Two weeks ago I attended Interactive Day San Diego put on by the San Diego Ad Club.  One presentation I found particularly useful was given by Heather Blank from Responsys about email marketing best practices.  Although I’ve been involved in several email programs and fellow digital team member Becca has written several posts about the latest and greatest, I still found myself jotting down notes as quickly as I could write.  Take a look at this list of tips- there’s something new for everyone:

1. Get in front of the customer at the right time.  This is the #1 seducable moment.  Ex: for Petco, it’s sending an email coupon to a customer on their pet’s birthday.

2. Track list growth.  One year loses 30% if you don’t replenish.  Unsubscribes cause 1-3% loss per month, complaint rates cause 1% loss per month.

3. Your email list growth goal should be ~14% annually.  About 3.5% of your unique monthly site visitors should be signing up.  A few ways to help achieve this:

• Place a ‘Quick Sign Up’ button on EVERY page of your website.  It should only require the customer to click once.  And, tell them why to sign up.  What’s the benefit?
• Be sure to have a link to the Privacy Policy.  Studies show that people don’t read it, but are more apt to sign up if one exists.
• Deploy a qualified sweepstakes.  Run a sweepstakes that awards a prize that is in line with your brand.  Ex: for Jer’s Chocolates, sign up to win a free box of chocolate every month for a year.  This is cheap to fulfill and drives sign-ups!
• View social media as an acquisition resource.  Customers are already expressing interest by interacting with your brand, so make it easy for them to sign up for correspondence.  It’s as simple as placing a newsletter sign-up link on your facebook fan page.

4. When working on your creative, design for grandma.  Simple.  Text.  In this order, your priorities are for them to: read it, open it, click on it. Then, put the creative stuff on your website.

5. You have 5-8 seconds to get someone to act.  They need to know: who’s it from? What’s in it for me? How do I take action?  ALL IN TEXT.

6. Links at the bottom of the email (rescue links) should be links to what’s clicked on most on your website.

7. Instead of opt-out, give a customer the option to opt-down.  Wouldn’t you rather they receive fewer emails from you than none at all?

8. If you have images in your email, point them toward the call to action.  It increases the uptake.

9. Strengthen your welcome message.  This is the triggered email that goes out immediately upon someone signing up.  Make sure it accurately represents you and gets them excited to receive more.  Consider adding an offer.  Ex: Philosophy, a body products brand, takes 3 weeks to condition their new customer with a series of welcome emails before placing them in the general email pool.  The added benefit here is that Philosophy can learn about their new customer- what did they click on, what did they delete?

10. Don’t ignore the text version of your email.  More and more, people are viewing from mobile devices so make sure you get to the point and label all your links.