The start of a new year is a perfect time to take a fresh look at your email marketing program. Here are four basics your team should be on top of to make the most of your email expenditures in 2012.
1. Test and evaluate your suppression list process.
You don't have such a process and you are running an email marketing program? That should be your first red flag. There are many email addresses on your file that you need to ensure you are not emailing, even mistakenly, includes whole domains under the Federal Communications Commission's wireless domains list, which marketers are banned from contacting via email.
2. Test and evaluate the accuracy of your seed addresses
You use them to estimate your inbox placement at different ISPs. If you're even more on top it, you also use them to check for rendering issues. One challenge is that seed addresses can take on a life of their own and not always remain representative of the whole. The repeated act of opening, clicking and replying can send signals to the ISP anti-spam system, undermining the validity of the results to the whole.
While you may be happy that you are getting your mail in the inbox, others may not be. It's best to have a regular process to update and retire seed addresses, so that you can be more confident that your test results arerepresentative to your subscriber base.
3. Test and evaluate your ISP feedback loop and unsubscribe process
A recipient unsubscribe action and, ideally, the same person's complaint action should result in the person not receiving another email. This is the law for the former under Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM) and a good practice in the latter case. (That is unless you want more complaints that will tarnish your sender reputation.)
Difficult problems don't arise when everything is broken. This is easy to identify because statistics will show zero unsubscribes or complaints. Rather, it is when something is partly broken where big issues can stir, fester, and then culminate into major hidden problems. Usually, system overload and stress can be a factor here. For instance, a slow database may miss processing all record changes when the load is high. However, high load or not, missing even one unsubscribe request is a CAN-SPAM violation.
As a marketer, or even an email service provider, you have a responsibility to make sure your system is working and within all reasonable loads, high or low. The only accurate way to do this is in a planned experimental way.
4. Review your personal role and security process
Ideally you have a clear policy and process on what happens with employee and/or client departures or changes, handling of customer data files, and who is responsible for what. However, chances are that something may have been missed. While not the most exciting, the new year is a great time to perform a thorough cleanup. Revoke access to past employee email accounts, delete remains of unnecessary data files, and review each member's his/her function's responsibility and accountability.
Far from being the most exciting start to the New Year, these basics often can make or break an email marketing program. Investing a little time to make sure your fundamental processes are running smoothly can go a long way to making sure the rest of year is successful and will give you greater peace of mind that there will be less surprises.
Andrew O'Halloran is senior director of privacy and client services at Cypra Media.
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