1. What is the primary purpose of the emails that your company sends?

If your company is using emails to send out monthly newsletters consider expanding your message to action-oriented emails. Poll your readers to find out what messages and/or offers they would be interested in learning more about.

2. How are your company’s emails deployed?

Sending emails out manually through your Outlook or any individual email account can make you and your company look like amateurs, not to mention that you could even be sending your customers viruses. Use a third party online marketing tool specifically designed to send emails, such as Lyris, Activate Direct, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor. These systems offer features to track open rates, click throughs, and can even integrate other applications your company may be using like a customer relationship manager (CRM).

3. How does your company design and manage email assets?

Designing emails from scratch each time you want to deploy an email can be very time-consuming, utilize a template approach. Users may lose interest if you continue to use the same template over time so design a series of templates for your email campaign.

4. Does your company utilize landing pages for your email campaigns?

There is a balance of marketers that feel implementing individual landing pages is far too time consuming, but they could not be more wrong. Directing all traffic to one specific place eliminates the ability to effectively traffic the success of your campaign. It can also be frustrating for your user if they get to a page and the page is not specific to the email they received. The most effective landing page uses a combination of the offer, making the user feel the offer is unique to them and include a call to action.

5. Does your company test offers, lists, subject lines or creative?

Your company should constantly be testing email communications to your readers. This will allow you to refine your message(s) and get rid of poor performing campaigns or programs along with segmenting your list of users. Select a percentage of your database like 10-20% and test a two different messages or offers, even test the subject line within these messages.

6. Does your company test to optimize deliverability, as well as frequency, and days in which email deployment is most effective?

Deliverability is important information for every successful email program. The time and frequency of email deployment can also be a factor in the success of your deliverability. What works for one company may not work for yours. The only way to truly know what works for you is to test, after all isn’t email marketing a game of “trial and error”? Having conclusive results will help you refine your email campaign and build a more effective outcome.

According to Epsilon’s Global Consumer Email Study, conducted by ROI Research, the survey of over 4000 consumers in 13 countries finds that Email remains a mainstay communication, showing that 87% of North American(and 74% of European respondents are more likely than their peers in APAC to use email as their primary online communications tool.

Instant messaging as the main channel for communication, is notably high in APAC with 28% of respondents, while text/SMS and social networking remain consistently low across all regions. While most consumers manage one primary inbox for the programs they subscribe to, mobile phones and PDAs are gaining popularity for time-sensitive alerts such as news, weather and finance/stock information.

Email is also replacing other channels of communication. Over one-third of respondents have replaced traditional (communication) channels in favor of email for communications from:

Banks (40%)
Promotional postal mail (38%)
Telemarketing (34%)
Offline coupons (14%)
Telemarketing (28%)

PBEs (permission-based email) are more likely to elicit actions from APAC respondents including clicking on a website, signing up for more information, watching a video clip, clicking on an advertised link or purchasing on or off-line. APAC also leads in reported usage of a PDA or Smartphone for email with 32%, significantly more than North America (9%) and Europe (7%).

59% of APAC consumers report making an offline purchase as a result of email communications, followed by North America (53%) and EMEA (37%). Half of APAC respondents feel that “subject” lines are the most compelling feature to open a permission-based email; over two-thirds of North American and European respondents select the “from” line. Discount offers, free product offers, familiar brand names and personalization of subject lines increase the likelihood of opening among all respondents.

Other key findings from the study include:

Respondents cite security and lack of attractive offers/promotions as the primary reasons why they do not interact with the emails they receive.
North American respondents are the most likely to unsubscribe.
Irrelevant content and frequency are cited as the two most likely reasons for un-subscription.
Eight in ten North American respondents have added PBE addresses to safe sender lists; overall, more than half of respondents have added PBE addresses to safe sender lists.
Respondents are most concerned about viruses, identity theft, phishing, and scams. Concerns about phishing and pharming have increased significantly from 2005 to 2009 for US respondents.

Kevin Mabley, SVP of Strategic Services at Epsilon,  ”… these findings reinforce the need for marketers to speak to consumers in a two-way dialogue… respecting… (consumer) preferences and past interactions… knowledge of local marketplace trends is crucial and testing each strategy and program will provide confirmation of what’s working.”