|
1)
Automated Bounce & Unsubscribe Management
As well as helping with email deliverability by reacting to
bounce messages from ISP’s and ensuring you minimise
spam complaints it improves the productivity of the marketing
team who do not have to manually trawl through a mailbox of
bounce messages and unsubscribe requests before deleting them
from your list.
2)
Open & Click-thru tracking
Knowing how many people and who is opening & clicking-thru
obviously tells you how effective your message is. This information
can then be used to target future messages based upon the
recipients activity.
3)
Spam Checker
Over 20% of corporate users utilise Spam Assassin, the open
source filter. Many other corporate filters also use the Spam
Assassin rules in their product.
Therefore
having a report before you send the email showing how your
email rates against this filter is vital.
4)
Inbox Preview
Different email clients treat your email in different ways
which can lead to your message being rendered incorrectly.
Viewing
your message in a tool such as Maxemail’s Inbox Preview
enables you to easily spot these issues and make the required
changes to creative.
5)
Email De-duplication
There is nothing worse than receiving an email newsletter
twice. It is impersonal and unprofessional.
Make
sure your email marketing software automatically ensures that
duplicates are handled.
6)
Inbox Seeding
If your list contains a large number of consumer addresses
at places such as Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or Tiscali then running
a spam score check will not give you an idea of whether they
will deliver your email or place it in the junk mail folder.
You
could set-up test addresses at each of these ISP’s but
this is time consuming to check. A better method is to simply
click a single button and then have an interface to see the
delivery status in real-time.
7)
A/B Testing
This is the ability to test different creative to samples
of your list in order to work out the best performing variants.
The main part of your list will then get the best performing
version.
Differences
in results between variants can be huge, even if it is simply
testing fonts, subject lines or timing.
This could be achieved manually but there is always the risk
that someone could receive multiple versions. Email marketing
software like Maxemail prevents this.
8)
Testing & Approval Process
Without adhering to a proper testing process emails can easily
be delivered to your lists (or even the wrong list) with errors.
Make
sure your email marketing software has the ability to test
your email by allowing you to send a sample to your address
or a seed list and ensure only your chosen users can approve
a campaign for delivery.
9)
Dynamic Content & Personalisation
The more relevant you make an email campaign the better the
results. More than simply merging in a name, dynamic content
is merging in whole blocks of content based upon the recipient’s
profile. For example if someone has an interest in rock music
an appropriate offer could be inserted while a classical music
fan would have a different offer inserted. Each email sent
could be entirely unique.
10)
ROI & Conversion Tracking
Open and click-thru rates offer some indication into the success
of your email campaigns but the real test of campaign success
is how many people make a purchase or perhaps complete a request
for more information in a B2B scenario.
While
this tracking can be achieved to some extent with analysis
tools this will require you to manually tag links. In addition
a web analytics tool is not going to be as accurate as a solution
integrated with your email tool as this holds all of the information
about who the person is, what email campaign they came from
and what link they clicked on. This ensures unique statistics
are produced.
|
