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Email Marketing Tips Video Interview with Greg Cangialosi

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A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with Greg Cangialosi from Blue Sky Factory, and he shared with me some of his top tips for permission-based email marketing.

Building a List

1. Make sure all the forms on your website are capturing email address
2. Ask permission to add people to your email list whenever you get a business card from someone
3. If you are using pay per click search engine marketing and are unhappy with your conversion rates, test changing your landing pages just to ask for email opt-in, not a complete lead form
4. Ask your biggest fans to forward your email newsletter to friends and get them to sign up for your list

Sending Emails

1. Send your new subscribers an instant confirmation email telling them what you will send them and how often you will send it
2. Be consistent - make sure you send emails on a consistent basis, it can be daily, weekly, or monthly, but make sure you stick to that schedule
3. Make sure it is simple, clear and easy for your audience to change subscription preferences

Measurement and Analytics

1. Open rates are becoming less reliable, so don't focus on that metric too much
2. Click through rate (CTR) can be good top measure if your email has a call to action and you want people to click - it might be less relevant for newsletters
3. Conversion rate - if you are driving people toward registering for something or buying something, track the number of people on your email that ended up converting
4. Measure your overall list metrics to know the health of your list
1. List growth - how is your list growing over time
2. Opt-out rate - how many people are leaving your list
3. Bounce rate - how many bad emails do you have on your list
5. Trend analysis - for all the metrics, make sure you look at trends - sometimes the most interesting information is in the trends because they show you how the metric is changing over time

Greg's final piece of advice... just get started!  Think about setting an editorial calendar for email to make sure you put aside the time necessary for your email marketing program.

Posted by Mike Volpe on Tue, Dec 02, 2008 @ 08:15 AM