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5 tools to improve your email marketing

March 17, 2010 |

With emails flooding inboxes, the pressure is on to deliver highly compelling and creative communications that rise above the clutter. Yet some marketers are still clinging stubbornly to the same stale email campaigns they've had for years.

The good news is there are new innovations and proven tactics for better engaging customers and driving revenue. Here are five:

1. Social sharing: According to the Pew Internet Project, more than one-third of American adults have a social network profile, and many of them use these sites to gather product information and recommendations. Rather than seeing social media as competition, savvy email marketers incorporate the medium into their campaigns, extending reach by as much as 24.3 percent, according to Silverpop research.

Getting recipients to share emails on social sites requires more effort than just adding icons to messages. Recipients must be educated about how and why they should share content. Marketers should feature the social-sharing option in welcome messages and then continue to devote prime space in mailings to sharing icons or links. They should also experiment with how many and which social networks they link to and where the links are placed within messages.

2. Web analytics: In this crowded marketplace, consumers are increasingly demanding relevance. Optimizing integration between messaging and Web analytics platforms is vital to building loyalty, increasing conversions, and improving ROI. Using Web analytics data helps marketers better understand customers' needs and improves their ability to engage them through targeted and triggered campaigns.

One particularly effective way of combining Web analytics and email is a shopping cart abandonment campaign. Marketers that send reminder messages encouraging online cart abandoners to complete purchases have experienced tremendous results. To increase the sense of urgency, some of these messages remind customers that selected items are not guaranteed to always be in stock. Some companies also include an incentive to finalize purchases.

Get the full story at Silverpop

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