The Email Wars

Sitting on a fresh start for 2010 we have been looking hard at our own email marketing efforts to see what we can do ourselves to step it up a notch. We spent a lot of 2009 fine tuning our campaigns, welcome streams, and newsletters to focus on performance and cross platform/device rendering. We found out a lot of new things that we were able to try from as simple as mobile versions, pre headers, and subtle changes to button colors/placements that made some impact. Everything we tested gave us lots of ammo for 2010. So what are we going to do with it?

We took it upon ourselves to remap our own communication plan around email and leveraging our systems to hopefully make a larger impact on open/reads as well as clicks and conversions. It has been a large undertaking that took some time due to the fact that as a marketing and software organization we have a lot of systems and tools we use… just like many of you and the clients we work with. So as we move into this year look for a host of new things to be entering your inbox in a new manner.

The Welcome Stream: Seems we had a good system in place, but all systems can take the knowledge of one year and be made better. We have worked on some changes to our Thank You messaging as well as our Welcome stream. Not only in the emails but in the landing page touch points. We hope from our tests that these prove to be even better performers for you. Leveraging the touch points to give more information in a clearer format will benefit these engagements as they roll out. But as always we will be fine tuning and testing throughout the year.

Customer Lifecycle: We have been working hard on our own housecleaning of sorts by tying together our emailROI platform, Salesforce, and Pardot systems. Still on the docket are some plans of our project management system to interface better across them all. Funny all the challenges one can find with so many systems, right? We will enter the new year with new a new customer welcome system for both our emailROI clients and agency clients. Using more personalization, surveys (pre and post projects), and visual communication to hopefully connect our customers more with the people that they work with all the time and might not ever have the chance to meet face to face. We are going to be making use of the past year’s survey data and reaching out more frequently for direct feedback. Data, data and more data… as that is what helps us to shape better programs and results for our clients. The key to all of this is sharing the data and results across the whole team to learn from and do better.

Also look for more customer education and communication on our software side. We are striving to move our account and support teams to present more information to you to help you to become even more empowered to execute great campaigns.

Engaging Newsletters: We often hear how many of you enjoy our monthly newsletters. I can personally tell you that they are an undertaking as everyone is uniquely designed and written by people across our team. But even with great feedback we are looking at how to change these emails this year. As an email marketing agency we don’t want to become too stuck in our rut and by presenting ourselves with the challenge of a new format and doing better we hope to deliver you a better experience and content. I kind of get tired of others email as they look and feel so similar each and every month. I always love the effort our team puts into them as a stand alone endeavor. Keeping it fresh keeps people subscribing and looking forward to the next one.

Weekly Recaps: Are you subscribed to the weekly recap of this blog and our 3 other sister blogs? This weekly email can help you stay in touch with many of the articles we write each week. Knowing that we have a weekly email also helps to keep us on our game. As many of you may not know this email is powered by our RSS to emailROI engine that just got a complete rebuild/overhaul. We are killing off the old system and will be rolling the new one out to clients that rely on this system to create their daily/weekly/monthly emails to power their email marketing. It is a great system for so many publishers (blog/magazine/website) that create content everyday. The way in which this new engine has been written gives more flexibility to layouts, images, and content than ever before. It has allowed us to do some really cool things for some of our publishers that were a challenge in the prior system. Some publishers we are working with on this platform used to (believe it or not) use the Feedburner system that you see if you Subscribe to daily newsletters like TechCrunch, but were unhappy with the lack of reporting, ways to monetize the emails, as well as had very little control over the design formatting. This system changes all of that. If you are looking for an email engine that can do this for you let us know as we are happy to share it with you.

Sometimes starting from scratch is the best plan. If you read this blog I would encourage you to sign up on the right hand side for the weekly emails. We will be sharing more information on this new system in this coming weeks.

Sales Engagement Campaigns: Yes we do use email to walk people that request information from us. We have a fairly detailed system that really does wonders across our own engagement campaigns. Since so much of what we do (and have always done) relies on inbound marketing, we really like to be cognizant of how outbound relevant marketing works. It is one thing to have the inbound side down, but if you are not working hard on our outbound you have missed the boat. Our past campaigns have helped us to qualify, engage and make informed decisions… but with a whole new flow (designed by some sharp minds in the office) I think we are going to see some fun new surprises in our sales streams. As a long time fan of the break up campaigns, we are going to push harder on changing these email up to deliver an even better experience.

Why did I want to share this with you? I mean so many of you that read this blog might have that same thought. Well in an effort to be more transparent with all of our readers, subscribers and clients I really wanted you to understand that no matter how everything looks from the outside of an email program – there should always be changes being made. If we get too comfortable with our own efforts we often miss the opportunities to do better and push the envelope. I am hoping that by sharing our plans we show you that every program must always be in a state of testing and change.

So much on the plate but heck we are only 4 days into a 365 day cycle. Thanks for your continued reading of this blog and I hope to be able to share ideas, tactics and news that help you with your own programs. Lets all get out there and drive hard in 2010 and make our email programs better for all of our subscribers.