It’s the volume, cost and time involved in collating and distributing paper based notices that cause schools a real headache and even if your school is diligent at getting notices out, how can you ensure that parents are reading them? How do we know that important notice about tomorrow’s parent teacher interviews hasn’t been used as a paper plane on the way home, marinaded with wet socks in the bottom of a child’s bag or thrown in the bin with the remnants of their school lunches? Usually we only find this out when upset parents blame the school for poor communication or a lack of response to a request sent home makes it obvious.

Sending notices directly to a parent’s email inbox automatically solves some of these issues, using the unique features of Maxmail’s email platform gets around the rest.
These days parents use email every day and organise their activities at both home and work electronically. Shared diaries, email folders, sms and calendar reminders keep many busy parents in line. Paper records are cumbersome and easily get misplaced.

Imagine:
•    Sending professionally branded, relevant and personalised information out to parents in a timely manner, via email – enabling parents to be better informed and more involved in their children’s school lives
•    Slashing the cost and manual admin work associated with sending notices out
•    Being able to gauge how many parents have opened and read your newsletters

Maxmail makes communicating with your students and their families easy. Using the email template builder you can upload images and branding from your existing website or even a word document. Capturing and managing email addresses is also easy, either upload lists in a CSV file or you can build an online form in Maxmail and get parents to register for email communication, the information they key in will go straight to Maxmail. All of this can be done without a huge input from your web provider. You don’t even need to have anyone on your staff that’s really tech savvy in order to use Maxmail.

8 great reasons for your school to use Maxmail

1. Easily managed mailing groups
By managing your mailing lists inside Maxmail, email communication can be sent home easily to targeted groups e.g. whole school, junior/middle/senior school, by class, absentees by day, in fact you can “slice and dice” your database by selecting students using any criteria. Capture email addresses with the easy to use Maxmail web form builder – or upload in CSV format from your existing database.

2. Dynamic content = relevant information
By using smart tags, student’s names, birthdates, classroom numbers, teacher’s names or even variable invoice amounts (school fees or stationary fees) are automatically put into each email – read from the database of information you have collected. Custom fields allow you to gather any information you need to include.

3. View opens and clicks
Automatic notification that an email as been opened and read will give you assurance that parents are receiving and reading newsletters.  Alternatively emails can contain a link where a parent will click on e.g.  “Please tick to confirm you have read and understand this notice”. Their response will be recorded in Maxmail for you to view at any stage.  Using this feature, you are far more likely to get a response than when using the physical sign off sheets that parents need to return.

4. Scheduled and auto-responder emails
You can set up Maxmail to send emails automatically for example an email on a student’s birthday, 6 monthly dental nurse reminders. New enrollments can be captured and managed e.g. an email can be scheduled to arrive in a parent’s inbox 1 month before a child’s 5th birthday to contact the school about a school visit.

5. RSVP and opinion polls/ surveys
Using this function of Maxmail you can easily create and publish professional looking surveys to get feedback from parents on your initiatives and avoid time consuming collation of results. Using an intuitive drag and drop interface you can mash up questions, answers, page layouts, video clips and more to create an intelligent survey in minutes. Also, if you use this function as part of a newsletter, parents can simply click on a link, fill in a couple of boxes and respond to parent help requests straight away!

6. Online
When emailing links out to parents for sites that assist in home learning, parents are more likely to visit these websites than typing a long winded URL into their browser from a printed sheet. This also applies to email addresses for staff.  Because Maxmail is a web application, your admin staff can work either from home/ school or anywhere that there is an internet connection

7. SMS for instant communication
This feature can be used to send urgent or important communication via txt messages for e.g. sports cancellations, trip cancellations, unrecorded absentees , ad hoc parent teacher interviews,  etc with the option for set reminders. Parents can receive these at any time during the day and don’t have to wait until their child comes home with important time critical notices.

