10 ways to improve the engagement of your emailing programs!

As you may have seen, less than a month ago, I had the opportunity to participate with Return Path in a conference organized by ExactTarget. This conference was about email engagement! On this occasion, I had taken up a story that I had already told you in this article : I am a spammer ... or the complicated life of a ham salesman.

Below, I will outline the viewpoint developed in the rest of the presentation.

Be trustworthy

Before we begin, a quote:

Being trustworthy requires: Doing the right thing. And doing things right.
- Don Peppers

Trust must be at the center of your strategies, yet when we ask marketing practitioners about their emailing objectives, we can hear answers such as: contact qualification, personalization, split testing, optimization for mobile devices, multi-channel, ... all these approaches are important ... but do we not fall into the excess of a marketing that has become too mechanical? In which the consumer has become a data!

However, the solution to this problem is simple, you have to take a step back ... not so simple in fact ... and act.

Another great marketing man once said:

Soon is not as good as now.
- Seth Godin

So what do we do now?

1. List your promises List all the promises that have been made to your consumers in your emailing program. Whether they are explicit or implicit
2. Establish priorities In all these promises, which ones are the most important, not to you, but to your consumers?
3. Remember the source of the recruitment in your emails : If they have signed up, your subscribers have been engaged ... sometimes only for a few seconds ... but it's always good to remind them.
4. Designate an emailing quality manager Whether it's a permanent position or a rotating responsibility, designate a person to be responsible for the quality of your campaigns. This person must be able to take the time to put himself in the shoes of your subscribers.
5. Create links between email and point of sale If you extend the experience your consumers have in your stores via email, both channels will benefit from an increased level of engagement. The benefit is therefore shared.
6. Focus on transactional emailing This point is similar to the previous one. Add value to the transactions generated by your customers by using transactional emailing.
7. Engage your target audience from the beginning of your emailing program There is no time to lose! It's good for your relationship with your customer/prospect ... and it's also very good for the deliverability of your emails. How many companies don't let the collected addresses rot before taking them out six months later and being surprised by the poor performance of the campaigns?
8. Set up automated scenarios Scripting is an opportunity to take a step back and reflect on the value your emailing program offers to your customers and prospects.
9. Stay relevant. And use the tools that will allow you to do so It is obvious, it is said in all the conferences? Well, obviously it is not won ...
10. Stop sending emails in "noreply" mode #noreplywar : It's a struggle I'm passionate about, but in 2013, every company has a community manager, a Facebook page and a Twitter account ... but it's still not possible to reply to a newsletter and receive a response from customer service.

P.s. Can you find the connection between the image illustrating this article and the subject of the article?