Email Marketing : Health Check To Do List

The start of a new year is always exciting, but make sure you take some time to do a health check for your email marketing program.  Here is a brief list of items that should be on the checklist:

 1. Email Acquisition

Have your email acquisition numbers started to fall or reach a plateau?  Do a review of your web & email analytics and determine where your numbers started to drop.  Once you’ve found the culprit, implement a new strategy to start increasing those numbers.

 2. Triggered Emails

If you haven’t set up triggered emails yet, now is the time to do so.  Triggers can include holidays/seasonality, new product offerings or content additions to the website and many more.  Triggers are an easy way to personalize your email interaction with your customers/subscribers and increase send volume.  If you’ve already setup your triggers, go through and test them all to make sure they are working properly.

 3. Mobile Friendly

You’ve already made your emails mobile friendly?  Great, now you need to test them.  Don’t rely solely on your designers to stay within “specifications”, test them on your smartphones and tablets.  If your emails aren’t currently mobile friendly, get started today with responsive email templates.

 4. A/B Testing

As a friend once said, “The worst place to learn to fly fish is in the river, you’ll scare all the fish”, similarly, the worst time to do A/B testing is during the fervor of Q4.  Make sure you start now, you’ll want to include content, subject lines, offers, images, day parting and more in your tests.

For many industries Q4 is the money maker and it is smart to prepare heavily for it throughout the year.  Ensuring that you have a healthy email marketing program will reap the rewards of lower cost of customer acquisition and a positive ROI.