E-mail Marketing: It’s just not marketing of one

If you’ve ever looked on Monster or CareerBuilders for job postings for anything online, chances are you’ve come across a posting for “e-mail marketing manager”. If so or if you’re currently in this position, then the primary goal is obviously…e-mail marketing. Chances are that you’ll need to work on lead generating, sending out e-mails to your client’s database while making sure that e-mails follow best practices and are whitelisted & comply with the CAN-SPAM Act. Nevertheless, we are only human and there are times when you just can’t be the right person for the job and available 24 hours a day.

As with most of these rants, personal experience definitely comes into play. Having been in a capacity of managing e-mail marketing projects first hand it’s definitely been a learning experience, first realizing the creative subtleties of e-mails, sanitizing lists, and following through with best practices.

Nevertheless, the one issue that doesn’t come into play is how do you deal with e-mail marketing when you’re not there? Obviously you can’t expect the projects to simply STOP while you’re away on vacation or at a conference or whatnot. This could be really critical and maybe even crippling for small to medium businesses that don’t have a big staff. So what’s a company to do? Well probably the best thing to do is to designate someone to take your place in the event you aren’t available…establish a line of succession, of sorts.

Wait, are we that vain? No, we need to focus on educating your team on what they can do to help with these campaigns and make sure they are executed without a hitch. It’s amazing that these days more kids aren’t taught simple HTML that are absolutely crucial for marketing in the 21st century. What’s more, the creative team should have an understanding of what they’ll need to do with an e-mail blast - educate them in how they can best design an e-mail keeping in mind what issues there are surrounding platforms like Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, and even AOL. Teach them what size and colors should be avoided to comply with CAN-SPAM. Educate your other departments if you send out e-mails on their behalf on how to best manage their lists and how to sanitize them. Perhaps lastly is to educate your entire marketing/public relations team on how to use the e-mail distribution system and let them know the advantages/disadvantages of what works…what doesn’t…and how to read the tracking analysis so they won’t need to ask you about the open rate or unsubscribe rate.

Try to teach your team and I’m sure there will be some resistance especially since they all have other things to do, but these tips are very important in their lives since it affects their responsibilities in the company as well. But when it comes down to it, it’s a department effort…it literally could take a village…so everyone will need to pick up the slack.

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