I’m sure many of you would agree with me that there are never enough hours in the day – time is precious to the modern day marketer and there is always more which we could be doing.
So here are a few email marketing time savers to help you reduce the time spent on day to day email issues.
1. The Seed List
By creating a seed list you are able to send your email campaign by a click of a button to a selected group of contacts before sending it to your actual email database. This enables you to test it across multiple inboxes and receive approval from those necessary. If you are using a system that makes you send a separate campaign, chances are you are spending many extra hours fiddling about getting tests out of the door.
2. Data Integration
There should be no need to spend time loading data for every send. For a one-off effort you should be able to define an extract from your system to your ESP, and then have this run on an automated basis, eliminating the chance of errors, and ensuring your data is always live. Not to mention the world of opportunities with trigger based emails this opens up for you.
3. Reporting Dashboards
The norm in the email marketing world is to have reporting at campaign level only. And once you get to a certain level of campaigns and tests this makes the reporting a major job.
When you dive into the deep analytics of your campaigns, email reporting can become a major task. When choosing your platform pick one that provides all the data you need in one place. You don’t want to be using the old school method of copying figures from your ESP into your internal spreadsheets.
4. Content Feeds
Why manually craft content when you can automate it? GraphicMail provides you with the ability to pull content from the feed of your choice into HTML format within your email. This could be done with your Twitter or Facebook feeds, or even include the RSS feed from your blog to keep your subscribers up to date with all your latest content and news.
5. Segments
Different email systems have different ways of creating segments. We chose to make them a time saving feature so you can re-use them easily. For example, you want to send to all male customers, who have opened an email in the last year and have never purchased, we would have 3 saved segments that you simply tick. Then when we send the female version we untick the male segment and tick the female segment. This saves huge amounts of time over systems where you would need to create a new segment for each combination of those rules, plus it puts the data selections in the hands of less technical members of the team who are far more comfortable with ‘ticking’ than creating their own rules.