The Mechanics of a Robust e-mail Marketing Strategy

Customer Strategists Kurt Neckebrouck and Isabelle Jansen: Building a Sticky Email Marketing Strategy

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Customer Strategist

Compared to paper-based customer communications, email marketing is often considered to be a more cost-efficient tool. Still, many marketing leaders continue to struggle with effective approaches for delivering relevant email content to recipients to help boost opt-ins and response rates.
These challenges are further complicated as email - and by association, email marketing - continue to compete with social media for consumers' mindshare. According to MarketingSherpa's 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, while 81 percent of executives polled say they believe that social media helps to extend the reach of email content to new markets, 71 percent of decision-makers say this ongoing battle for eye-share between email marketing and social media will increase in importance over the coming year.
As the survey results suggest, decision-makers must continually fine-tune their email marketing strategies to help ensure that their message resonates with their intended audience and helps companies to meet their goals. When considering those objectives, decision-makers need to ask themselves the following questions: