One question has dominated my
conversations with clients and in online
forums over the past several weeks: “Is
my e-mail marketing plan
recession-proof?” The answer is that it
certainly should be. E-mail marketing is
something that companies turned to
initially because it was an inexpensive
way to reach large numbers of customers.
Over time it has evolved and today has
one of the highest ROIs of any marketing
expenditure.
As the economy slows and
businesses evaluate ways to conserve
resources, marketing is often one of the
first line items to be reviewed and
sometimes cut. Despite its
cost-effective nature, e-mail marketing
is still a potential target. The key to
successful e-mail marketing is to make
sure your house is in order. Marketers
can start by putting in place processes
to provide tangible, bottom-line
results.
Is your e-mail marketing recession
proof? Here are five steps to make sure:
First, link results to business
goals. You may measure e-mail success by
opens or clicks, but are those the
metrics your company uses to measure its
overall success? If you are not already
doing so, identify and document the link
between e-mail investments and tangible
business success, such as incremental
revenue, margin improvement, store
traffic, qualified sales leads or
channel sales increases, among other
metrics.
Next, be sure you have optimized your
opt-in process. Your objective should be
to build a quality database. To do so,
take advantage of even the simplest
forms of opt-in optimization, such as
having an opt-in form on the home page
and then again on every page of your
website. Don't give up when IT and Web
departments push back on this. The job
they save may be their own.
Once you get subscribers, you don't
want to lose them, so make sure that
what you are saying is hitting home.
Plan your messaging strategy carefully,
and then develop messages that deliver
content to specific segments if you can
identify them.
Make sure that your e-mail service
provider or your in-house IT department
has taken all the necessary steps to
ensure that messages get delivered (i.e.
using authentication), and that they are
monitoring delivery statistics. Every
message that is not delivered is a
missed communications opportunity.
Finally, learn from your mistakes. No
one can truly move forward successfully
without learning from the past.
Marketers are no different. Look over
the past year's campaigns. Do you see
any trends, opportunities, ideas or
plans that you can identify and apply to
growing the business? Take what you
learned and then test against it.
You probably are thinking that this
list reads like the basics of successful
e-mail marketing. That's because it is.
Whenever there are bad economic times,
the businesses that hunker down and use
good blocking and tackling to their
advantage are usually the businesses
that survive and thrive. Let's hope we
don't have a full-blown recession, but
if we do, make sure your e-mail plan is
recession ready.
Jordan Ayan is founder/CEO of
SubscriberMail. Reach him at
Jordan@subscribermail.com.
