Email Marketing offers many advantages as a communication tool because it's cheap, easy, measurable and most important - effective. With proper campaign planning & execution, email marketing can bring tremendous success to your business marketing goals.   Different Types of Email Marketing: Direct/Promotional: The main purpose of this is to attract customers by sending promotions/offers to your products or services and increase customer base. Newsletters: The main purpose of this to stay in touch with your already existing customer base by sending periodic emails about your products or services enhancements. Partner Emails: The main purpose of this to advertise in partner's email list to promote your products and services. This is more effective as it reaches the subscribers of your partner's list.   Email Marketing is more effective when it is permission based. Marketers should understand the difference between permission based and unsolicited emails where the latter is considered as "SPAM". On the contrary, permission based email marketing which means that your subscribers have agreed to receive emails from you. Permission based email marketing lets you send targeted email messages to the right people at the right time.   Permission based email marketing is the most cost-effective marketing medium available to organizations today. Marketers who leverage subscriber behavior and use that data to target and segment their subscribers deliver campaigns that are more profitable than those who simply blast their emails. It's not just about Newsletter but rather can be used as any of the following purposes:   Acquisition Retention Conversion Brand Building or Awareness Viral or Forward to Friend   Overall, Permission based email marketing beats both direct mail and web-site based marketing as they generate high response rates, easy and cheap, and shorter time to generate campaigns that can be tested before launching the actual campaign.

Businesses engage in email marketing to achieve their marketing objectives and it's important to have a checklist of items for their email marketing activities to make sure all of the items in the checklist are satisfied when you send your email campaigns. This will greatly help in high response rates. Different Types of Email Marketing: Check whether the message is targeted to the appropriate audience. Make the message more personalized and relevant. Check the message whether it is communicating the right content and offer. Make the call out action more prominent and visible for your subscribers to take immediate action. Match the subject line of the message to the actual content of the email campaign. Test with multiple seed list to check where your message lands (inbox or junk/spam) in different email clients. Match the call out action content and the landing page content identical for faster conversion. Look through your past campaigns and decide the best delivery time for high response rates. Check your campaigns contain all items concerned to CAN-SPAM laws including your postal address and unsubscribe options. Review your campaign metrics that includes receipt rate, reader rate, click rate, bounce rates, conversion rates, referral rates and others to optimize future identical campaigns.

It's important to understand not all email marketing objectives are similar. The campaign planning, execution and evaluating the metrics will vary based on your campaign objectives. Similarly, email marketing objectives for B2B and B2C are different and it's important to have a different checklist while targeting your subscribers.   Even though some steps are identical when targeting either B2B or B2C, the objectives and list size will vary greatly. B2B marketing usually involves individual in an organization who are interested in your products or services and has long sales cycles and negotiation on pricing. B2C marketing, on the other hand, involves consumers who are ready to buy individuals and more loyalty concerned.   B2C Email Marketing Tips: Have a content strategy for each subscriber segment based on their demographics, interest or other attributes that can let you segment them in a group. Conduct A/B Split testing campaigns to small groups in a list and send the winner to the rest of the list for maximum response rates. Create a process to have long term relationship with the subscribers by providing them with timely content based on their interest and demographics. Design dynamic content or one-to-one marketing strategy based on subscriber's past behavior. Offer freebies and encourage subscribers to refer their friends to subscribe to your newsletter using forward to friend form. Make the purchase process or your conversion goal as quick and as easy possible. Be open about how you use subscriber's information and provide visible and easy opt-out process.

	Though email marketing is easy, cheap, immediate and measurable, it must follow some rules to be compliant with industry spam laws to communicate with your subscribers effectively and continuously.   Permission based marketing emails contains one of these characteristics: Your subscribers requested it by filling your opt-in forms or from your legitimate partner list The emails that you send arrive on time and relevant to the needs of your subscribers. Your subscribers should be able to identify who you are. Your subscribers should be able to stop receiving your emails easily and any time.   Tips for successful email marketing: Provide double opt-in form that will confirm your subscriber's intent to join your list and specify what they get and how frequent in the double opt-in confirmation email Track their IP details used when they subscribed to your list. Always include why they are receiving these emails from you somewhere in your content or at the footer as part of other CAN-SPAM details. Keep your list clean and ask idle subscribers to re-confirm the subscription Keep Unsubscribe link visible and make the process as easy as possible to unsubscribe from your list. Provide exclusive "Manage Profile/Preference" area to update their new email address and more unsubscribe options. Do Not Sell or Rent list. Have a process in place to act on your subscriber's request replied to your campaigns. Don't leave your campaign replies unattended. Do not assume that they like your other newsletters because they opted in for one of your newsletters. Always, get clear permission for each of your list. The emails that you send arrive on time and relevant to the needs of your subscribers. Your subscribers should be able to identify who you are. Your subscribers should be able to stop receiving your emails easily and any time. Don't email too frequently and don't give longer gap between emails. It's important to keep in constant touch with your subscribers with right frequency.

