For many of our clients, their “broadcast” email effort is a large and important part of their online efforts. Because of our experience with email distribution services, many of our clients have asked us to set their service up, based on their particular needs. There have been and continue to be MANY email distribution services available online, all offer various features and pricing structures, and the needs of the client often mean finding the best fit of software-as-a-service for the client.
Now, over time, actually administering and coordinating email campaigns has become much more sophisticated. It’s no longer just sending a text email to a list of email addresses, although that is what some do. It’s not just designing an email in an html template. There are so many considerations involved as technology continues to evolve, and these are just some examples of such considerations:
What will the email look like on a mobile phone or a tablet?
How will my Analytics software measure activity from this email?
How can I measure other social media activity related to this email?
What is the view rate of my emails? Click rate? Unsubscribe rate?
How are my emails protected from improper spamfilter blocking?
What kind of notifications can I automate on campaign tracking and delivery issues?
Email has become a specialization in the web world, and not just for companies such as Constant Contact. Email Specialist is a job. Email Marketing Coordinator is a job. Creative companies hire such people, to design, test, measure, and coordinate email efforts. It’s big business.
Organizations that do not have such a person in their fold need to consider how they will develop the expertise to manage email more professionally. It can be included as part of the skillset required for various PR, marketing and membership hires. It can be contracted for from various providers (and that includes Kessler Freedman, Inc.). But ignoring the need for such expertise comes with it’s own cost in opportunities and efficient communication.
This can be a bit like peeling the skin off an onion – the more you discover what you didn’t know but could know, the more you wonder what you could still discover. It can get overwhelming or frustrating or both. So the first step is non-data oriented – it’s establishing the goals of your email campaign(s), and then the metrics of how you will determine the results towards those goals. Keep the goals simple to start with or you’ll get lost in all the details – this is a long-term process, always refining and revising goals and metrics.
Once you have your starting goals, you can dig into the data you have on your campaigns, and at that point you may want to talk to others to sift your results through the filter of those more experienced in email campaigns.