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MAILING TO MILLIONS Six Best Practices to Get Maximum Return & Revenue from Your Million-Plus Email Database

MAILING TO MILLIONS

Copyright © 2012 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 2 All Rights Reserved. Suite 900 Email: [email protected] Atlanta, GA 30326 Website: www.whatcounts.com

MAILING TO MILLIONS

SIX BEST PRACTICES TO GET MAXIMUM RETURN & REVENUE FROM YOUR MILLION-PLUS EMAIL DATABASE

There’s no reason overseeing and managing a million-plus subscriber email database

should be a discombobulated and overbearing task. Start being an effective email

marketer by creating a plan, brushing up on your skills, and cleaning house.

Implementing these six simple tweaks will go a long way towards maximizing the

return, response, and revenue from your email program.

HAVE A PLAN WITH THE BIG PICTURE IN MIND

A larger list usually equates to more attention, expectations, and effort. Use your data,

and leverage your staff, executive sponsor, and your email service provider to create a

roadmap to success. Get buy-in from above and across other business channels, and

share your goals and objectives across the board. Set up weekly, monthly, and quarterly

reporting on your campaigns and perform regular assessments of your program to

ensure all efforts are working towards achieving the desired results.

Make sure your plan is sustainable. Beware the batch

and blast mentality (always think, how would I react

if I received this?), think strategically, targeted, and

don’t forget about delivery! Email marketing

programs that perform the best do not sacrifice long-

term profitability for short-term return. Keep your

focus narrowed, consistent, and report on what’s

relevant.

“Beware the batch and blast

mentality. Always think, how

would I react if I received this?”

MAILING TO MILLIONS


KNOW YOUR PLATFORM It is crucial that you and your team have a better than average understanding of the

capabilities of your email service provider, especially with a large database. You don’t

need to be an expert, but you should feel right at home navigating through the system,

understand its reporting, and know if it can support your ambitions.

Make sure your corporate language maps to what your email service is reporting, and if

your language does differ, make sure you can translate! If a brush up on your system is

needed, or you just aren’t quite sure about a function, contact your provider.

GET YOUR DATABASE ORGANIZED Chances are, your database is multi-faceted, with multiple subscriber lists, templates,

reports, and segmentation rules that make finding anything a chore. What’s worse, these

countless variables make the chance of errors on deployment high.

The best-run email programs are those that organize by vertical or marketing effort.

Create folders for different groups and name them something that clearly spells out

what’s stored there (keep it simple!), and then migrate everything to their new homes.

If you have lists within lists, campaigns within

campaigns, or old reports for which you’ve forgotten

the details or context, create sub-folders for each (for

your old and irrelevant items, move them out of

sight, and out of mind, by creating archive

subfolders). This linear approach will make finding a

list or template to edit, or campaign to deploy, that

much easier.

“The best-run email programs

are those that organize by

vertical or marketing effort.”

MAILING TO MILLIONS


Here is an example of how you could organize one vertical:

STANDARDIZE EVERYTHING Building on what we’ve already discussed, a large database means lots of opportunities

to create interesting ways to name things, but also provides ample opportunity for

human error. Standardize your naming convention for everything. Avoid complex, or

long and drawn out titles like, “marketing_customer1_campaign1_ddmmyy.” Your

design objective for naming should be that anyone can look at the title and figure out its

purpose. Keep it simple, but relevant to the material.

Don’t bother going back and renaming all your prior data, as it would cause confusion

when accessing older information, and make sure you manage to the changes you’ve

made. Leverage your partnership with your internet service provider (ISP) to ensure

you’re operating as efficiently as possible. Use their knowledge to help you automate

processes where you can. Grant system access only to relevant parties, and ensure

appropriate user rights and restrictions are enforced. Keep close tabs on who can edit

content, subscriber information, run reporting, and push the send button. The last two

are critical, as you want to make sure your data reflects the goals you’ve outlined. You

certainly don’t want just anyone to have the capability to deploy campaigns, do you?

MAILING TO MILLIONS


The best large-volume email programs clearly define who does what, when, how, and

who backs each functional owner up for each vertical.

DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT

There are always a lot of moving pieces to large-volume email campaign operations, and

therefore exceptional communication and documentation is necessary to ensure

everything performs effectively and successfully. Document clearly what your standards

are, make them known, and easily accessible to all vested parties. Your documentation

should also include staff, their responsibilities, automated processes, “how to”

instructions, and who(m) to contact in the event of an issue. Those with the largest (and

growing) lists and lowest subscriber churn percentage realize how important having an

outstanding knowledge base is to their success. Questions are answered, information is

readily available, and accountability is at hand.

KNOW YOUR SUBSCRIBERS Last but certainly not least, your mentality and

treatment of a million plus subscriber email database

should be no different than the mentality and

treatment of a subscriber base of one hundred. All

your efforts will be lost if you’re not cognizant of this

fact, with constant monitoring of your subscriber’s

reactions to your campaigns to keep this in check.

Report on what’s relevant, but track everything, as you never know where that next

trend lies. Target your base and send them only relevant offers or information. If you’ve

been tracking everything, you can easily look into your subscriber’s habits by reviewing

their opens (total and unique) and clicks. Look for highest open rates by subject line,

“Report on what’s relevant, but

track everything, as you never

know where that next trend

lies.”

MAILING TO MILLIONS


clicks by offer, and open-to-click ratio by campaign. Use this information to segment

your database and build marketing campaigns that make sense.

Test your ideas on a large enough percentage to ensure an adequate amount of relevant

data is collected to secure confidence in a new initiative and executive buy off. There’s

no real “right” percentage of your base to test, however, feedback from email marketing

managers at large organizations say anywhere from 10% to 20% is sufficient.

Also work with whoever is responsible for monitoring visitor engagement and

conversion on your site, and look for improvement opportunities here. Offer subscribers

the opportunity to control mailing frequency through a preference center, and segment

inactive subscribers (those 6 months or older) into reengagement campaigns.

Both of these efforts will help you maintain a positive reputation and enhance the

deliverability of your campaigns.

RESULTS FROM IMPLEMENTATION

Implementing these six steps to success does not have to be a complicated matter. As

one large organization proves, there are simple measures that can be taken that can put

you on the path to executing the six steps, and make a significant impact to your bottom

line. This company had not, historically, paid much attention to its email marketing

program, however, their new management had different ideas. Recognizing that their

database of an estimated 3 million subscribers was an asset with significant revenue

potential, they developed a plan centered on improving organization, campaign

management, and production, i.e., the big picture. The case presented to the executive

level detailed how purchasing a project management tool could help them organize their

operations, standardize their processes, and free up staff time to focus on more targeting

and testing. The executive team signed off, and the tool was added to their arsenal.

MAILING TO MILLIONS


After a year, the team was pleased to learn that this simple tool had rewarded them by

reducing a campaign’s production time by one third.

In addition, with their new found “free time,” the email team was able to launch 5

lifecycle marketing programs, which netted a 40% increase to site visits and a 65% year-

over-year lift in revenue. The minor investment in an organizational and

standardization tool freed up enough resources to get to know their subscribers a little

more, and lifted their program to new heights.

So, are you and your program ready to take the first step?

The solutions are there for the taking.

MAILING TO MILLIONS


ABOUT US

WhatCounts, a private Atlanta-based company

founded in 2000, is a leading email technology

innovator offering a fully integrated lifecycle

marketing platform supporting dynamic and targeted

content delivery, robust segmentation, API and

transactional capabilities as well as integrated video

and social media tools.

WhatCounts offers deliverability management,

strategic coaching, best practices benchmarking,

CRM integration and advanced analytics facilitating

ROI maximization.

The robust WhatCounts platform is delivered as a

hosted Web-based SaaS application and as part of the

unique Broadcaster on-premise appliance line.

WHATCOUNTS, Inc.

3630 Peachtree Rd. Telephone: 404.995.8600

Suite 900 Toll Free: 866.804.0076

Atlanta, GA 30326 Fax: 404.995.8611

www.whatcounts.com

Email: [email protected]

ATLANTA • BALTIMORE • CHICAGO • SEATTLE • SYDNEY • WASHINGTON DC

http://www.whatcounts.com/

mailto:[email protected]

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