Four E-Marketing Resolutions: Boosting Your Success in the Months Ahead

You know whats a real shame? When you have an important message for your clients and prospects, youve got a great database to enable you to reach out to them . . . but no one opens the e-mail you send them. Or, worse yet: they do open your e-mail, but it looks so amateurish that it does more harm than good. The bottom line is that you need to put just as much effort into preparing the e-mail itselfits look-and-feel, its HTML coding, its subject lineas you put into the message. Otherwise, you might as well not send it at all. Here are four resolutions to boost your e-mail marketing success in the months ahead:1. Use split testing to improve your e-marketing ROI. Its also called an A-B test and it allows you to determine which subject line, which content, which from box will motivate more readers to take actionto either open your e-mail or to click on links inside. Just create two or more versions of your e-mail and send them to a portion of your mailing list. Let your e-mail platform determine which generated the better responserate based on the criteria you chose, and then just deliver the remainder of your campaign using the winning version. Weve seen open rates of 20% spike to 35%, and click-thru rates jump from 4% to over 10% just by trying two different subject lines. 2. Preview your e-mail to avoid disasters. Most people dont realize that the same e-mail will look different depending on the platform on which its viewed. Imagine perfecting your e-mail in, say, Outlook, hitting the send button, and having some readers receive a completely broken version (text jumbled, images distorted, lines out of whack) simply because they viewed it in, say, Eudora. It happens all the timewhich is why you need to test for quality and consistency across all the platforms your readers use. If youre not using an automated system like ours (which has testing capability built in), its difficult to test for every possible e-mail platform. In business-to-business correspondence, the most popular platform is Outlook, but note that Outlook 2007 is not the same as Outlook 2003, and e-mail designed for one will not necessarily look correct in the other. Our best suggestion is to create e-mail accounts in several popular platformsperhaps Outlook, Gmail, and Hotmailand send yourself copies of the e-mail you created. If it fails the quality and consistency test, youll need to go into the HTML code and make whatever changes are appropriate to the problem. Remember, youre putting all this money and effort into your e-mail campaign; if what youre sending is broken, what kind of impression do you think youre making? 3. How does your look-and-feel look and feel? When you receive e-mails from lawyers, from restaurants, from software companies, do they all look the same? We think notat least, not if they come from professionals who want to look professional. Sure, there are some companies that use cookie-cutter templates and stock photography because its cheaper to do it that way. But marketing is largely about branding and creating an image that you share with no one. Take a look at your e-mail template and decide whether it gives your readers the impression you intend it to give. Do the colors, the typeface, and the logo mirror those on your website? Is the art reflective of your company? If not, its time to upgrade, to customize. If your e-mail looks like your competitors, what are you achieving?4. Getting good grades? Check the reports. Just as in school, its hard to know how youre doing until you receive your marksand, in the case of e-mail marketing, your marks are the reports (or click-thru statistics) that a good e-mail platform generates for you. Are people opening your e-mails? Are they clicking on your links? Proactively check your reports and use them to determine what information your readers are accessing and how you can best deliver it to them. E-mail marketing is not just about sending out e-mails; its about communicating with your clients and prospects. And communicating needs to go in both directions!

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Paul The Game Master Hyman has covered the video games industry for over 15 years; he currently writes for Gamasutra. com and Game Developer magazine, among others. As editor-in-chief of www. OpenMoves.com/gamesan e-marketing boutiquehe creates e-newsletters for such game-related companies as Ninja Kiwi, GameTap, FOG Studios, and Digital Artist Management. E-mail Paul at paul.hyman@ casualconnect.org.