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.