8. Pricing – The Best Bit
Schools using Maxmail are excited about the low monthly cost and the fact that there are no fixed contracts!!! Plans start from $25.00 per month for 1000 emails and range to the unlimited plan for enterprises at $250.00 per month. SMS messages are just 17 cents each.

Go on, see for yourself.

To sign up for a free 30 day Maxmail trial visit www.maxmailhq.com

Here is a non-technical explanation of the main words and concepts. (Email technologists may want to look away.)
Email deliverability

The numbers of emails you send out does not equal the number of emails that arrive at their intended destination (the recipient’s inbox.) This article explains why.

This fact leads us to talk about email deliverability, which is a term with two meanings…

1. It refers to the whole subject area of getting your emails delivered to the right place.
2. It refers to your concrete success at getting your emails delivered to the right place.

So when someone mentions a deliverability issue, they are talking about something affecting the delivery of their emails. When they ask “How do I improve my email deliverability?” then they are simply asking how they can get more emails successfully delivered to recipients.

All the rest of the terms in this mini-glossary are, therefore, deliverability jargon.

Some general concepts

Various organizations are involved in delivering email. Yahoo, for example, manages the incoming email for over 250,000 email accounts at their Yahoo! Mail service. Large corporations manage the incoming email to their employees’ email accounts.

One of the main tasks for these organizations is deciding which emails to deliver to their email users. In a perfect world, this would be easy. They’d just deliver all of them.

But in a world of spam, these organizations (or rather the technology they use) have to make a judgment call on each email. At a basic level, it looks like this:

* Do we delete this email and not deliver it to the email account?
* Do we deliver the email to the account, but mark it as spam or perhaps send it straight to the junk folder in the user’s email interface?
* Do we deliver the email straight to the inbox?

Often, there’s another layer of management at the receiving end. If you use desktop email software, it also makes a judgment call on incoming email. So your company may deliver the email to your desktop inbox, but your email software might divert it straight to the delete or junk folder.

Most of the terms used in deliverability refer to procedures or technologies which help organizations and software make the right judgment call about incoming email. Procedures and technologies that help them accurately label email as spam/unwanted or legitimate email/wanted.

Spam filters and anti-spam technologies

Anti-spam technologies are any mechanism in place to identify spam and deal with it accordingly. There are hundreds of different technologies operating at various points in the chain of events that leads to the delivery of an email to a user’s inbox.

People often talk about spam filters or email getting filtered. A spam filter is a broad term used to describe any technology or process where an incoming email is examined and then tagged as a legitimate email or as spam.

If it gets tagged as spam, then it gets “filtered out,” meaning deleted or routed to a junk folder rather than the recipient’s main inbox.

There are many types of spam filters using different criteria to decide if an email is spam or not. But we can split these criteria into two broad groups.

One set involves the content of the actual email itself. What words are used in the subject line and main body text?

So, for example, if a subject line is “PENIS ENLARGERS FOR U!!!!!”, then chances are a spam filter would put a tick against that email on their spam checklist. Get enough ticks, and the email is filtered out.

Another set of criteria concerns the route the email has traveled. Who sent the email? Where did it come from? Where does it suggest people go to (links)?

So, for example, if the email originated from somewhere known to be a regular source of spam, then that’s a tick on the spam checklist.
Spam reports

Spam reports are where the receiver of a particular email decides it’s spam and reports it as such. The nature of these reports has important implications for deliverability.

Case 1: User reports spam to the organization managing their account

If you use a webmail service like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail, then you have a “report as spam” button or similar on the screen whenever you view your emails.

Using that button sends an automated report to that service about the email you’re viewing. The service then uses these reports to refine their anti-spam technologies.

For example, if enough people report email sent by “Acme Engineering” as spam, then the service might decide to block all future emails from Acme Engineering from reaching their users.

Case 2: User reports spam to a third-party anti-spam organization

Many people make a point of reporting what they see as spam to one or more organizations actively working to combat spam. As with Case 1, these organizations use the spam reports to identify spammers.

