Increasing profit through email marketing

7 questions to review your email strategy

Value: [rating=4]

Our commentary : Our recommendation of the best email marketing advice this week is a checklist to help think through how you can get more from your email marketing communications. I really enjoyed reading this since it's about the BIG email strategy questions that should be asked to make email marketing effective.

It's particularly applied to transactional sites, but some of the advice applies to brand and relationship building needed by all companies.

Marketing implications:

• 1. Transactional emails rule! I agree, but I would expand this to all event-triggered emails to develo a complete email communications strategy through the lifecycle including welcome, research, reactivation and post-site behaviour follow-up.
• 2. Get the frequency and offers right according to customer activity levels. Don't overmail or undermail your best subscribers.
• 3. Use social media as a profit generator. This was the most interesting one for me. Facebook followers are great, but many may not read or engage with your Facbeook wall posts or messages along with the flurry of social interactions with their friend. So a key strategy is using social media to grow email subscription which gives you a more controlled targeted message than will ever be possible through social media.
• 4. Treat email as a profit centre not a cost. Excellent advice. Because of the low-cost of email it often isn't treated strategically, leading to overmailing, poor targeting and lack of investment in the transactional emails mentioned in 1. If it's funded according to the potential returns, then investment in lifecycle emails can occur.
• 5. Content and value should guide your program, not marketing objectives. Email programmes often seem to fail to deliver enough because not enough is invested in the creative and layout to make them effective

Recommended link: 7 questions to review your email strategy