Creating and managing list effectively and efficiently will help in your email marketing objectives. Not all email marketing efforts are similar and not all lists in your organization have the same purpose. It's important that online marketers should build highly-relevant lists rather than just email addresses to manage the list effectively. According to Marketing Sherpa's Email Marketing Benchmark Guide, 18% of companies with online sales between 25-50 million have house lists of 100,000 - 500,000 contacts, while 27% in the same earnings manage with lists below 50,000. It shows the importance of quality of subscribers in your list than quantity.   Your subscriber's interest and response rates define your list efficiency. Your email messages should be personalized to your subscribers in order to keep them active and your list should be able to collect important data about your subscribers to keep it personalized and effective.   Tips to manage your list effectively: Create relevant custom attributes that makes more sense for a particular list Capture important attributes of your subscribers for better management. Make your opt-in forms double opt-in to increase the efficiency of your list subscribers. Define multiple statuses for your subscribers other than Active and Unsubscribed and assign your subscribers to one of many statuses. This will help to manage your subscribers more effectively. Have some list hygiene process in place to purge your list occasionally by removing idle, bad or inactive subscribers. Have enough data about subscribers to segment and target them properly. This will let you send more relevant messages to relevant subscribers. Merge lot of small lists to one bigger list for easy list management.

Segmentation is one of the old tactics of basic marketing and it allows you to improve your knowledge about customers and subscribers. Segmentation is an ongoing process that will help you build real relationship with your subscribers. The smaller you make the segment, the more likely you are able to deliver relevant message.   Segmentation with proper data capture of your subscriber can deliver enormous result and it's possible and practical with email marketing. Segmentation can be broadly categorized under 3 groups as follows:   Demographics (age, gender, location): These characteristics make more sense to B2C markets. B2C marketers can create a different content according for this group and target them. Preference and Interest: Subscribers with similar preference and interest most probably act alike. Behavioral data: This is the best segmentation strategy to predict future because subscribers with past behavior most likely repeat it in the future.   Segmentation should be a view to your original list rather than creating it as a separate and independent list. This is because your segments should be synchronized with your current list data. There is a high chance that a subscriber might change his preference that is more suited to a different segment that has his latest preference.   Segmentation done on past campaigns will provide more insight in to your subscriber's activity and helps you to target them properly. This is often called "Campaign Response Based Segmentation" where subscribers will be segmented based on their past campaign behavior.   Campaign Based Response Segmentation: Subscribers who have opened your email: This segment shows basic interest to your email campaigns. Subscribers who have clicked your email: This segment shows most promising subscribers and exhibits some sort of interest in your email campaign. Identify what they clicked on, how often they clicked on and send relevant targeted messages. Subscribers who have opened but not clicked: This segment shows partial interest to your email campaign and you can entice them with a better offer and more relevant content in your future campaigns to make them click on your campaigns. Subscriber who didn't open: This segment of subscribers didn't show any interest to your email campaigns. You can check their history of campaigns sent to them and analyze their activity on each of them. If they were idle on most of your email campaigns then probably they are not interested in your campaigns any more. You can either make them inactive so that you can avoid them clicking you as a spammer or send a separate campaign to all these subscribers to find their interest in your campaigns or else let them unsubscribe from your list. Again, bigger list is not always better.

Businesses realized long ago that personalized and relevant content receive higher response rates and achieves marketing objectives. With email marketing, sending personalized and relevant content is easy and possible. However, you can achieve best result if you have captured or mined your subscriber's data thoroughly.   Capture as much information as possible about your subscriber during opt-in forms or ask them to provide more details about their interest and demographics using preference center Segment your subscribers based on similar interest. Mine your previous campaign subscriber activity to find out their interest that was not provided by them and segment them accordingly. Start with simple personalization techniques to complex rules based segmentation to send relevant content.   Sending relevant content is not just about simple personalization by replacing first and last names merge tags with subscriber's data but it's about attaching relevant piece of content based on their demographics or past behavior. This is often called "Dynamic Content" or "Dynamic Campaigns" where the marketer assigns few areas in a content to be dynamic and let the email marketing engine insert relevant content to that subscriber.   How to create dynamic campaigns: Take a targeted list and segment the list into multiple groups based on what your content is all about. It could be a simple gender based or a complex behavioral based. Create a full campaign content and identify blocks of content that will hold dynamic content. Create separate piece of dynamic content that is either block of text or call-to-action image. Specify rules and map which segment should receive which dynamic piece of content. Remember, to always have a default dynamic content if any of your subscribers don't fall in any of your segments. While creating the campaign, indicate where these dynamic pieces should go. Test with different permutation and combination to make sure your subscribers will get the intended content.