In only a few short years, it’s taken over the way we communicate with friends, clients, and business associates. It’s made "You’ve got mail!" an internationally known phrase. It’s even (to the dismay of many) revived the chain letter. What is it? Email, of course. And besides the achievements listed above, it has become one of the greatest marketing tools of our time. But author Chris Baggott says many email marketers out there aren’t using this tool to its full money-making potential.
"We are working in a new era of marketing, one based on the principles of relationships, metrics, and analysis," says Baggott, author of the new book Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level (Wiley, 2007, ISBN-10: 0-4701224-5-5, ISBN-13: 978-0-4701224-5-7, $24.95). "Tools like email make it easy to embrace these principles. If you aren’t using email marketing in the proper ways, then you are missing out on huge opportunities to increase your business and sell more product."
Baggott’s book serves as the "paint by numbers" of email marketing. It contains the step-by-step instructions you need to accomplish your goals, create better relationships, and move your organization to a higher level. It shows the tactics the "big boys" use and puts them in context so that any business can achieve the same results.
"The most important element is ease of use," says Baggott. "If you can get sophisticated, automated tools into the hands of the marketer, you eliminate the pain associated with execution. This means you now have the time and energy to focus on actual marketing. Ease of use facilitates an incredible amount of change. Marketing becomes faster, more relevant, less expensive, and more valuable. That’s why email is the greatest marketing tool in history."
Think you may not be approaching email marketing in a way that makes the most sense for your company? Baggott can help.
Here are nine tips on how you can use email marketing to take your company to the next level:
- Stay out of the spam folder. The same things that make email valuable to you also make it valuable to spammers. There is a lot of bad email out there, and if your message gets lumped in with the trash, it will mean ruined constituent relationships for you. And you don’t have to sell questionable sexual enhancement products to be labeled a spammer. Even trustworthy organizations can abuse email. "Email can present a Catch-22 at times," says Baggott. "It is so easy to execute; it takes very little time to throw together a thoughtless message and get it out the door. In reality, the quantity of emails you send means nothing. The quality of your messages means everything. And that is how you will avoid being reported as spam, by providing people with information they will find useful."
- You have to get your recipients to act. One of the most glaring issues for email marketers today is dwindling engagement. For whatever reason, people who at one point opted-in by opening emails and purchasing through them have stopped engaging. To solve this problem, you’ll have to take a look at the four factors that influence an email’s success with your recipients-past behavior, relevancy, frequency, and creative strength. These are listed in the order of their importance, so you should weight them accordingly when you tweak your email messages to make them more successful. "The number one rule you should remember with regard to subscriber engagement is that people are busy," says Baggott. "Don’t waste their time. If you don’t have something of value to say, don’t say anything at all. If you keep hitting your constituents with information they don’t care about, they won’t believe you when you finally deliver something of value."
- Build a killer database. To leverage the benefits of email segmentation, you need a good database. And to build a good database, you need to understand what data is going to drive your business and email marketing programs. There are three ways to collect email addresses for your databases without alienating your constituents: online email collection, offline (physical location email collection), or business-to-business/networking/real-world registration. "No matter what method you are using, always ask permission to continue building a relationship with them through email," says Baggott. "The last thing you want is to assume that you have permission to email a group of people who a) don’t like you or b) don’t remember anything about you, which is a recipe for getting perceived or reported as spam."
- Find the best recipients. We established the fact that your constituents are busy people and don’t want to be bothered if you have nothing relevant to say. Another important lesson is that when you do have something relevant to say, you must say it to the right individuals. Segmentation is your answer. It is one of the most effective ways to boost engagement and prevent list fatigue. It lets you identify individuals with similarities, allowing you to develop messages that are likely to be relevant to these select portions of your audience. "You’ll want to put all of your constituents through an RFM microscope-a familiar concept for most marketers," says Baggott. "That’s recency, frequency, and monetary value. Three staples of direct marketing. You’ll use these factors to figure out who your ‘best’ constituents are so that you can build the best relationships with them."
