As a consumer, what are your feelings on email marketing? Do you enjoy receiving deals, coupons, and newsletters in your inbox every day?

If you look forward to perusing the virtual onslaught, then you are one of the 40 percent of consumers who say they enjoy receiving email from their favorite brands or deal services, according to a new survey by Blue Kangaroo, a personalized deal website.

What better way to know what people want than to let them tell you through a full-blown email preference center?

The study, which surveyed 1,090 adults between the ages of 18 and 64, also found that more than half of consumers feel the amount of marketing emails they receive is “about right.”

Additionally, 42 percent of respondents said they open and read a majority of the marketing emails in their inbox each week, and only one percent said they ignored them.

This is good news for marketers, as email is probably one of the most economical and easy-to-implement forms of advertising.

In the November issue of Associations Now, I interviewed HighRoad Solution’s chief technology officer, Ron McGrath, about getting the most out of email marketing, and he had a few tips to share that didn’t make it into the final Q&A.

McGrath’s first tip was to implement a communication preference center where individuals can opt-out or change their email preferences.

“What better way to know what people want than to let them tell you through a full-blown email preference center?” McGrath says.

Tailoring your email marketing strategies to your members’ preferences also allows for better engagement. People are less likely to overlook or delete emails if they are receiving what they feel is the right amount.

McGrath also suggests that organizations take advantage of the metrics and analytics on their current email marketing campaigns.

“[Make] sure you leverage the reporting data you have access to—the analytics—who’s opening things, what they’re clicking on, what topics are performing best within your newsletters,” McGrath says. “And use that to fine tune the content in your newsletter moving forward.”

This leads to McGrath’s third tip, which is to actively test what works with your particular audience.

“One of the things that sets email marketing apart from other messaging mediums or marketing mediums is the ability to test and isolate systematically what works and what doesn’t work with your audience,” McGrath says. “At the end of the day, nothing is going to replace, or be better, than you testing against your own audience, because every audience is different.”

What email marketing tips and tricks have you discovered?

 

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