On our blog, we’ve talked about how marketers can use email ads, why email advertising works, and even what a five-year-old can teach you about best practices in email advertising.

We received a lot of questions when our CEO Eric Didier wrote on MediaPost about how email works as a performance-based advertising channel. So we wanted to take a step back and explain how to get started with email ad campaigns.

As always, if you have questions specific to your business or just want to discuss your goals for email ads, we’re happy to talk with you. You can request more information or just drop us a note at contact.us@ividence.com.

1. Have a marketing goal.

Granted, this might seem like an overly basic place to start, but it’s absolutely critical to know what you want to achieve. A typical goal among our clients is identifying  new prospective customers. However, email advertising campaigns can also be used to drive website traffic and sales, new email subscribers, increased event attendance, and other marketing metrics.

2. Develop your email advertising creative.

Once you know what you want to achieve, you’re ready to start work on the creative. This includes:

• Your subject line
• The body of your email
• Your landing page
• Any email marketing follow up or remarketing
• Alternate versions of any of the above that you would like to test

If you have an in-house email marketing team, you already have the resources in place to develop your creative. If not, you may want to enlist the services of an email marketing agency who can help with all aspects of your email marketing and email advertising campaigns.

Great email creative can supercharge your campaign by driving up engagement, opens, and clicks. Be sure to plot out your strategy for how you will follow up with new leads or how you may work your email landing page into a currently existing remarketing plan to get the best possible boost from each campaign.

(For some extra tips, we made this list of nine mistakes to avoid when developing your email creative.)

3. Find a partner or email list owner to work with.

Just as with display advertising, there are a number of vendors to work with in email advertising. You can work directly with a list owner or with a provider who aggregates a number of databases into one exchange.

To decide on the best partner for your brand, you’ll want to look at the following:

• Health of the list – To determine this, ask questions like: How are subscribers acquired? How are feedback loops managed? What is the hygiene process for new email subscribers?
• Targeting – No matter how well an email list is maintained, you don’t want to talk to a list. You want to talk to the people on it. At a minimum, your provider should be able to target based on past behavior and basic demographic info.
• Price structure – Many list owners rent their list on a CPM basis. However, it may make more sense for your program to work on a CPC or CPL basis.
• Timing – Email campaigns have traditionally been a one-drop process, with your creative going out to all of the selected subscribers at once. If you’re looking for a one time boost, that may be a good solution for you. However, you should enquire into the possibility of sending smaller, more targeted sends over a longer period of time. This allows for constant optimization as well as driving leads or traffic consistently over weeks or months like a search campaign.
• Reporting – What information is available to you to determine how well your campaign performed?

4. Evaluate the results of your email campaign.

If you’ve incorporated A/B testing into your email ad campaign, make sure that those results are being used throughout the campaign to optimize for the best creative.

Once your campaign is complete, use the reporting data your partner provides to determine:

• How your campaign performed on your KPIs compared to other channels you advertise in
• How your campaign performed  compared to similar campaigns your partner has run on their email list
• What segments of the list were most responsive to your campaign

5. Learn, incorporate, repeat.

Take the learnings from your campaign evaluation and incorporate those into new email ad campaigns or other ad channels. Some ideas of ways you might be able to optimize future campaigns include:

• Further testing to see how different creative elements work within different groups
• Adjusting pricing (either down to bring it in line with other lead sources or up to make sure you aren’t leaving any leads on the table)
• Extrapolating data from your reports to other media channels (either for target discovery or for developing creative for specific demographic groups)

What are your suggestions for ways to incorporate email advertising and email advertising data into your overall marketing plan? We’d love to hear.

Image courtesy of StressedTechy.

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Kevin Deseuste

Kevin Deseuste joined the ividence team at the beginning of 2011 and directs the implementation and evaluation of advertiser campaigns and publisher lists for the U.S. market. He brings to the team an expertise in monitoring and enhancing deliverability and response rates from both the publisher and advertiser perspective. Prior to joining ividence, Kevin worked in Business Development at technology solutions provider SCC.

He can be reached at kd@ividence.com.