Secrets to Email Campaign Success

The Marketing Panel for Secrets to Email Campaign Success was a great session. The speakers included Rasmus Menke, Sr. Product Manager from Salesforce.com, Jason Stewart, Sr. Manager from DemandBase, and Charlie McKinney, the Director of Sales Support at McKesson. They covered Email Best Practices and two of the panelists (Jason and Charlie) shared how they use Email Marketing in their business and gave their recommendations on how to create and send email campaigns.

All the speakers agreed that email marketing is an integral, effective and low cost method of marketing.  They also agreed on several basic fundamentals of email marketing:

1. Know your audience so you can target your message effectively and get it to the right people
2. Mail on a frequent and regular basis for the sake of familiarity, and provide relevant, useful content
3. Subject lines are important.  Keep them short and to the point. 
4. Reporting is essential - use a tool that provides excellent delivery and reports on opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes.  
5. Follow-up is crucial for campaigns - if someone clicks a link then they're likely interested in something you offer. Don't miss an opportunity to follow-up with that person.

Jason Stewart takes a particularly good approach to unsubscribes, bounces and non-responders.  Most people see these as negative and do nothing with this info, but Jason (who uses our VR for AppExchange product) suggests running reports of bounces and giving them to sales so they can review and attempt to update the addresses for each record.  He also made the point that you should not take unsubscribes personally, as people who opt-out may just not like email marketing.  Try direct mail or alternative marketing methods with these folks.  As for non-responders, be sure to follow-up with an email, as there are any number of reasons why they didn't open your email - their inbox was crowded, they were too busy at that time, etc...no reason not to send them the email again, but just make sure your message is a strong one.

Charlie uses ExactTarget to send email newsletters, educational offerings, and hot topics out to clients and prospects. He stressed the importance of separating clients from prospects in your email lists and messaging. He finds that the days in which one mass email with one message working for your entire are definitely over.

There were a number of questions after the session.  These seemed to be the most popular:

When/What day is best for sending out email campaigns?

A:  It depends on your audience and your business, industry reports say Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the best days in general.

What's the best 'From' name for your email?

A:  A recognizable name is key, maybe a sales rep's name or someone in marketing who your customers or prospects will be familiar with (or your company name), so they'll be more likely to open the email.

Is Text or HTML better for an email format?

A:  HTML is best, because you can track open rates. However, don't take that to mean you need lots of images. You can have an email that looks like just text that is in HTML  format and still track the open rate.

Sarah Benner - Senior Marketing Manager

Comments

[Jason Stewart]

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you enjoyed the presentation.