Email Marketing Best Practices


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Email Marketing Best Practices How to Acquire Contacts and Keep Them

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Email Marketing Best Practices

Email Marketing Overview Email marketing is an exciting element of your marketing strategy that can be a huge contributor to website traffic, lead acquisition and sales opportunities. However, there are misconceptions concerning email marketing that remain challenging for all email marketers young or old, new or experienced that require attention.

Email Address Age Most nations are mobile and most of us have lived at several different physical addresses over the years. This becomes apparent when you retrieve mail from your mailbox and find that some marketing mail has a previous owner’s name. This highlights a key difference between traditional snail mail marketing and email marketing that is often overlooked. Unlike your home address, your email address is always a rental. The overwhelming majority of the time that rent is “free” as many email providers will give you an email address as long as you are a member (e.g. an employee of a company or a customer of a service). You may be asking yourself: I get it. I don’t own my email, but what does that have to do with email address age? Since we have established that you rent your email address, let’s review email address age. Once a user has relinquished their desire to use an email address (e.g. the user has found another service or the employee finds another job) then the email server takes that address back and turns it off or repurposes it for other things. That is drastically different than traditional snail mail arriving at your home as it remains the primary responsibility of the previous and new owner (you) to alert others of the change in residence and marketing communications can continue until the sender is notified to stop sending mail. In email marketing, it is the responsibility of the sender to know when the change in residence occurs and to end communications to that address. If you send an email to an expired, unrepurposed email address then the owner of the email address (the contact email server) will reply letting you know the email address is not found and to not send another email. This is known as a hard bounce and limiting hard bounces remains the largest influencer of your email reputation, which requires your management.

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Email Marketing Best Practices Reputation So what? I hard bounce email addresses all the time! They go to my suppression list and I move on with my life. Why should I care? When you engage in email marketing, you have a reputation, which is tied directly to deliverability of your emails to inboxes. Reputation is hard to earn and easy to lose. Your bounces are reviewed as a percentage of your emails sent. For example, if you bounce 1 email out of 100 emails you will have a 1% bounce rate. A bounce rate over 1% will affect your deliverability. Also, your bounce rate is cumulative. A high-bounce campaign will affect all subsequent campaigns (reputation). Only sustained low-bounce campaigns will improve a damaged reputation thus improving deliverability of your emails. Your email reputation dictates the success or failure of your emails reaching your contacts inboxes. If you have high reputation then you have high deliverability to inboxes. If you have low reputation then you have lower deliverability to inboxes and a higher opportunity for your emails to be redirected to quarantine zones like junk email folders. Chronic low reputation can lead to email servers banning all your communications before the filtering and quarantine process. Given enough time and abuse, your low reputation will require intervention by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) who maintain blacklists that will stop your email marketing from being delivered to anyone, anywhere. Learn from others past mistakes and protect your reputation by only emailing contacts that you have acquired through best practices offered in this document.

Suggested Mind Set Email marketing is like dating and your contacts should be handled using common dating courtesies. For the purposes of this analogy you should: 

Stop courting any email contacts that you have not cultivated through your own explicit opt-in strategies (no blind dates allowed).



Do not email contacts that you have not emailed in the past six months (you have stopped dating).



Create re-engagement campaigns with contacts that have not responded to your marketing attempts in the past six months (rekindle the relationship).

Email addresses are fleeting with undefined expiration dates and your reputation depends on your attention to this fact. The world of email marketing is inherently a trust relationship and as an email marketing provider, we trust that you will provide targeted, deliverable, opt-in contact lists. We can determine the accuracy of your contact list(s) only after you send it TheChannelCompany.com

Email Marketing Best Practices through our tool and we analyze the results. Your reputation, cultivated from these campaigns, dictates your monthly email capacity. You can learn more about our Campaign Agreement in your Partner Console under Help > Campaign Agreement.

Best Practices Acquiring email addresses for your marketing campaigns are an important process for successful email marketing. Please review the following best practices to develop and maintain your contact lists:

Housekeeping 1. Only email contacts that have opted-in (provided their email address to you with the explicit purpose of receiving your marketing communications). 2. Send us a suppression list if you are importing contact lists from another email marketing tool or use our suppression tool found in your email marketing tool under the Contacts > Suppression List tab. 3. Look for email addresses with misspellings such as "gmil.com" and update to "gmail.com". 4. Remove "role-based" email addresses such as webmaster@, sales@, support@, admin@, etc. as these are commonly used in server countermeasures against spam. 5. If re-engagement campaigns are unsuccessful, think about eliminating non-engaged contacts from your mailing lists. Non-engaged contacts can lead to undeliverable email addresses, spam reports or worse, which will affect the deliverability of your emails to engaged contacts. DO NOT let the non-engaged influence the engaged.

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Email Marketing Best Practices Do Not 1. Do not guess email addresses - inferring an email address based on a name and email domain will not help you achieve your email marketing goals. It will guarantee a higher bounce rate, attract countermeasures, and increase the likelihood of lower deliverability. 2. Do not email old contact that you have not emailed in the past six months. 3. Do not email a contact if the time between email address acquisition and marketing message is greater than six months. 4. Do not harm your brand by using misleading tactics to acquire contacts.

Do 1. If you have high spam complaints (greater than 1 complaint per 1,000 emails sent), low click-through, low opens, and high bounce rates (greater than 1%), your deliverability will be affected. Minimize each of these to improve deliverability. 2. Only use opt-in lists if you are purchasing a list, leasing a list and/or subscribing to third party services. 3. Offer a sign-up form in a highly visible, high traffic location on your website with a welcome message explaining the intent of the form, your privacy statement, benefits of registering and a sample communication. Also, offer it at seducible moments like a sales transaction. 4. Only ask for registration information that you need. Too many questions in a registration form feel like an interrogation and will reduce the number of completed registrations. 5. PUSH your email registration process. Trade shows, live events, webinars, emails, sales transactions - wherever you are registration efforts should follow. 6. Use a double opt-in standard: email confirmation after registration. 7. Create re-engagement campaigns and focus on those contacts that are not engaged in your marketing efforts. This helps you gauge whether you continue your marketing courtship with these contacts. 8. Provide incentives for your contacts like a registration or re-engagement prize to keep your marketing efforts attractive. 9. Offer great content in your marketing - review email marketing that you subscribe to that gets you excited and emulate it. TheChannelCompany.com

Email Marketing Best Practices 10. Offer new ways to connect if email doesn’t appeal to your contact (drive them to your Facebook account or LinkedIn group). 11. Empower your team to acquire contacts with incentives and quotas. 12. Train your sales team to provide a quick pitch explaining the value of registering and send the contact to register at your website. The motivation exhibited by self-registering contacts will encourage more leads and more sales while weeding out the non-engaged. 13. Time the Welcome Email effectively – deliver a Welcome email as quickly as possible to a new contact. Seconds after registration is exceptional if you can automate it, however within twenty-four hours is expected. Questions? Please reach out to our support team at [email protected]

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