- Find or create relevant content. Creating the right content for you all comes down to what works for your business and what will provide value to your constituents. Often the word content is synonymous with worry for marketers. There are budget fears, resource fears, and time constraint fears. The good news is there are several easy ways to create relevant content for your messages, and they won’t necessarily require more work. For example, you can use information from your website, utilize third party content, tap into professional copywriters, and the list goes on. "Here’s more good news about great content," says Baggott. "Once you’ve found it, you’ve found it. Using a concept called Dynamic Content, or content that changes according to rules, you can create a message-let’s say for new customers-and reuse it based on the parameters you’ve set up in your email system for new customers. In fact, messaging based on stage of the relationship-whether it’s a lapsed relationship, a thank you, or a reminder-can all be created once and leveraged over and over again using Dynamic Content."
- Use analytics that matter. Once upon a time, you couldn’t tell which parts of your marketing effort were working and which parts weren’t. But here in the 21st century, that truth is outdated. By paying attention to analytics such as your deliverability rates, open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates, you now have the power to know exactly what’s happening and why it’s happening. In fact, you can apply a return on investment amount to every single email marketing activity. "Remember that you are competing only against yourself," says Baggott. "When measuring the success of your email marketing program, the only comparison you need to make is against yourself. You have the data right in front of you so you just need to get a read on it. You really have an advantage here, because the speed at which you can receive feedback and implement changes has never been faster."
- Put your messages to the test. In today’s high-tech world, it’s easy to find out which elements of your messages are more likely to work before you commit your entire database or segment. There are two ways to test: A/B and multivariate. A/B will require you to pull two random samples. You’ll then send out a message where only one element is different-a subject line, for example-and look at results to see which subject line encouraged the most recipients to open the email. The winner is then mailed to the remainder of the audience. Multivariate testing involves simultaneously testing several variables at once and measuring the net result. "Ultimately, testing gives us the chance to act like real marketers driving real actions," says Baggott. "We get to play in a giant sandbox full of data, creative, and strategies in order to build the biggest castle yet for our organizations."
- Ask for feedback. In a relationship, dialog never stops. It is impossible to know all you need to know about someone, which is why you should strive for more information on an ongoing basis. Asking is the best way to receive information directly from your constituents. Requests can be made during registration, at the point of purchase, or via a survey. The most important thing to remember is that you have to make positive changes based on the data you collect. Not using data will erode trust and perhaps prevent further participation in the future. "Email is the perfect way to fill in data points once you know what data is valuable and what data is missing from different constituents," says Baggott. "Almost every email you send should give the recipient a chance to answer a question or two."
- Triggers, transactions, and integration-What does it all mean? Triggered emails are automatically sent to a subscriber when an event happens-a purchase, webinar attendance, or email opt-in are examples. These events, or "transactions," are indications that a constituent is engaging with you on some level. Typically, automation and triggering entails "integration," which is a means to seamlessly move your data from your database marketing system to your email marketing system. This direct connection will enable you to sync your database of record, provide email marketing from within your other systems, automate, and even syndicate content. "The beauty of triggered, automated emails is that once the program is up, it’s a fairly hands-off process with huge revenue potential," says Baggott. "However, keep in mind that while the process itself may simply need to be monitored, you should continue to test your messages, segments, and other email elements."
"Email is such an inexpensive and easy marketing tool to use it’s unfortunate that more companies aren’t using it effectively," says Baggott. "I want to help people build relationships with their constituents that make them feel appreciated, unique, and valued. Email marketing is the way to do that. It allows you to reach out to your customers in a one-to-one, deeply personalized way that goes beyond communication or even selling. You’re actually engaging them in mutually beneficial dialog. Email is a revolutionary marketing tool . . . you just have to know how best to use it."
About the Author
Chris Baggott is the cofounder and chief marketing officer of ExactTarget, a market leading email marketing software firm. Chris’s blog has been voted "Best of the Web" by Forbes and "Best Online Marketing Blog" by readers of MarketingSherpa. A voice for best email practices, Chris has been quoted in Forbes, Inc., AdWeek, 1to1, CRM, Direct, DM News, Dow Jones Online Retail Report, and MarketingSherpa. Chris makes more than fifty appearances a year, speaking on best practices in database and email marketing at such venues as the Harvard Business School Entrepreneurship Conference, Ad:Tech, and the American Marketing Association.
About the Book
Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level (Wiley, 2007, ISBN-10: 0-4701224-5-5, ISBN-13: 978-0-4701224-5-7, $24.95) is available at bookstores nationwide, from major online booksellers, and direct from the publisher by calling 800-225-5945. In Canada, call 800-567-4797. If you would like to receive this information as a Word document, please let us know.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on May 16, 2007
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