1) The Safe/White List

The main key is to get your users to add you to their safe/white list. This can usually be done by adding you to their address book. It’s the only way of ensuring you are not redirected to the junk/bulk folder. Use the following strategies to encourage the user to white list you:

• On the order confirmation page suggest that they add you to their safe list you ensure they receive order and shipping information (or newsletter)
• Run time critical competitions that require you to receive emails to take part
• When a user signs up to your newsletter send them through to a page that clearly states how to white list specifically for their email provider based on their email domain (or give them clear instructions on the website)

2) Remove Failed Emails

Most ISP’s will blacklist you if you do not remove the invalid email addresses after they have informed you about them. If the ISP’s blacklist you it means nothing may get through, even order confirmation emails unless you are using a different IP address to broadcast so it is in you’re best interests to remove the failed deliveries right away.

3) The A/B Test

Use A/B Testing to run different creative’s to different segments to see which one is most successful for the service or product you’re promoting. This is a good way also to test the Psychology of you’re users.

4) Seed Your List

Try Including a personal seed for all the major ISP’s in your test, if you get thrown in the junk mail try a different subject line to see if you can get through to the inbox.

5) CTA – Call To Action

To get people to act on your email, give them a simple and clear button or link to do this. A simple large button will make a substantial difference on your click through rate, I said in a previous article about using a big red button, which seems to work well.

6) Viral Marketing Integration

Viral marketing can reap huge rewards to the take up of games, special offers, free coupons, you can have pretty much anything you want. Including a ‘tell friends’ button in the campaign can help you reach new users and grow your list.

7) Persona Marketing

Persona marketing is being used for profitable effect by many large organizations. Create around 7 or 8 persona sets to help you remove your view on your product/service and look through the eyes of your users. Create persona’s with a name, face, motivations, attitudes and goals. You could actually use your friend as an example or a family member. Develop your sets through a combination of demographic, psychographic and topographic profiling.

8) Consistency

Keep your emails consistent, users like the familiarity of knowing which section they usually go to and what it is they are receiving. Paying attention to your user’s movements pays of in the long run.

9) Email List Cleaning

Clean your database every year or two. Don’t spam, even when you have collected an opt-in email address, if you have been emailing the person for 2 years with never an opened email it probably means they have either identified you as a junk and really don’t want you’re emails continuously or they are simply not interested. If you clean up your database you will focus on the real customers who do want to hear from you and increase the ROI.

10) Before you buy a list

If you are buying a list from an external source request a test of the data (100,000) before purchasing the full database.

Email Marketing is pretty straight forward as you can see. Good luck and umm, happy emailing?