Email marketing systems use databases to storage, retrieve, and update data in the system. Everything the system does uses information (data) stored in the database, including email content, email design code, contact lists, scheduled sending, and performance statistics.

The databases in email marketing systems are called “relational databases,” because they recognize relations among stored items of information. For example which contacts belong to a list, or which statistics relate to a specific email.

Think Excel. Excel files are actually small databases. Databases consist of software-based “containers” or “fields” that are structured to collect, manage, and store information. Databases allow users to easily add, edit, or delete the information it stores. The structure of a database is tabular, consisting of columns (types of information with a given name); and rows (instances of information – commonly referred to as ‘records’).

What are fields?

Fields are containers that hold data in a database. There are different types of fields to store different types of data.

What are field ‘values’?

The data in a field is called the ‘value’ for that field.

What are custom fields?

Most email marketing systems offer the ability to add ‘fields’ to your database. These fields are called “Custom Fields” because you use them to customize your database.

The term Email Marketing System refers to computer software that sends bulk email to target audiences. Effective uses of email marketing software include sending sales and promotions, customer service, and customer support email communications to opt-in lists of subscribers.

The software uses a database to store contact information, campaign statistics, and message history. The software interface has features necessary to manage email campaigns such as email setup and sending, adding or importing contacts to receive emails, reporting and tracking functions such as how many people opened an email, how many emails bounced back, and how many people actually clicked links in an email.

Email marketing software is sold as licensed software – to be owned and run on a server computer by the owner, or as a service – (Software-As-A-Service – SAAS) which is run on server computers and accessed via the Internet. Prices to buy and own email marketing software range from around three hundred fifty dollars ($350), to fifteen hundred dollars ($1,500). Service providers typically charge monthly fees based on the total number of emails and/or the number of emails sent. There are also enterprise level services that cost thousands of dollars a month to manage marketing email campaigns for large enterprises. These systems have sophisticated features to connect and integrate with other systems, personalize emails, and for detailed reporting and performance analysis.

Features and Benefits

• Email Marketing software speeds up the direct marketing process by sending personalized email messages to a customer or prospect.
• 96% of Internet users access email, and email outranks all other online activities including shopping, downloading music, or reading blogs.
• Most email marketing software can schedule emails to send automatically at pre-defined dates and times. This allows marketers to adhere to a marketing plan.
• Some email marketing software can automatically send email in the future based on available contact data (like birthdates, or 30 days after a purchase, etc.), or recipient activity (joining or being added to a list, clicking a link in an email or opening an email). These automated emails are called autoresponder or trigger emails, and they enable complex and detailed response communications to be setup in advance.
• Using email, businesses or organizations can manage ongoing sales, service and support communications with customers and prospects, and do so frequently at no additional cost. This is attractive to any business seeking to reduce and control costs.
• Email marketing software makes business communications appear more professional. Most email marketing software systems use templates to manage formatting of emails. Templates allow users to adhere to brand standards in their emails.
• Email marketing software also features reporting tools that track delivery, opens, link clicks, and other performance metrics.
• Email marketing software streamlines the process of organizing contact data, creating and managing mailing lists, and creating list segments to target emails.
• Email marketing software automatically confirms subscriptions, removes duplicate contacts, processes unsubscribe requests, and processes bounced emails to keep lists optimized and ensure compliance with SPAM laws.

The CancerLens conference marketing campaign was very successful and the reasons for that success can be uniquely articulated in the statement – we didn’t do anything different, we just did things differently.

This simple statement is an important distillation of the campaigns key success factors. It also effectively communicates our unique approach and the virtues of our practices and methodologies. What came out in our interview for the MarketingSherpa Case Study was that every client and marketer knows about, and purports the importance of customer centricity and allowing the customer to drive the communications experience. But rarely do campaigns appear that do this effectively.

Here is a summary of the approach we use to get superior results from our campaigns. Try them.

• Be customer focused. Yeah, yeah, I know you’ve heard this before. But the ability to translate client requirements into a compelling customer experience is the core value we bring to every campaign we create. If you don’t have this skill in-house, hire it.
• Know the target audience. A campaign has to address multiple audiences effectively. Segment and address each audience uniquely.
• Define clear success metrics. A campaign must deliver ROI. Defining clear success metrics requires careful consideration of potential benefits beyond the campaigns focus. ROI is typically measured in quantitative terms, but qualitative measures are important, add value, and contribute greatly to improving the experiential aspects of a campaign.
• Don’t Sell, Tell! Nobody cares about what you are selling. They care about meeting a need they have. Great campaigns communicate how what you offer meets that need best, and make it easy for them to get it.
• Use talented and professional design and writing. Ultimately, what you say, how you say it, and when make all the difference. View and use design and writing as core strategic disciplines, not simply “creative” endeavors.

