8 Great Tips for Large-Scale Email Deployments

1. Listen to Your Data

You can’t market successfully if you don’t know who you’re marketing to. And this all-important “who” is contained in your data. So ask yourself: “What is our data telling us? How can we act on it to increase relevancy to our consumers?” If you use Web analytics to track your campaign and website performance, ask how your consumers are reacting to your website.

2. Maintain Good Hygiene

(List hygiene, that is.) Hygiene is all about keeping your email list as clean as possible. Scrub out domains that no longer exist. Remove users who haven’t opened or clicked in recent months. Also, remove users who have inactive email accounts or accounts that continuously bounce at ISPs.

3. Don’t Blast Before It’s Passed

When producing an email campaign, you need numerous safeguards in place so that it launches without error. Use top-of-the-line applications and recheck your emails right up until the time they blast. At Direct Partners, we use a series of four QA checks:

- Code Validation
- ISP Spam Filter Testing, Inbox Monitoring
- Email Rendering
- Copy/Creative Proofing

Code Validation – We create our emails in compliance with the W3C validation engine. Incorrect and invalid code is extremely detrimental since bad code can be translated as spam by certain ISP filters.

ISP Spam Filter Testing, Inbox Monitoring – What good is an email if you can’t get it delivered? We put all campaigns through rigorous spam filtering at all of the major ISPs to help ensure that the emails will be delivered. We check for spam trigger words, image-heavy creative, invalid text characters/symbols and other criteria. We also check our delivery rates by using Inbox Monitoring. This tool predicts the likelihood of an email arriving in the inbox at all of the major ISPs, domestically and internationally.

Email Rendering –Your email might look great in Yahoo, but have you checked it against Hotmail, Gmail or, better yet, Outlook 2010? At DP, we have accounts set up across the Internet to check for rendering issues.

Copy/Creative Proofing – Eye-popping creative and spectacular copy are great. But what if your dates are wrong or you’re sending consumers to a dead landing page? Proofing and quality assurance play a vital role in the success of your campaign. Due to the permanent nature of email, it’s absolutely imperative that your campaigns are proofed and approved by multiple checkpoints before deployment.

4. Time Your Emails Thoughtfully

The old adage in email marketing has always been, “Send a relevant email to the right user at the right time.” It’s even truer today. In addition to receiving email, your prospect or customer user is getting relevant information from social networking sites and smartphones (SMS, MMS). With all this competition, timing your communication is key to success.

When a person opts into your email list through a transaction or newsletter sign-up, it is best practice to re-engage that person immediately with a timely welcome email or a series of triggered welcome emails. Send re-engagement campaigns to users who haven’t been to your website or who haven’t opened an email in the past “x” months, or to users who didn’t finalize an online purchase or reservation. Immediacy and a well-timed campaign are key to keeping your most valuable users active.

5. Customize for Success

You know this already but it’s worth saying again: every person in your database is unique for a plethora of reasons. Tailoring your email campaign to each individual creates a one-on-one dialogue with your consumer.

Try to go beyond the usual “Dear John” salutation in your campaigns by generating dynamic content. If you’re a retailer and you know that a user has purchased designer shoes in the past, generate content in the email that might encourage the user to purchase a matching blouse or pants.

6. Respect the Opt-in Rule

Email marketing is all about permission. Consumers who sign up for your newsletter or opt in into your database through a transaction are trusting you with their email address. And they have the power to unsubscribe or click the “SPAM” button whenever they like. Follow the dictates of the CAN-SPAM act religiously. Make certain you adhere to your own business rules and not venture into questionable business practices to enhance your email list.

7. Keep Your List Growing

If meeting an internal target for email list growth is a goal, you have to communicate that throughout your organization. Growing your list goes beyond just a newsletter sign-up or opting into your list through a transaction. At every point of contact with your customers, make sure that all business units are involved in capturing email addresses.

If your company sends out direct mail material, catalogs or magazines, provide a Web address for sign-ups. If you maintain a call center to assist customers, kindly ask if they’d like to be included in the company’s newsletters. Likewise, ask for email addresses at the point of sale. If capturing new leads online is the focus of your organization, employ list rental services or lead generation websites. This can be a tricky area for marketing managers to navigate, so be cautiously optimistic about the results.

8. Choose Your Email Partners Wisely

Most organizations that deploy email campaigns to a large volume of users employ an email service provider (ESP). ESPs allow you to easily test and deploy email, and most offer features that email managers find useful daily. ESPs allow you to insert and test campaigns with ease, maintain healthy relationships with ISPs, monitor spam traps, provide insightful reporting and allow for easy list management and hygiene. These are all ways to help your organization deploy campaigns more quickly and profitably.

Finally, if you’re sending 250+ million emails a year (like we do at DP), it’s smart to focus not only on a cost-effective solution but also on a system that will remain stable in the most taxing environments. A state-of-the-art ESP allows you to integrate the technical aspects of email marketing while allowing your marketing team to focus on retention and acquisition initiatives.

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