Email, once considered dead, is the savvy marketer’s most beloved tool – the workhorse of the marketing arsenal.
Consider, the Direct Marketing Association says the ROI on email marketing averages 4,300%. It calls email “the most prolific tool for today’s data-driven marketer.” Numerous studies show email is more effective at engagement and conversion than social media, direct mail, and other marketing efforts – and it is often less expensive.
Many proven strategies are available to help email marketers improve their campaigns. Personalization can help you reach each prospect as an individual, automation can streamline your email workflows, A/B testing can help you refine your messaging, and sending email in a mobile friendly format helps you reach your targets regardless of the email device they use. However, the most important aspect to any email campaign is to make sure your messaging provides value to your target audience.
Email and its peer, the eNewsletter, are excellent tools to inform and educate an audience. They can be used to:
- Raise brand awareness and consideration
- Promote new products and services or new uses for a product
- Announce new events, webinars or presentations
- Share new blog posts and video
- And so much more
Of course finding and reaching the right prospects is the whole point, and it can be useful to partner with a third-party that is positioned to connect with those prospects most likely to welcome your messaging and become your next wave of customers. No doubt you have your own list (or lists) of customers and prospects. Still, complementing an organization’s internal list with a third-party’s is a great way to extend reach and target people the organization has not yet encountered. For smaller organizations, it may be the only way.
Unlike list rentals, in which the marketing organization sends the email itself, third parties send the email on the marketer’s behalf. This can work to the marketer’s advantage because third-party messages from the right source tend to be viewed as informative and helpful rather than a direct sales pitch.
Opt-in is critical
To determine that you’re working with the right third party, one important criterion is the quality of its list. Make sure its recipients have opted in to receive emails, newsletters, and other communications. In addition, find out how often they clean up their database and re-engage with their subscribers to update areas of interest.
Unless the database is comprised of people who are expressly interested and engaged with messages from the sender, a third party email vendor is not going to be able to deliver the opens and clickthroughs you need to engage your prospects.
Demographics
Who is on your third party’s list? Are they targeting the industry or industry segments you need to reach? Can their list be divided in a variety of ways to help you target highly specified groups of prospects? Good third-party resources should be able to provide detailed demographics in order to make it possible for you to reach the best targets for your messaging.
Measurement
Ask how emails are measured.
Positive engagement metrics include:
- Opens – not just received
- Clicks – did they select links within your email
- “Not Spam” data – if subscribers select “This is not spam” links within the email
- Saving email – if subscribers move the email to a folder
- Forwarding email – did the recipient feel it was worthy of a pass-along to a colleague?
Negative engagement metrics include:
- Unsubscribes – the rate at which recipients unsubscribe or otherwise reduce their engagement with your emails
- Spam rate – the number of subscribers who mark your emails as spam
- Delete without opening – counting instant or repeat deletes
Knowledgeable Service
Working with a third party is about more than just accessing someone else’s list. How the third party does things is as important as what they do. If you only wanted a list, you could rent one. But when working with a third party to communicate with an audience via email, you want their proven experience to guide you.
Good third-party resources can service of a range of needs to fill gaps in your own abilities. That means they can:
- Create the email from information and images provided
- Provide templates that you populate
- Create custom, unique emails
- Share what works and doesn’t work, based on experience
- Provide feedback to improve your email content
- Design templated and custom emails that mirror your branding
Expertise and service can also help you determine email frequency – how often to send so that you engage, not inundate, your audience. Third-party email resources should have standards for frequency and mechanisms to enforce it so their opt-in readership does not become annoyed and decide to opt out.
Extra Options
In addition to sending emails, third-party providers should have options too. Some of the additional services you might inquire about include:
- A/B testing to determine what works best before you conduct an entire campaign
- Multi-touch or “drip” email campaigns to re-engage prospects depending on previous actions (or inactions)
- eNewsletters that cover topics of interest to your target audience
Post-Send
Once they’ve hit send, the third-party resource’s job is not over. Look for a high quality, detailed report on the metrics you’ve agreed to. A good partner also will share their experience to provide recommendations, if necessary, for improvement – this is where an investment in A/B testing can make a difference.
Preparing Effective Emails
Once you’ve selected a third-party provider to send emails on your behalf, it’s time to consider what makes for a more effective email. Here are some basic recommendations to get going:
- Subject lines should be compelling, creating a sense of urgency or intrigue or a willingness to act – just don’t use an exclamation point
- The call-to-action (CTA) within the email should be clear, compelling, and prominently located so it is easy to find and recipients know what you’d like them to do
- Use hyperlinks to drive recipients to a landing page; hyperlink images too
- Balance images and text – emails that are 100 percent image are known spam triggers
- Keep it brief and use bullet points; often 100 words is all that’s needed
- Place your featured content within the top 300 pixels of the email
- Avoid spam trigger words such as free, win, discount, offer, prize, buy, order, best, rate, trial, give-away
To succeed, however, the content must be valuable to your audience, and it must reach your target. Dentalcompare offers email blasts and eNewsletter sponsorship opportunities to reach our well-maintained list of dental professionals. Our topical eNewsletters cover subjects ranging from CAD/CAM, lasers and digital imaging, to orthodontics, endodontics and practice operations
For assistance reaching Dentalcompare’s audience of highly qualified, highly engaged dental professionals, contact your sales representative or check out our media kit. We are a third-party email resource that can deliver the audience you want to reach, and help you to engage them in a way that promotes action.