Email and Mobile Direct Marketing
Read this chapter. Email marketing is one of the more effective ways to reach customers. Email is owned media, which means you control the content and own the email list. You can use email in conjunction with social media to continue engagement with your audience.
Tools of the trade
There are many good ESPs available. MailChimp (www.mailchimp.com) is one example of an email service provider that can manage the email send for you from start to finish. It provides tracking, support, subscriber list management and email templates.
More advanced ESPs that offer a range of message and campaign management facilities, as well as broader data management and delivery value, include Salesforce Marketing Cloud (www.marketingcloud.com), Silverpop (www.silverpop.com), Hubbion (hubbion.com) and Oracle Responsys (www.oracle.com/marketingcloud/ products/cross-channel-orchestration/index.html), which offer mobile and email solutions, among others.
All emails need to be tested for email client compatibility as well as for any potential spam problems.
- For email client compatibility, as well as mobile rendering, you can test your email at Litmus: litmus.com/email-testing or at PutsMail: putsmail.com
- An email's spam score can be checked at: spamassassin.apache.org
- An email's reputation score can be checked at: www.senderscore.org.
Once a message has been sent, results need to be analysed to pinpoint areas for growth for the next campaign. Use your ESP's built-in analytics feature and correlate this with your Google Analytics data.