Those so identified get added to “bad sender lists” (see “blacklists” below) which are made available to organizations managing incoming email so they can reject email coming from a source on that list.

Case 3: Users report spam to the email software they’re using

Email software also has “mark as junk” or “spam” buttons which users can activate when they see spam in their inbox. The software typically uses these spam reports to refine its own spam filters. So future emails sharing similar characteristics to those marked as spam get tagged as spam, or diverted on arrival to junk/delete folders.
Blacklists

Blacklists take various forms, but are essentially a reference list of “naughty senders” that anti-spam technologies can draw on to quickly decide if an email is spam or not.

An organization might have a unique proprietary blacklist of bad email senders built through its own experience with incoming email. Or it uses one of the publicly-available lists provided by third-party anti-spam organizations.

When email arrives at an organization, the anti-spam technologies check the sender against the blacklist (or lists!) they’re using. If the sender is on a list, it’s tagged as spam.

That’s the simple version. There are lots of nuances to the different blacklists out there and how they are used.

Whitelists

Whitelists are the natural pendant to blacklists. These are lists of “good senders.” Getting on a whitelist allows your email to automatically bypass one or more of the spam checks and filters an organization might use.

Unfortunately, there are no global whitelists out there that allow your email priority delivery to any email account. Many (but not all) of the big email services run their own whitelists, and the process involved to get “whitelisted” differs from list to list.

As with blacklists, there are also third-party organizations that run whitelists which others can use.

The terms whitelist and whitelisting also refer to individuals giving your email priority access at the level of their own email software.

For example, you may see experts recommend that the welcome message you send to new subscribers should include instructions on how to whitelist you.

This means you should tell people to add your email address to their private whitelist or (usually) their email address book. Now when you send emails to that recipient, their email software recognizes you and is likely to treat you as spam.

As well as helping with the delivery of your email, whitelisting may have other side benefits.

Some email services and software, for example, prevent images in emails from displaying. If you are whitelisted with that service or software, then your images might show up while those of your not-whitelisted competitor won’t.

Email certification

Email certification is where an independent, third-party organization declares that your email practices conform to some kind of desired standard. Normally a certification fee is charged, after which the certifying body conducts an audit of your practices. You could also use enterprise level email marketing solutions like Maxmail HQ which already has extremely high deliverability rate to bypass the need for one-to-one certification.

Certification takes various guises, involving one or more of the following concepts:

1. If you pass the audit, you are added to the certification agency’s whitelist. Email address services recognizing that certification may use that whitelist and give your emails priority treatment (as described above.)

2. Email certification is also used to refer to programs where complying with a set of criteria allows you to display some kind of certification seal on your website. This is similar to the privacy seals you often encounter on retail websites.

3. A more recent development is certification that puts a “certified” icon next to your email, indicating to recipients that your email is both authentic and complies with the certifying agency’s email standards.

Email authentication

The success of efforts to clean up the email world hinge on the ability of those managing incoming email to properly identify the sender of each email.

Email authentication refers to new standards used to accurately identify email senders. When a sender “authenticates” their email, it means they follow the requirements of these standards so that organizations receiving their emails can say with certainty where they originated from.

Increasingly, authenticated email is considered a big plus by anti-spam technologies.

Email sender reputation

Email (sender) reputation is a broad term used to describe your standing with those organizations managing incoming email to end-user accounts. As anti-spam technologies evolve, so they are relying more and more on this holistic concept of reputation to determine whether or not your emails should get delivered.

The better your reputation, the more likely you are to pass all the spam checks and filters. Which begs the question, just what makes a good reputation?

There are various criteria that contribute to a good sender reputation. The main ones are:

1. You don’t send messages to email addresses that no longer function.
2. Your emails don’t generate spam reports.
3. The links you use in your emails are not associated with any bad emailers.

Some would also say email authentication enhances your reputation. Others treat authentication as a separate issue.

