2009 Email Marketing Resolutions

Let me start by wishing all of you (and your families of course) the very best for 2009! May it be the best year ever! :-)

On my end, life has been pretty hectic over the last couple of weeks. Starting my own business certainly took up a LOT of my time. Check out my brandnew website at www.tamaragielen.com. Advice and feedback are most welcome!

Back to business now.

In Stefan Pollard's latest ClickZ column, he shares 10 resolutions to make to get your e-mail efforts back on track in the coming year.

Here are his top 10 resolutions for e-mail marketers:

1. I Will Listen to Feedback
2. I Will Give My Subscribers More Control Over What They Receive
3. I Will Monitor More Than Open/Click-Through Rates/Revenue
4. I Will Practice More Segmentation for Increased Relevance
5. I Will Practice Good List Hygiene and Trim Inactives
6. I Will Pay Attention to the ISPs
7. I Will Work to Send Great Content
8. I Will Make it Easy for Recipients to Know Who I Am
9. I Will Be More Careful About Whose E-mail Efforts I Emulate
10. I Will Banish the Word "Blast" From my Vocabulary

Each of these resolutions comes with a number of tips on how to achieve them, so make sure to read the full article here.

Comments

[Tamara Gielen]

Hi Steven,

I absolutely agree with you! Targeting the communication by where the reader is in their buying cycle is definitely a good strategy and makes the messaging a lot more relevant - unless of course you're pushing your products so hard that the reader runs away screaming :-)

Tamara

[Steven Woods]

Tamara,
Congrats on starting your own company, I'm sure it has been and will continue to be a wild ride, but very rewarding for you.

I liked your list of resolutions for email marketers, but I think you might be missing an important theme. So much of connecting with a reader comes down to the *timing* of the communication. Not day-of-week or hour-of-day, but timing a communication based on where the reader is in their own buying cycle (or education cycle, depending on the context).

Unless you work to deepen your knowledge of the readers/prospects and then deliver a message that matches each individual's level of interest at that moment, you'll be perceived as interrupting and untargetted.

It was a great set of resolutions though, and I do agree that they are all worth focusing on in the new year.