Welcome back to Email Marketing Tuesdays, I have been on a quest to discover best practices for email marketing, and I want to share my findings with you.

One of the many things I have read includes Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing, and the guide covers 5 attributes that makes email marketing engaging, and the 5 attributes include:

1. Trusted
2. Always Relevant
3. Conversational
4. Coordinated Across Channels
5. Strategic

However, before going into details about the 5 attributes that makes email marketing engaging, let’s define engagement.  According to Brian Solis author of  What’s the Future of Business? Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences, “engagement is defined as the interactions between a brand and a consumer, but it is in how it’s measured that counts.”

Now, as you read the details about the different attributes involved in engaging email marketing, think about the actions your brands and your consumers need to take, and then, think about how these actions can be measured.

1. Trusted – To create trust with your target audience, you need to develop and maintain the quality of your list; maintain your reputation to increase deliverability with ISP’s; be consistent in the timing, frequency, marketing messages, who emails are from, and subject lines; and finally, abide by CAN-SPAM regulations.

2. Always Relevant – Say the
right thing to the right people at the right time.  To accomplish this, you need to segment your target audience and determine what is the most relevant content for each segment within your target audience.  The next Email Marketing Tuesday will talk more about how you can segment your list, so stay tuned!

3. Conversational – the content of your email marketing efforts should spark a two-way conversation between you and your target audience.  You can do this by listening to your audience, adapt to their changing needs, and tell engaging stories.  Segmenting your lists and using dynamic content will help you achieve this attribute.

4. Coordinated Across Channels – According to a recent study by Mckinsey & Company, “E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than Social Media — nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.” However, social media extends your reach beyond your email marketing efforts. Therefore, Digital Marketing Managers need to include both email marketing and social media marking efforts in their digital marketing programs.  Tomorrow’s blog post, Social Media Wednesday, will talk more about social media efforts that you can coordinate with your email marketing efforts.

5. Strategic – First, make strategic marketing decisions that comply with your company’s goals.  Second, with the metrics that you are given, formulate a process to determine your Return on Investment (ROI) for your email marketing program.

Some of the above mentioned attributes are not surprising, but some the details and examples out-lined in Marketo’s guide are helpful.  In my opinion, Marketo put together an excellent guide that contains a majority of what you need to plan and deploy a top notch engaging email marketing program.

Remember: Tomorrow, check out the Digital Marketing Manager blog post, Social Media Wednesday, to find out more about the Coordinated Across Channels attribute mentioned above.

Learn More about Digital Marketing Manager, Cindy Plough