Marketing spending is flowing again, as it should be, given its importance to business success. To ensure a healthy ROI, however, many marketers are sticking with the tried and true. According to a MarketingSherpa report, 65 percent of companies surveyed are increasing their email marketing budgets this year. If you’re in the same camp, here are three timely tips to make your email campaigns a success.

Integrate social media. Extend beyond your opt-in list and organically build your house list by including a Facebook, Linked-in and Twitter link on your email, and incorporate an opt-in capability on your company’s respective social networking profiles.

• Integrating social media into your email campaign can boost social media efforts and improve email campaign results by as much as 54 percent¹
  
  
• Including sharing options generates a 30 percent higher click-through-rate, on average (CTR)²
  

Automate. With tight budgets and manpower stretched, automation can help you maximize efficiency. You can set up email campaigns to run on their own and at the right time with triggered emails (i.e., a welcome email for a new subscriber or an email to a user who has abandoned an item in their shopping cart).

• Triggered campaign tactics are almost three times as likely to generate conversion rates that exceed the industry average of 3 percent³
  
  
• Automated welcome emails boast nine times greater transaction rates than bulk mailings⁴
  
  
• Welcome emails with an offer generate more revenue than those without
  
  
• Real-time welcomes generate eight times more revenue ($6.89 per email) than those batched and sent weekly ($.78 per email)⁴
  

Incorporate preference centers. For heavy emailers, this allows you to communicate with your customers on their terms. For instance, a customer might prefer SMS for a payment reminder, email for award point status, and their Facebook feed for promotions. Links to your preference center should be included in your opt-in form, Facebook page and in every email. Also, periodically invite your customers back to update their information. Information typically found in preference centers includes:

• Email address change: Make it easy so they don’t have to re-subscribe
  
  
• Frequency: If you send multiple weekly emails consider offering alternate frequencies such as once per week
  
  
• Channel: Offer alternatives such as SMS, and RSS or direct mail
  
  
• Interests/Preferences: Interests and preferences change with time so make it easy by pre-populating existing profiles so the user is reminded of current settings, making it easy for them to change
  

In this time of reinforcing the benefits of marketing, make sure that all your campaigns are well positioned, relevant to the customer, and technology driven when possible. Incorporating these three easy tips into your email marketing program can help you build loyal relationships and ultimately increase your ROI.

¹eMarketer, What Are the Benefits of Email-Social Media Integration?, November 15, 2010
²GetResponse, Email Marketing and Social Media Integration Report, 2010
³JupiterResearch, The ROI of E-mail Relevance, 2005
⁴Experian, The welcome email report, 2010

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