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Email Marketers Keep Up with Latest Trends

US marketers are no slouches when it comes to integrating new technologies and tactics with their email marketing efforts, a survey by email marketing service JangoMailof email marketers found that the vast majority of respondents used advanced features like integration with Google Analytics or geo-tracking analysis to increase campaign effectiveness. Just 11.8% of email marketers reported never or seldom using such techniques.

They were slightly more likely to ignore email segmentation, a valuable tactic that can increase the relevance of communications for recipients and avoid cluttering inboxes with unwanted messages. More than two in five email marketers reported always segmenting their email lists, and another quarter did so regularly.

Email marketing solutions provider Lyris surveyed US online and email marketers, agencies and Lyris customers in June, with similar findings. Seven in 10 respondents reported using email segmentation, with a further 14% planning to do so in the future. Web analytics were even more popular.

So if you're not doing this stuff you are now officially behind the times!

Email Newsletter Response Rates

Some new research from Marketing Sherpa suggests that the behaviour of users across consumer and business is much closer than previously thought. This is a theory we've held for a long time as the line between work and home becomes ever more blury. This will have an impact in a number of areas not least of which will be send times.

See the full article for more

Protecting your Email Reputation

If life as a marketer isn't hard enough right now, damaging your reputation through inadvertent use of bad practices would be a disaster, here's some things to be aware of:

• Monitor your stats: keep an eye on hard bounces, spam complaints and open rates. They will all tell you if you're touching your email database too often, with relevant content or not getting in to the inbox at all.
• Check your content: use our inbuilt spam and design checker to check that you're not falling foul of any of the filters.
• Test your emails: send an email to a slice of your database and check that the unsubscribe rates are in line with your previous levels
• Treat new subscribers differently: have a welcome email that explains how someone joined the list and what they can expect from you.
• Respect unsubscribes: deal quickly with any requests to unsubscribe, however you receive them, alternatively use an automated system like ours.
• Remove your hard bounces regularly: make sure you keep the list as clean as you can.
• Avoid changing your send details: keep the same IP address, from address and reply details so people and filters become familiar with you.

The Big Challenges for Email

According to Marketing Sherpa the big challenges for email marketing for next year are: -

• Measuring ROI [still there after all this time!]
• Competing with social networking [or 'complementing' might be a better term]
• Relevance [this will never go away - ever]
• Driving subscription levels
• Managing databases
• Deliverability

Using a system like ours will certainly help with most of those, and talking us about your startegy and onling resources should tackle the rest.

What you can measure you can improve

How old is this adage, I heard it on my first day of work, well real work anyway, they didn't mention it to me when I was sweeping the floor of the local post office in my summer holidays - funny that! And even now only around of 60% of marketers test their email campaigns [according to e-mail marketing agency eROI in their May June 2009 survey] which is staggering. We live in an age where marketing is more measurable and responsive than ever before and yet still marketing dollars are being spent without any thought to optimising that spend, in this current economic climate that really is criminal. It is extremely simple to test subject lines, send times, call to action and design, especially when you use a managed system like ours, if you're not already doing it please do get in touch!