Check out the MarketingSherpa case study on our conference campaign for the American Cancer Society. It highlights how we segmented the target audiences and details the tactics that created a compelling experience and delivered amazing results. And contact me if I can help you achieve better customer connections with your next campaign.

Engagement
A professional campaign includes the creation of specific web pages and triggered autoresponder emails that provide relevant and current information on the subject matter, as well as the producers, partners, and stakeholders. This is important, as it delivers a turn-key experience that effectively promotes the subject matter, the parties involved, and heightened recipient engagement (ie: registration for updates, RSVP to events, etc.).

Measurable Results
Professional email campaigns make detailed performance metrics accessible including read/open rates, link click rates, and conversion rates. They also create databases of qualified opt-in recipients interested in the subject matter and the offerings of producers, partners, and stakeholders.

Use of professional email marketing practices is often avoided based on three criteria, 1) time requirements, 2) skill requirements and 3) cost. These factors make using a ‘Send Only’ approach the most often used, and is enabled by services like Constant Contact and MailerMailer.

The ‘Send Only’ approach is used most often and is based on the agreement that simply getting a message or promotion viewed is sufficient. This approach fails to consider the impact of the recipients responses when they want more (information, capability, interaction, etc.), but can’t get it.

I hope this helps highlight the value-proposition to using professional email marketing practices as a core tool in your marketing and promotions initiatives. The time and resources required for professional campaign development are time and resources that are well spent.

• Collects RSVP Responses
• Tracks Conversions (persons on your list(s) who actually attend)
• Grows Your Database

Email marketing is an amazing event promotions tool. Here’s what you need to setuip an effective event promotions campaign:

1. Setup a “RSVP” web page for prospective attendees. The RSVP form is generated by your email marketing system and placed into your web page.
2. Setup a “Register For Event Updates” web page to allow interested persons to register. The Update Registration form is generated by your email marketing system and placed into your web page.
3. Send the initial email to your list promoting the event with one link to RSVP, and another to Register for event Updates.
4. Setup two autoresponder emails for recipients who do not open your initial email. Set the first to send 3-5 days after the initial email. Set the second to send 3-5 days prior to the event. Be sure to highlight any new developments in these emails – like new presenters, or new featured guests attending, etc.
5. Setup two autoresponder emails for recipients who registered to receive Event Updates. Set the first to send 3-5 days after they register. Set the second to send 3-5 days prior to the event. Be sure both of these emails contain some “new” information about the event. Be sure the second contains something “new” and different from the new item featured in the first email. The second should also include the new item that appeared in the first – as a reminder.
6. Be sure to setup thank you emails for persons who RSVP or Register For Updates.
7. Print the list of persons who RSVP. At the event have all attendees sign-in at the event – providing their name, email, and asking ‘how they heard about the event’.
8. Compare the event registration list against the RSVP list to see the percentage of attendees your email converted.
9. Finally, be sure to setup different post event autoresponder emails to send to 1) Persons on your list who did not open any emails; 2) Persons who opened but did not attend; 3) Persons who opened and attended. Include a brief survey in the email to persons who attended that captures their impression of the effectiveness of your promotion campaign. Send these 1-3 days after the event.

This basic campaign structure has successfully promoted attendance and built opt-in databases of prospects for marketing future events. See a case study at http://businessmarketingsystems.net/portfolio.html.

EMAIL SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Below is a list of features your email campaign system should have:

• Event based ‘autoresponders’ or ‘triggers’ that can be targeted based on opens and/or link clicks.
• Creation of unlimited Custom Fields of varying types including checkboxes, radio buttons, and list menus.
• Creation of simple surveys. (Optional)

Hope this is helpful. My firm, Business Marketing Systems, specializes in email and web-based event promotion. Contact me know if I can be of assistance.

Too many of the strategies and trends asserted and supported in marketing media are effective and relevant only for large enterprises. As an example the Forbes 2009 Ad Effectiveness Survey found that Forty-eight percent of marketers said that search engine optimization (SEO) was the best method for generating conversions online. E-mail and e-newsletters was next with forty-six percent. For smaller marketers the leaders get flipped with e-mail being most effective. Published information and recommendations are generally skewed to favor strategy for large enterprises because they pay for most of the research and publications.

The bottom line is marketing is essentially a highly customized function. Customization is expensive, and a key factor that explains the difficulty small and medium-sized businesses (SMB’s) have implementing effective marketing initiatives that deliver measurable ROI.

Seventy-nine percent of marketers confirmed “the need to measure, analyze, and report marketing effectiveness” was greater in 2009 than in previous years according to a study by Lenskold Group and MarketSphere. SMB’s are wanting more than read and click rates to measure their marketing effectiveness by. Like any business, they want to know:
⁃    How successfully and efficiently am I reaching my customers?
⁃    Is my marketing converting sales?
⁃    Who are my Most Valuable Customers (MVC’s)?

