Share your Email Marketing best practices or tips

This is almost the opposite of a way to engage customers or prospective customers, but it's definitely a way to keep people happy with your brand... Make sure that you have an internal calendar of your messaging, and try to consolidate/segment your mailings as much as possible. Over-messaging will not win you any awards or friends! Also be sure to have a clear, easy way for people to opt out of your emails, and (obviously) honor those opt-outs immediately.

In engagement streams, link to landing pages and use progressive profiling. Chances are you already have all the basic information on them by the time they enter an engagement stream. This is an easy way to collect more information on a lead, and they will be happy they don't have to constantly fill out the same information.

It'd be exhausting to go over all of the things we're doing with email marketing, but here are some of my big (new) things we're trying to implement/make big improvements on this quarter:

• Testing. We have used Litmus pretty consistently but only as a spot-checking tool (does it look good in previews? Great, logging out of Litmus now...) - we're trying to be a lot more rigorous going forward. This means making actionable steps to improve our deliverability, and constantly improving our templates to look better in all mail clients.
• List maintenance. I think any discussion about email marketing can't just ignore database health, and it's one of the best times to start this discussion again. For us, that means talking list health for every product list and marketing region.
• Compliance. I think every organization should be talking about ensuring they're still compliant everywhere they operate, and maintaining research and legal counsel documentation on this topic. For me, this has made me a lot more prepared to enter email marketing plan conversations with all of our international markets.

I am mostly a Marketo technical resource, so these few changes are mostly focused on technical work rather than pretty writing and design, but hopefully that gives you (everyone) a few topics to think about.

I could list out quite a few things but here's one I'm super keen on right now: Master Smart Lists & Segmentations. Stop duplicating the same rules through all of your lists & programs to determine mailability, correct customer types, product interests, regions - identify the key rules you need to use, and create "masters" to refer to.

No more "whoopsies" caused by an accidental "is not", or misplaced bracket in your custom filter rules - and much easier if you have either a large team or users who aren't comfortable with handling data and complex logic.

#1 - Keep your data clean to help ensure that you are reaching the inbox of those who want to receive email from you

#2 - Use targeted lists, we've seen a direct correlation from using really targeted lists to increased email metrics

#3 - Set up an email preference center to allow the prospects to receive your email for topics they are interested in

For our newsletters or news alert emails and fulfillment publication emails, content needs to be proofed by our editors for typos, grammar and link tests.

For our event email promos, Sponsor logos , board member name and company listings must be thoroughly reviewed. The main call to action links or buttons must be tested.  The event emails need to be highly targeted to a specific audience by event, and not sent to everyone in our database.  Never send an "event registration opens" promo on a Saturday when no one is in the office to answer phone calls or troubleshoot for registration problems.

Hard bounces from the fulfillment or renewal sub emails, registered or past attendees to our events, or our sponsors or board members are handled immediately and most often require phone calls to validate or update email addresses. 

We marketing suspend people on maternity/paternity leave or extended leave as we receive the out of office messages.  

I think two important considerations are list health and personalization.

List health: Far too often, I see clients go the route of purchasing lists from vendors. Do yourself a favor and avoid this outdated, ineffective, and dangerous tactic. Also, consider activating a re-engagement program to all leads who are inactive for more than 6 months. This will keep your database clean, providing better analytic insights and improving deliverability.

Personalization​: Use targeted messaging. One of the key benefits of using Marketo is the ability to send triggered emails based on activity. This gives you the opportunity to reach out to a prospect based on their web activity, increasing likelihood of conversion and staying top-of-mind. Also consider using segmentation and snippets to create customized, dynamic content.

Everything mentioned above is fantastic and completely on point!

One item or tip that I think is a must have is an email launch checklist. Whether it is creating a new program or just sending a one off email, having a checklist to go through prior to launching (ensuring the To and From fields are correct, or making sure your not blasting the whole company with the 5,000+ out of office replies) will save you a lot of time, anxiety, and those cute dog oopsy emails you have to send out for the wrong content.

There are lots of different checklists out there, but Scott Wilder published one a few years ago that we still use today. you can find it ---> Email Checklist

Use humor to your advantage. Put it into your content and use that as the first piece of your nurture campaign. People will interact with something funny and lighthearted and then anticipate your next email. It's a good way to become a habit for people and it will make your brand stand out.

We put a big emphasis on our database health and making sure that all lists are clean and accurate.  We're a year into our implementation so looking at the different ways we can optimize all the Marketo features: dynamic content, segmentation, etc.