Of course, “don’t get reported as spam” is a fairly glib answer to how to increase your sender reputation. In essence, what sender reputation really means is that your whole email program should follow established best practices in terms of list hygiene, permission, relevancy, subscriber management etc. etc.

Learn more about reputation

Understanding the terms used in email deliverability is one thing. Applying that knowledge to get more emails delivered is another. Explore the articles and links on this topic to learn how to do exactly that. Good luck!

SPAM is a chronic problem world-wide and quite often that means us, as email marketing service providers, have a pretty tough job policing and ensuring all emails that go out of our system are compliant with relevant Spam laws.

In this article we’ll attempt to explain the issue of SPAM, what it means, what are the laws, what’s at stake and how to make sure you are compliant with all relevant international guidelines and policies.

The Issue of SPAM in simple Engligh

Spam is an issue about consent, not content. Whether the Unsolicited Bulk Email (“UBE”) message is an advert, a scam, porn, a begging letter or an offer of a free lunch, the content is irrelevant – if the message was sent unsolicited and in bulk then the message is spam.

Spam is not a sub-set of UBE, it is not “UBE that is also a scam or that doesn’t contain an unsubscribe link”. All email sent unsolicited and in bulk is Spam.

This distinction is important because legislators spend inordinate amounts of time attempting to regulate the content of spam messages, and in doing so come up against free speech issues, without realizing that the spam issue is solely about the delivery method.

Definition of SPAM

The word “Spam” as applied to Email means “Unsolicited Bulk Email”.

Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.

A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

• Unsolicited Email is normal email
  (examples: first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries)
• Bulk Email is normal email
  (examples: subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists)

International Regulations around sending email communication

The United States Can-SPAM Act

New Zealand Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act

Australian Anti-SPAM Act (2003)

Anti-Spam and Privacy Laws for the European Union

Maxmail introduces new policy to fight SPAM and eradicate Spammers from its global network

Fighting SPAM comes as part of the territory of being a market leader in email marketing. Since there’s no way we can “predict” who will SPAM, all we can do is make sure we have tough enough policies in place to deter SPAMMERS and make sure our system is not used for sending unsolicited emails.

Hence, as of July 1, 2010, Maxmail has introduced new policies that imposes hefty fines and penalties with potential for litigation if it is proven that a particular Maxmail user has breached our Anti-Spam policies and our Terms of Use Agreement.

Read the Maxmail Terms of Use Agreement here.

The bottom line is this

• DO NOT send emails where you are not sure whether or not you have the “express permission” from your subscribers
• In all your campaigns make sure you have an unsubscribe link
• Mention your full company name, contact details and a phone number
• Specify where, when and how you got the email address of your subscribers – remind them of when they opted in
• Collect evidence that your subscribers indeed opted in – Capture the IP address from which they opted in (if using web forms), the date, website URL etc.
• If in doubt – do the right thing – ask for their permission before sending them the email.

Email, on the other hand, costs nothing to the sender therefore there is no monetary barrier or incremental cost to deter how much email spam can be sent. With this in mind, here’s the problem:

There are over 30,000,000 businesses in North America alone. If sending postal junk mail cost nothing to print or to deliver and therefore each North American business could freely send you one item of postal junk mail per month, you personally would receive 1,000,000 items of postal junk mail each day. Obviously your post mailbox would not cope even with a tiny fraction of that. Luckily, print and postal delivery costs prevent that ever occurring. But not so with junk email.

Very simply, spam does not scale. There is no way for a recipient to say “I will accept only 10 items of spam per day and no more” since there is no mechanism to force millions of junk senders to stop sending after the recipient’s daily quota has been reached. Nor is there any mechanism to force spam senders to not send more than one spam per month to each recipient. Nor is there any mechanism to limit who can send spam to your email address. The Internet is international — can only North American businesses send you spam? How about South American businesses? And European businesses? What about businesses in Asia or Africa, are they not allowed to send spam to you as well?.

