Improve Your E-Mail Marketing Efforts

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If you are like most marketers, you spend some time in August thinking about the impending, all-important fourth quarter and the tactics you'll use to meet your programs' goals. With this in mind, here are five tips to optimize your email marketing efforts.

• Target non-responders. As marketers, we spend a fair amount of time targeting frequent clickers, openers, and buyers, but we can sometimes miss that large, silent group of non-responders. Remarketing to this group can be an effective way to nudge response rates higher. Over time, if this group doesn't respond and you're sure the email is getting delivered, phase out this portion of your list. As a matter of efficiency, some retailers will mail non-responders less and less frequently until the group is suppressed.
  
  
• Promote email registration. Treat email registration on your Web site as you would a paid search ad on a major search engine: promote it. Use real estate in your SERPs (define) to promote your email registration forms. Simplify your registration forms by shortening them. Some marketers have doubled their email registration numbers by putting a one-field form at the footer of every site page.
  
  
• Reconfirm email addresses. To combat email address churn, develop a process where you systematically reconfirm subscribers' email addresses. Look to a variety of mechanisms to accomplish this, such as in the call center or through authenticated site visits. Be sure these efforts' cost doesn't exceed an email address's value. A while back, I wrote some tips on figuring out the math.
  
  
• Test, test, test. Determining which offers, creative, and editorial tone work can be a long but rewarding process. Determine which elements will resonate with subscribers through regimented comparison A/B testing that delivers the winning campaign to the majority of your list.
  
  
• Automate. You can automated many routines to optimize email marketing efforts. Trigger a series of sequenced messages, from welcoming to lead warming, for new email registrants. Employing campaigns that are tied to lifecycles or triggered by behavioral events improves message relevance and, ultimately, performance.

These are just a handful of ideas to help you prepare for the fourth-quarter home stretch. Let me know how these ideas work out for you.

Want more email marketing information? ClickZ E-Mail Reference is an archive of all our email columns, organized by topic.