subject: Managing an email marketing campaign [print this page] Managing an email marketing campaign Managing an email marketing campaign
One of the key benefits of email marketing is that it allows direct advertising and brand promotion to a huge number of people with a minimum of effort. However your average email client is unlikely to be up to the needs of making the most of this medium - of managing lists of contacts for permission based marketing or targeting specific demographics, running the gauntlet of automated spam filters successfully or even creating effective message templates in short order.
Luckily, for all of the problems of managing an email campaign, software developers have provided an easy solution - email marketing management software.
This software makes it easy to create and operate effective campaigns via email by providing tools tailored to each task. These include:
EMAIL DESIGN AND EDITING
One key step to building profitable relationships with sales prospects and customers via email marketing is to make an effective template for your messages. Email management software lets you create standard templates via simple drag-and-drop design elements, makes it easier to incorporate rich-text, HTML and other features as well as ensuring that your content is still compatible with a wide range of hardware and software configurations.
PERMISSION BASED MARKETING
Unsolicited email marketing is by and large, a waste of time. It's whats known more commonly as 'spam' and very few people will ever even read messages from groups that they don't recognise - in fact, for the most part, they'll consciously avoid them. That's why email marketing is more commonly operated on a premised based principle; users give their consent to receive your messages. For this to work in a bulk marketing medium though, some form of automation and data management is essential.
Therefore email marketing campaigns normally work alongside online data capture forms, where users can give their consent to be added to a list of 'subscribed' contacts. Different lists of contacts can be managed easily via the software, combined or separated according to specific campaigns By the same token - and by law - it's essential that you also give subscribers the option to unsubscribe from your campaigns. With effective software, this process can be entirely automated by integrating it with data capture forms and the task of managing thousands of email addresses can become incredibly simple.
TRACKING AND REPORTING
Another area where email marketing software fulfils a vital role is in measuring the effectiveness of a campaign. Without a proper analytics package in place, the impact of a campaign will be impossible to judge - you won't even know whether or not its reaching anyone in the first place. For all you know it could be intercepted by a spam filter before it even reaches inboxes. With the software you can see the 'bounce rate' of your messages (how often it successfully or unsuccessfully reaches the target destination) and more importantly, detailed information on user behaviour once they click through to your messages - how long do they read the message for, which links do they click, do they convert to your desired goal - allowing you to optimise your campaigns based on what actually works.