If you agree to accept spam as an advertising medium, then you automatically agree that every business in the world can send spam to your email addresses. As you have no way to limit who can send you spam, you are therefore agreeing to receive bulk email advertisements from a potential 200,000,000 businesses worldwide. Assuming each only sends you one spam per month you would receive 6,600,000 spams per day… meaning 4,500 spams per minute, or 150 spams per second, into your email mailbox. Many businesses would like to send you much more than one advert per month, possibly more than one per day! So how do you solve this problem?

The obvious solution is to limit who can send bulk email advertisements to you, so that you only receive the bulk email you actually want to receive.

Instead of agreeing to receive millions of unsolicited bulk emails from millions of senders, the solution is to instead opt to receive only bulk emails from specific lists you decide and consent to subscribe to. That, is what Spamhaus advocates and works to lobby world governments to legislate.

Follow ups are important for two main reasons:

(i) You keep your name in front of the potential customer. You become familiar to them, and trust is easier to establish.

(ii) If you have chosen your list correctly, the whole list consists of potential customers, and they could buy a product like yours at any time. The best time to advertise to them is when they are about to order! Unfortunately you never know when that time is likely to be, so the only answer is to put your product in front of those potential customers often to give you the most chance of catching that ‘buying moment’.

Having said that, there’s nothing worse than bombarding your customers with one special offer after another. Email Marketing is never about frequency just for the sake of “touching base” with your customers. Make sure if you are doing email marketing that you do it with PURPOSE, RELEVANCE AND VALUE IN MIND

So think about how you can “re-activate” a previously stale or “dead” business relationship through the power of purposeful and outcome driven email marketing.

From the interesting responses I have received so far, I think it is fair to make your opinion public.

So here’s a public poll where you can decide and see what others think is the most efective marketing channel today.

[polldaddy poll=1025002]

How effective is a marketing channel - Copyright Genesis Interactive

Effectiveness of a marketing channel was measured using the following 8 criterion.

• · Is the channel Low Cost
• · Does the channel have a broad reach
• · Does the channel allow personalisation (1 to 1)
• · Does the channel deliver targeted messages
• · Does the channel offer any viral features?
• · Can the results be tracked?
• · Is the channel easy to access?
• · What is the longevity of a channel

Each criterion was scored out of a total value of 100. The scores are plotted on the line graph from left to right (highest to lowest). So, the highest socre has highest effectiveness.

Questions around cost were normalised using comparative value proposition offered by each channel.

We considered advanced targeting abilities as a measure for the “target-ability” property of a channel

Reach – Global = Maximum, Local/Regional = Minimum

Tracking: We consider a campaign trackable if you can quantitatively define the number of responses and conversions.

What do you think? Any comments?

The real question is how do you make your campaigns viral in such a way that your message starst spreading like wildfire.

Well, here is a solution recipe that talks about how to create a viral email marketing campaign with guaranteed results.

Ingredients:

• A great special offer
• A competition give away
• List of opt-in email subscriobers (with first names)
• A Maxmail user account (get a Free trial account here)

Preperation:

Make sure your mailing list of subscribers is clean and has first names recorded for every single subscriber along with a valid email address.

Create an HTML newsletter (doesnt have to be fancy – keep it simple) with your special offer inside. The body of the newsletter should have a 600 x 200 graphic (well designed) that talks about an automatic entry for anyone who forwards this email to a friend. Each forward counts for one entry.

Mention the giveaway prize.

Forward this email to your friends to automatically into a draw to win one of 5 42inch Panasonic PLasma TVs. Forward as many times as you like, each forward counts for one entry. Increase your chances, get forwarding now.

Make sure you have the subscribers first name in the subject line (for higher uptake) and also in the greeting line (e.g. Hello John instead of Hi there)

Send the email.

Watch it cook

John receives your email and decides to forward the email to Sally, Bod, Sue and Ryan. Because John opted Sally, Bob, Sue and Ryan into your original mailing list, when any one of them forward this email, you have an exponential growth in the virality of your email.

