of readers.
Stefan Pollard is director of consulting services at EmailLabs. You can reach
him at spollard@emaillabs.com.
E-mail marketing fuels
social media
JANINE POPICK
Janine Popick
Verical Response
We do a lot of social networking
here at
VerticalResponse to reach our
desired audience, which is mostly
small businesses. The list of
resources to choose from is seemingly
never-ending: Facebook,
Myspace, Squidoo, blogs, communities
or forums — never has
there been so many alternatives
to bring you closer to your customers.
Exciting, isn’t it?
If your business is active with
any of these, then you know that
it’s not a slam-dunk to drive traffic and spark activity. That’s why
e-mail can play such an important role in alerting them to activity,
therefore potentially driving more traffic. Here’s how we’ve made
e-mail fuel our social networking activities:
Blogs A few years ago, when blogs were still sort of new, we
started one full of e-mail marketing best practices. We also wrote a
newsletter that went out to our users, which was filled mostly with
best practices and information on our product updates. At one
point, we took a step back and asked, “Who is going to create all
of this content?”
The solution: We continued writing best practices for the blog.
Two times per month we included excerpts from the blog in the
newsletter and sent it to our users to drive more traffic.
The result: These days our blog is ranked pretty high in the
search engines. We also link from the blog to our site and to other
blogs that we like. Over and over again our readers have told us
that our blog has really made a difference. We think it’s because
that’s where we are focusing our content, and that’s what we’re
using our e-mail newsletter for.
Social networks Businesses today are finding themselves taking
to the social networks. Yes, they are filled with teens wanting to
know what their best friend is doing, but you’ll also find a large
amount of businesses setting up groups for customer feedback,
event invites, etc.
If you do set up your own business’s group or network, make
sure you announce it in your e-mail newsletter. We recently set up
a group and sent an e-mail newsletter about it. In three days we
had almost 100 members. We also started discussions there and
got some great feedback about our product.
Communities and forums Businesses are noticing that communities
are a great way to listen to their customers. Our community
has taken off with people wanting best-practice advice as well as
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E-MAIL MARKETING GUIDE
people helping people. Can a community exist without outbound
communications? I suppose, but it’s sure more active when you
drive people to it and tell them about recent topics of discussion.
I’m part of a marketing community that sends out e-mail at least
two times a week letting people know what the hot marketing topics
are. On my own, I might not have gone into that community,
but I was able to pick up a few pointers thanks to the e-mail alerting
me.
Social media isn’t just for the teenie boppers anymore. Dive in.
But don’t forget to use e-mail to drive traffic. Since e-mail is a disruptive
form of media and an attention grabber, you can leverage
your recipients’ habits of checking and reading e-mail to drive
activity on your presence among social networks.
Janine Popick is CEO of Vertical Response. She can be reached at
janine@verticalresponse.com.
Beat outbound telemarketers
to the punch
TIM DALY AND CLAY GILLESPIE
In recent years, online marketing budgets have shifted toward the
fast-growing medium of lead generation referrals. According to
the Internet Advertising Bureau, lead generation represents 8 percent
of all online media spend. Online advertisers spent $1.3 billion
in 2006 obtaining leads — a
growth rate of 74 percent from
2005.
While media spending and
advertiser demand for this medium
is growing, lead conversion
rates have struggled to improve.
Due to the heated environment in
lead aggregation, speed of
response is critical to success.
First-mover status is the focus of
many insurance and mortgage
Tim Daly
advertisers, with some triggering
UnReal Marketing
outbound call-center efforts within
15 seconds of obtaining the
lead.
So how does the old-school
direct marketer compete against
this wave of technology-enabled
outbound telemarketers? We suggest
an integrated approach using
e-mail and other direct response
vehicles to provide umbrella support
for outbound telemarketing
(OBTM) in an effort to equalize
Clay Gillespie
the speed of the “tech” call cen-
UnReal Marketing
ters and increase the likelihood of
conversion.
The following are five best practice areas to focus on to effectively
leverage e-mail in your lead-conversion efforts:
Lead quality Suppress non-actionable leads by applying ondemand
data verification to the lead generation data. This will
improve the quality of your lead, deliverability of the e-mail, and