Email Marketing 101

Sometimes the basics of email marketing need to be re-examined if your station is looking to start, tweak or upgrade its email campaigns. Here are 10 Focus Areas for optimizing your email program.

1. Timing: Map out the customer or user experience in order to fully understand the process from the customer experience point of view.
2. Volume: Have an opt-in email database and leverage every touchpoint to encourage customers to sign up to receive your emails.
3. Relevance: Only collect data that you can use and make the process as easy and efficient as it can be for the customer. Offer more options for different lists and expand the list of preferences to help increase overall opt-ins.
4. Engagement: The first email a customer receives is the one most likely to get opened and read, which means that any untargeted, irrelevant messaging will result in a faster decline in engagement. A good first impression is a necessity.
5. Lift: Each email campaign must work toward best practices for creative such as subject lines, layout, header, CTA’s, direct response, standard templates, custom landing pages, etc.
6. Learn: Gain a full view of your overall program by understanding your objectives and having the ability to report on those metrics.
7. Integrate: Integrate your campaign across all marketing channels including email, on-air, web, print/direct mail, mobile, and on-site promotions.
8. Automate: Increase engagement by setting up personalized emails to be triggered by events such as point levels for a loyalty program, birthdays, anniversaries, contesting, etc.
9. Optimize: Continuous testing allows for constant optimization of your program. There could be hundreds of factors to test ranging from subject lines to including strike-outs.
10. Scale: Understand your full email process in order to streamline large and small campaigns.