Consider this

How Viral Marketing Works

You sent an email to John and it has been forwarded around to (in this example) a total of 29 new subscribers. You have also accumulated several competition entries. Your mailing list has grown and now you have greater interest from your customers.

Best of all, Maxmail’s viral marketing feature allowed you to tap into a list of subscribers that you didnt have access to prior to sending this email.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

Maxmail has identified a set of principles we call “The 22 Imperatives for Email Marketing Success.” Don’t let that number intimidate you, though, as most marketers are already deploying many of these imperatives. Increasingly, though, companies that fail to follow all of these principles will find their email marketing programs underperforming their competitors and not achieving maximum ROI.

1. Permission is Not Optional
When you send unsolicited email, you hurt your brand, your campaign and your sender reputation. Don’t use “stealth” methods to collect email addresses, such as pre-checked boxes on site registration forms. Use a two-stage subscription process that requires confirmation before the address goes into your database. Ask older opt-ins if they still want to receive your email, and retain all the permission data on each opt-in.

2. Manage Your Sender Reputation
You’ll get on an ISP’s bad side if you send too many emails too often to too many bad email addresses, or generating too many spam complaints. Result? The ISP will block your emails, shunt them to oblivion in the bulk folder and won’t tell you what you did wrong. Honor unsubscribe requests immediately, stay off blacklists, monitor and resolve spam complaints, and use a double opt-in process and unique IP address if you don’t already.

3. Clean and Analyze Mailing Lists
A “dirty” list – too many unsolicited, incorrect, out-of-date or duplicated addresses – hurts your campaign’s performance and your company’s delivery and sender reputation. “List hygiene” cleans out bad addresses, reduces undeliverable emails and helps you spot problems fast.

4. Deploy Authentication Technologies
Some ISPs are using methods that allow email from recognized senders but block spammers and malicious senders. They include “whitelisting,” SPF Classic, SenderID and DomainKeys. Ask your email service provider which methods it supports. Unauthenticated emails could be blocked, filtered or sent to bulk/junk folders.

5. Test for Delivery and Correct Rendering
HTML emails – with pictures, colors and graphics — can look or function differently when viewed in different email programs and ISP-based email services. Send a sample email to test emails accounts at major providers, such as AOL, Earthlink, Hotmail and Yahoo! to spot bad links, copy that triggers spam filters, bad images or other problems. Also, make sure your emails are W3C HTML-compliant. Otherwise, you risk being filtered, particularly at MSN and Hotmail.

6. Establish and Build Trust
Ask only for the most necessary information at registration. (You can ask for more later, when your recipients trust you.) Send only what you say you will, when and how often you promised at registration. Without trust, recipients are less likely to open or act on your emails and more likely to unsubscribe or file spam complaints.

7. Respect Recipients’ Privacy
This is just good business practice, but you’ll also avoid legal and ethical problems. Include a short, simple email privacy statement within your opt-in form and link it to the full policy statement on your Web site.

8. Give Recipients What They Want and Need
Your subscribers expect control. If you don’t give them what they want, they’ll go elsewhere. Let them decide the format (text or HTML), the frequency, the content and whether you can send them other kinds of information. Then, segment your lists to reflect those choices.

9. Provide Administrative Functions in Each Email
Give recipients the tools they need to manage their subscriptions, contact you, forward information to others and get more information, right in the email.  Reputable emailers include this information in a clearly marked section, usually at the end of each email. See the sample below:

10. Test, Test and Test Again
Besides testing for delivery, you must also test to see which attributes work best in individual emails. What you think you know isn’t always what works best. Testing is as easy as a classic A/B split and can show you which day of the week really draws the most opens and clicks or which subject line tanked.

