Internet Marketing Checklists

Sending a Marketing E-Mail

E-mail marketing is one of the most effective ways of connecting with customers, when you do it right. Each time you embark on an e-mail campaign, think about the steps you want to follow.

Design Your Campaign

• Choose your list. Pick an opt-in e-mail list that follows all anti-spam regulations and one that is pertinent to your offer. If you're using the same list each time, you might want to rethink that—targeted offers are the most relevant.
• Design your message. Who is the audience? What language do they respond to? What problems do they have? Think carefully about how you communicate from the title (to get it opened) to the message inside the e-mail (to get it clicked).
• Design your Web experience. The purpose of your message is to convert prospects into customers, so make sure that you've designed your Web site to promote follow-through. Ensure that your Web design looks like the e-mail design, so customers know they are in the right place. Take care to deliver the Web site messaging using the same care you put into the e-mail, so customers don't drop out of converting along the way.
• Design your metrics. Ensure that your e-mail system can count how many e-mails bounce versus those that are delivered. Make sure that you've applied the right dollops of JavaScript code to track which e-mails are opened and which are clicked through to your Web site. (And be sure you can track how many convert, also.)

Test Your Campaign

• Test your experience. Make sure that your links are properly formatted in several e-mail programs and that the links open to the right places on your Web site. Ensure that your Web experience also works from that opening landing page through conversion.
• Test your delivery. Send your e-mail to several test e-mail systems to see how many of them are blocked as spam and how many get through.
• Test your response. Develop several versions of your e-mail message (and possibly of your Web site also) and send them to small subsets of the list. See which one gets the highest response rate—that is probably your best choice to send to the entire list.

Now you're ready to send it out. Good luck.

In making this list, I intended to "do it wrong quickly"—there are undoubtedly other tasks that need checklists and probably more steps that should be on these lists. Please let me know what's missing and help me add it. Thanks.

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