Email Marketing Checklist: How do your efforts measure up?

With emphasis on how you can continually improve your email marketing program, Expresso articles are designed to pinpoint key issues affecting the inbox. Today we're taking a step back and checking out the big picture. Let's quickly review potential pain points that may be hurting your email program and go over why it's important. We'll review:

• List Management and Privacy
• Email Message and Design
• Metrics and Reporting

We have an automated email opt-in form on our website that triggers an immediate "thanks for signing up" welcome email.

The welcome email is indisputably the most opened email of any marketing-related message. If you are not taking advantage of it, you're missing out on a huge opportunity! Use a welcome email to reinforce best practices (add us to your address book, view our e-newsletter archive, read our privacy statement). And it's never a bad idea to sweeten the relationship with a little incentive (download our whitepaper, take advantage of this e-coupon, etc.)

We segment our database (i.e. by demographics - age, gender, geography, or by behaviors - past clicks, average spend, etc.)

We all know the most responsive emails are timely, meaningful and relevant. The more you segment, the more relevant your emails are to your audience, which pays off in response. If you haven't started segmenting yet, begin by leveraging what you have in your database - it could by language, region, type of customer etc. Then start thinking about new ways you can target your audience!

We include the option to unsubscribe in every email we send and we honour these requests within 10 days.

It's the law. Case closed.

We include a permission reminder at the top of every email we send. i.e. "You are receiving this email because you have shopped with us or requested notifications of special offers."

It's never a bad idea to remind your subscribers how you got their information. This will prevent subscribers from mistaking your email for spam, and also reinforce that you are a reputable, trustworthy sender.

We include site information related to security and privacy in every email we send.

People are weary about security and their personal information. Providing these details in emails assures your recipients you respect their privacy and protect their personal information.

Email Message & Design

We have in-house talent and/or strategic relationships that make it easy for us to design/code emails that focus on value and customer benefit.

Email design is different than web or graphic design. Whether in-house or outsourced, be sure the people designing and coding your emails are aware of best practices and guidelines for designing for email. The reality is there are hundreds of different email clients and unfortunately each handle HTML differently.

When designing and coding emails, we understand the common filter triggers - i.e. we never send emails that have a high ratio of images to text.

Like the point above, certain codes in HTML can trigger spam filters. Not sure what they are? We've blogged about it!

We use compelling subject lines with enticing information that make people want to open our email.

The subject line is the crucial snippet that determines whether or not someone will open your email. Writing subject lines is an art form. Strive for them to be 5 - 7 words and preferably less than 50 characters, but at the same time they must capture readers' attentions and motivate actual opens. Want to perfect your subject lines? Try some A/B split tests with your list, and over time you'll have excellent data into what works and what doesn't.

We provide incentives and compelling calls to action that make people want to click.

Again, if you want people to click, you've got to give them something worth clicking on! If you're not sure your emails are reaching their full clicking potential, test, test, test!

Our email marketing is always planned and never sporadic

In a perfect business world, everything would be proactive and strategically planned. However, we all know it doesn't always happen that way! At the very least your email program should have a yearly editorial calendar that lays out themes, article topics, business objectives, etc. to help you stay on track. It's also a good idea to stick to a frequency schedule so your recipients know when to expect them

Metrics and Reporting

We track results and have access to meaningful reports for: open rates, clickthrough rates, bounces (hard & soft), deliverability, opt-out rates and more.

The bottom line - metrics are the key to measuring and evaluating your overall email program. If you aren't measuring, you won't have an accurate picture of where a problem may lie. Say you don't get a high response from your call-to-action... it could be because people aren't receiving it (deliverability issue) or perhaps your from line and subject line aren't enticing enough (open issue). Or maybe your wording or incentive to click was not right (click-through issue).

We understand our results and refine our email efforts accordingly.

The ultimate power of metrics is that you can continually use them to refine and improve your email strategy. Not enough opens? Reconsider your subject line, or perhaps the time of day/day of week for sending. Bounces too high? Find out if you're having a problem with certain domains and get it resolved!