There are a few basic tactics SMB’s can use to measure marketing ROI:
⁃    Use some form of database driven CRM system to track customer communications activity.
⁃    Consistently use email and web conversion pages.
⁃    Integrate and consistently implement conversion tracking processes into sales and service processes.

The careful integration and consistent implementation of online marketing with offline sales, service and support processes is what leads to happy customers. This must also include a healthy dose of “personalization” to be most effective. I’m not referring to some tactic here when I use the term personalization. I’m referring to a deeper more value based approach that begins by viewing each customer as a thoughtful, caring, and concerned real person. Don’t think of customers as simply consumers or markets. Thinking of people as consumers implies they have needs that you satisfy with your products and services, and that exchange represents the sum total of any satisfying experience they will have patronizing your business.

What I’m referring to when I use the term personalization is a focus on the qualitative and emotive qualities of your customers. I’m talking about things like sending a personalized “Thank You” note when someone visits or buys from you. Starting each customer interaction with a warm smile and a sincere greeting. These are the often overlooked things that make all the difference. And some of them can be automated with e-marketing systems to help you deliver that uber personal experience every time.

It’s good to pay attention to the trends and keep abreast of what’s happening in the marketing world. But it’s most important to focus on and invest in the solutions and services that can help you do what you do better. chances are those will be different from the tactics you read about – and that’s just fine.

But let’s digress for a moment, I am defining marketing as “the activities that a business undertakes to prompt customers and prospects to take a desired action.” That action might be to make a purchase or attend an event. Whatever, the point of any marketing effort is to get people to do something you want them to do.

So if the aim of an email campaign is to prompt people to attend an event, for example, then does it meet the marketing objective to know how many people opened or clicked links in a particular email? More to the point, a marketing campaign would enable you to see who came to the event based on their receiving an email. In this context, email campaign services like Constant Contact, MailerMailer, and Vertical Response (to name but a few…) by themselves do not fulfill the most basic marketing objective.

They sell themselves in a similar way that weight loss products are sold. It is common knowledge that safe and effective weight loss is achieved by a combination of diet and exercise regimen being enacted in concert with one another. That requires commitment and concerted effort. But a galaxy of so-called weight loss products are sold by the millions promising to shed pounds without changing your current diet or exercise habits. Just strap on or mount the gadget and spend as little as five minutes a day. Well we know these things do not work. It’s the same with email marketing.

Email marketing services provide access to powerful systems that can do amazing things like send autoresponder or triggered email that’s customized and personalized based on any data in the system. But, what they don’t tell you is A) you have to know what to do with toe tools to make them work; and B) you have to design and implement other offline data collection systems to track the results properly.

Not to mention the following core skills are required to effectively and efficiently use any email marketing system:
- Database Design & Administration: To know what lists and fields to create.
- HTML Programming: To create email that gets through SPAM filters and displays as intended in the recipients email client.
- Professional Marketing Knowledge: At a minimum to know what to send, when, how often, and to whom.

So using the event attendance example, you pay $25 a month (that’s $300 a year) to send email to 2,000 people. About 17% (that’s 340) people actually read your email, and 2% (or 6.8) people actually clicked a link. Let’s say you do this 1 time each month, or 12 times a year. You spend $300 to reach 4,080 people ($0.07 per person), of whom 81.6 people actually clicked a link ($3.68 per person who clicked a link). Bottom line, you spend total of $3.75 for each person who clicks a link, and you have no idea if any of them came to the event.

Today Constant Contact has more than 3 million users paying a minimum of$15 each month, and none of them are actually “marketing.” What a business! If you want more from your marketing, contact me and tell me about what you’re presently doing. I’ll be happy to show you how with a little professional input you can market more effectively and efficiently right from where you are.

Better Customer Connections.™

1. Track Conversions
Design and implement conversion tracking processes for your campaigns. If your objective is to attract attendees to an event then be sure to require people to check-in so you can know who came and which of them participated in your email campaigns. If the goal is sales then devise a way to know if the sale came from one of your campaigns.

2. Follow-Up Consistently
Do do you remember the the last place you shopped that sent you a timely and relevant email thanking you for your business and/or extending you an offer? Thought so. So be sure to put all that wondrous email marketing technology to work enabling you to send relevant follow-up communications consistently. And take care to follow-up based on each persons interests and preferences, not generically. See item 3 for more on personalization and segmentation.

3. Personalize and Segment
At a minimum capture the name and email address of anyone in your mail lists. Then personalize all emails with the persons name appropriately. And don’t send the same email to everyone. Segment your list. Group list members by different products or services you offer and by characteristics that make them most and least likely to buy what you offer. This most often means collecting more data. Do that.