When you stop and think about it, the concept of email as a communication vehicle is a revolutionary one. Long before email became a marketing tool, it was a communication device. The impact that email has had on our culture and our lives is tremendous. Yet, many people forget the vast change in communication that email has produced and think of email marketing simply as a cheap or fast way to sell a product. Email deserves a much higher level of respect.
This book is your guide to understanding the full marketing potential and impact that email can offer to you or your company. It strives to broaden your mind about the opportunities this amazing communication channel offers, and it provides ways to redefine the strategic uses of email as an effective marketing vehicle. And it also, we hope, conveys some of the passion and fervor that the two of us feel about our discipline and hope to share. We have dedicated more than a decade of our lives to evangelizing the role that email currently plays and has the potential to play in our personal and business worlds. Throughout this book, you will be presented with a plethora of real-world and timely examples of what works and does not work, documents and checklists to help you plan your strategy, and questions that will challenge and encourage you to redefine and rethink your approach to leveraging email as a communication and marketing vehicle.
The structure of this book was carefully designed to enable every reader, whether a newcomer to the discipline or a veteran, to walk away feeling a sense of broader understanding and appreciation for email marketing. Our biggest challenge was making sure that all the collective intelligence and insights appropriately educate you in a way that also inspires you to take what you read and build upon it. Just providing simple case studies, examples, and checklists would have been a disservice. Those of you who have experience on the front lines of email marketing know, all too well, how challenging of a craft it is. Email marketers need to understand the strategic elements that drive results and how to avoid the technical faux pas, as well as how to design creative, analyze results, and navigate trends. Email marketing is one of those rare trades that requires specific expertise in many broad categories. Therefore, this book offers an organized and unique approach to crafting a successful email program from start to finish. As you read, you will find yourself being challenged to question your current actions and compare them to our recommendations. As you apply your skills, you will be able to quickly define those areas that will help you excel. This book was designed with the ultimate goal of making you, the reader, successful in your efforts. We want to inspire you to be the best email marketer you can be.
This book strives to provide you with information easily applicable to your specific needs. If it takes you more than ten seconds to understand how this relates to your business or effort, we have failed. There are success stories and failure stories in this book. We think you need to understand both what to do and what to avoid. You should be able to learn as much from our failures as our successes. We want you to walk away from reading this book completely fulfilled.
Anyone who wants to send or is currently sending an email marketing campaign should buy this book. In fact, anyone who works for a company where email marketing is being used should buy this book. It doesn't matter which of these describes you:
Familiar with the basics of email marketing
Currently sending email marketing campaigns
Working for a company with a small budget
The only person doing any type of marketing
Employed by a large or sophisticated company where email plays a small or insignificant role
An experienced email marketer looking to take things to the next level
This book was written to allow the email marketer at any level to increase their level of understanding. It will also expand the perception and increase the level of respect that email marketing gets for any reader who may not currently be on the front lines of email.
If the authors could wish for one thing to happen once you finish reading this book, it would be that you share this book with a friend or colleague who may not understand or respect what you do. Those of you who work in the field are all too familiar with the cocktail party situation where someone asks you what your job is, and you say, "Email marketing." The reply often is, "Oh, so you send spam?" The next time you hear that, give them this book, and ask them to email us. We understand there is so much more to email marketing, and we appreciate it as well. We are here to help you share in our enthusiasm and help us grow this industry's level of impact even more by enabling better conversations using email.
Here is a glance at what's in each chapter:
Chapter 1: Understanding Email Marketing Today begins with a basic overview of the email marketing industry: the origins of email and its uses, the evolution of the channel into a marketing vehicle, and some of the basic elements of email marketing.
Chapter 2: The Five Critical Elements of Every Email You Create provides an overview of the five key roles that email marketing plays in the broader context of marketing and advertising. In this chapter, there is a clear outline of how email marketing can and should be used to achieve different goals.
Chapter 3: Getting Ready to Build Your Email Marketing Efforts enables you to start at the beginning of the road of creating successful email marketing campaigns. It covers everything from budgeting effectively to ensuring you have the right tools to the basics of strategy design, and then carefully moves you into a comprehensive role of email marketing mastery. This chapter ensures you effectively consider all critical aspects of campaign design.
Chapter 4: What Happens Once You Send Your Email is critical to read. It ensures you know what can happen to derail your campaign but, more important, what you can do to avoid it or deal with the sometimes inevitable. This chapter is one of our favorites!
Chapter 5: Eight Key Drivers of Your Email Campaign equips you with the tactics you typically pick up in bits and pieces from industry trade publications. It provides you with checklists and best practices you can literally rip out and save. You will refer to this chapter over and over again to ensure you have the right elements in place and are following the critical government and compliance requirements.
Chapter 6: Month 1: Preparing Your Email Marketing Strategy gets into the good stuff. This chapter devotes a large amount of time to helping you build or optimize your email marketing strategy. By leveraging many of the current email campaigns in the market right now, you will be able to evaluate and apply those elements that will match your company's capabilities as well as deficiencies.
Chapter 7: Month 2: Ensuring Success as You Launch Your Campaign dives deep into the details of driving results. While Chapter 6 is built for creative and broad thinkers, Chapter fits the cravings of those who love and want details. These details are often critical to driving a campaign result that delivers a strong return on investment. This is not a chapter to breeze over. It is a chapter to spend time with and fully digest.
Chapter 8: Month 3: Adding Bells and Whistles kicks it into high gear. Now that your campaign is out the door and you have some results, this chapter persuades even the most advanced email marketers to rethink their efforts and expand email into new areas. It provides insight into the ways in which consumers have adapted technology into their lives and the most important roles email plays as a personal management vehicle. This chapter is one the bloggers will blog about for years to come.
Chapter 9: Getting Ready for Year 2 and Beyond brings us back to the realities of the real world and sets expectations for what will come next. This chapter will keep you on the right track to ensuring your email marketing efforts not only succeed but are sufficiently supported for continued growth.
In addition, you'll find a remarkably thorough glossary, which will get you up to speed on all the terminology you'll encounter in this book and in other print and online discussions of email marketing; and two appendixes, which list the URLs for every vendor and other resource mentioned in the book and provide two checklists from a series created by the DMA/EEC's Email Design Roundtable.
Finally, from this book's web page at www.emailmarketinganhouraday.com you can download several Excel spreadsheets for calculations discussed in the book as well as a remarkable PDF example of dynamically generated content discussed in Chapter 8.
Throughout the entire book we offer guidance that will hold true regardless of how the technology, the economy, or even the industry changes. We are thrilled to be able to share our passion with you and encourage you to share those areas of the book you enjoy with others. Oh yeah, we love feedback. Good or bad, critical or supportive, we want to hear from you. Please make sure to drop us a line when you can. Thanks, and enjoy your reading!
We welcome feedback from you about this book or about books you'd like to see from us in the future. You can reach us by writing to [email protected]. You can also reach us via our profiles on LinkedIn or Facebook or at either of our day jobs.
Wiley strives to keep you supplied with the latest tools and information you need for your work. Please check its website at www.wiley.com, where we'll post additional content and updates that supplement this book should the need arise. Enter Email Marketing, An Hour A Day in the Search box (or type the book's ISBN—9780470386736 ), and click Go to get to the book's update page.