Five Ways to Centralize and Test All E-mail Programs

With a recent Strongmail/JupiterResearch survey reporting that 93 percent of all companies now deploy some type of e-mail marketing solution, the need to separate your messages from the clutter of consumers’ inboxes has never been greater. If you don’t already, now’s the time to centralize your e-mail campaigns. This is where you set rules to maintain message frequency, analyze subscriber behavior and coordinate a single e-mail initiative across all channels and business units. Without it, consumers will continue to be bombarded with marketing e-mails, thus undermining the relevance of each message.

In a recent whitepaper from JupiterResearch, The Maturation of E-mail: Controlling Messaging Chaos Through Centralization, that focuses on controlling e-mail chaos through centralization, the research firm offers several tips to help implement a centralized e-mail messaging platform that optimizes your investment.

1. Choose wisely. Invest in a platform that allows different users within your company to have different rights and privileges across various message types (e.g., transactional, promotional or service). Companies need to control e-mail — determining which users in their company have the ability to send e-mails — while adhering to federal CAN-SPAM regulations. This helps to lessen marketers’ legal risk of an e-mail blast being sent that’s not compliant or authorized. It also allows marketers to maximize their investments in e-mail in terms of scale and use throughout the company.

2. Don’t overdo it. To keep them relevant, limit the number of e-mails you send to customers each month. To calculate this, take into account all the transactional, service- and relationship-oriented e-mails you send and determine the number of promotional messaging opportunities that exist for every subscriber segment. Leverage e-mail goals, such as viral campaigns, account reactivation and conversion, into all messages — particularly transactional messages, which marketers often overlook.

3. Know your recipients. Base the tone, content and frequency of your messages on your subscribers’ recent shopping or interactive behavior. Track clickthrough data to monitor customer behavior.

4. Improve your infrastructure to help your messages get delivered. As it has become harder to get your e-mails consistently delivered to customers’ inboxes, maximize message delivery from a central platform in the following ways:

* Send different classes of mail (transactional vs. promotional) from different IP addresses;

* Limit the sending volume of messages;

* Limit connections to specific ISPs so they don’t become overloaded;

* Measure and handle bounced messages consistently;

* Implement authentication schemes in the headers of messages; and

* Optimize mailing patterns by learning from previous mailings. For instance, if you’ve found that a particular element of rich media, perhaps video, works well with a particular customer segment, be sure to include this element in a targeted campaign to that demographic.

5. Test. Learn from previous tests (e.g., different subject lines) and apply their outcomes to all forms of messaging, not just promotional, including transactional and service-related messaging. Build testing into each mailing to optimize whatever changes you make in real time. Through testing you can determine optimal frequency patterns as well as the tone and content of messages.

With consumers receiving more e-mails than ever, the Strongmail/Jupiter report says a lack of centralization and mailings without organizational control only will add to the clutter in the inbox and significantly alter your ability to use the channel effectively, while also deteriorating the value of e-mail as a communication tool.