11. Define Your Email Value Proposition (EVP)
Without a clear focus and value proposition, your email won’t hit your recipient’s “internal inbox.” People can manage only a limited number of regular email communications. Give them clear reasons to open your emails every time. Define your “EVP” much like you would a positioning statement and use it to drive your content, creative, frequency and segmentation strategies.

12. Segment Lists for Better Results
Use the information you collected at sign-up to divide your list into relevant segments and deliver targeted messages. Better yet segment based on email and Web behavior such as which links recipients clicked on or what actions they’ve taken on your Web site. That will boost your performance and make your communications more valuable to your recipients. Segmenting also helps you understand performance and trends based on demographics and segments.

13. Personalize for Greater Relevance
Personalization is the next step. It uses recipients’ own information to create highly relevant messages, which boosts your value. Top-quality email service providers allow you to personalize right to the recipient level, with email that recognizes each one by name, buying history, content, format, etc.

14. Use Good Design & Format
Weak designs and improper format frustrates users. They can’t navigate your email easily or find the information they want. So, they opt out. Or, they delete you every time. Or, they hit the “Report Spam” button and hope that makes you go away.  That’s why you test sample messages, to make sure they perform across many email programs and Web services.

15. Design Emails for the Inbox
Your email has to stand out in a crowded inbox. Put your company name in the “from” line for fast recognition. Add a “grabber” subject line. Design the top of your email to be preview pane and “disabled images” friendly. Use teaser text and HTML colors and layout rather than an image so readers can get an immediate “preview” of your email even if images are disabled. Finally, put the important content – the offer, the call to action, newsletter contents – up at the top for immediate viewing. You have just a couple of seconds to make your case, so don’t waste them.

16. Deliver Value Continuously
Recipients’ needs change over time. Your emails will compete with new and changing sources of content or offers that will affect your value proposition. Survey your recipients occasionally on their needs and interests. Make it easy for them to change their subscription preferences. Analyze each send for revealing statistics on factors such as results according to subject line, offer, links clicked, segmenting, etc.

17. Focus on List Quality Over List Size
Growing your mailing list is important, but don’t do it at the expense of quality. Analyze your house lists carefully. Clean them frequently, especially before a campaign or publication. Segment lists by customer value and activity level as well as the permission factors we discussed in earlier Imperatives.

18. Integrate With Other Marketing Channels
Email marketing can’t exist in a silo. You’ll get a higher ROI when you integrate it with other marketing channels and touch points, such as direct mail, telemarketing and trade shows. Design search-engine landing pages to make it easier to begin a relationship. Promote newsletter content through multiple channels, and reprint email information on your Web site.

19. Focus on Goals, Not Process Metrics
You can’t measure an email campaign’s success just by counting the average open and click-through rates. Instead, measure performance against your end goals. Number of transactions, demos sold, white papers downloaded, etc. will tell you if your email program is actually achieving your desired goals.

20. Use Advanced Automation
The simple “load and send” strategy doesn’t work anymore. You need to deploy a whole range of advanced technologies – behavioral segmentation, detailed reporting, API database integration, dynamic content, triggers and more – to drive improved results and ROI. For example, you can use triggers to send specific emails to recipients based on their email actions. This automates a manual process and delivers dramatic results.

21. Allocate Necessary Resources
Many companies got into email marketing because it was cheaper than traditional direct mail, but that’s all different now. The landscape – from ISP relations to technological innovation and government regulations – is more complex now. So, your organizations must allocate adequate budgets, resources and know-how to do the job right and achieve your ROI goals.  Your email service provider should be able to help you out, but you must also educate your team and key influencers in your company.

22. Know the Laws Affecting Email Marketing, and Comply
In the United States, you must follow email and privacy statutes in 36 states as well as CAN-SPAM, the federal email law. In addition, the European Economic Union, Asia and Australia have their own anti-spam laws, as do most countries with an email presence. Have an attorney with appropriate expertise review your email and privacy policies. Audit your practices across all departments, not just marketing, that manage email, and train everyone in correct procedures.