Power E-Mail Marketing: Three Things You SHOULD Be Looking Into

E-mail marketing is pretty simple and companies such as Campaigner make it quite easy to send an e-mail newsletter to customers, prospective customers and just about anyone else. While e-mail marketing as we've been doing it for years is "ok" there more things you should consider to BOOST the results of your e-mail marketing and ensure you get better results (aka sales) from each message you send.

Campaigner believes that targeting, personalization and deliverability are three areas where your e-mail marketing can be improved. In 2008 many smaller businesses already moved toward these improved e-mail marketing strategies, but what about you?

Let's take a look at each one.

Targeting: Instead of having one e-mail newsletter for every person who signs up consider segmenting your readers 2, 3 (or more) profiles so that each e-mail newsletter is more customized for them.

Campaigner writes that e-mail list segmentation moved from being a marketing buzzword to a best practice among many small businesses. Increased segmentation helped improve the relevance and targeting of small business e-mail marketing campaigns. Many small businesses made a more conscious effort to use basic and advanced list-building features and technologies offered by the top e-mail marketing services, allowing them to create multiple, highly customized lists based on specific audience attributes.

Personalization: While targeting is useful, personalization takes things up to another level. Maybe you have a store catering to fishing. Why not send all your customers an e-mail address to them by name (well that's easy most of us do that any way) but also reminding them of their past purchase and suggestions for future purchases - all automatically personalized to them individually. This bring e-mail to life and makes it much more than just a transaction.

Campaigner writes that like segmentation, small businesses have long understood the value of personalizing their e-mail marketing communications, but have lagged behind larger organizations with more sophisticated and advanced marketing technologies. In 2008, more small businesses took the simple, but important step of not only using mail merge functions to ensure that each e-mail salutation is addressed to the individual, but also using list attribute features that allow them to personalize messages according to stored personal attributes such as demographics and buying behavior.

Deliverability You set up a great e-mail marketing campaign and do all you can to segment your lists, but what if no one receives or (or many people don't receive it) because it was blocked by spam filters or some other problem. It is so important to ensure the message you take careful plans to create REACHES the recipients.

Campaigner writes that despite a plethora of industry studies confirming e-mail marketing’s effectiveness and unbeatable ROI, deliverability concerns persist among businesses of all sizes. According to JupiterResearch’s E-mail Marketing Buyer’s Guide, 2008, 70 percent of survey respondents cited e-mail deliverability services as more important than cost (69 percent) when selecting an e-mail marketing service

If you are not doing e-mail marketing, START if you already have an e-mail newsletter, it can always be improved.

Check out Campaigner. Other e-mail marketing providers include Constant Contact, Vertical Response and Microsoft Office Live.