Email Marketing Resources?

[LukeHutchinson]

Hi All,

I'm fairly inexperienced when it comes to email marketing and know that it isn't as simple as firing off an email and hoping for the best. Realistically it involves tracking responses, clicks and overall the conversion of what you are trying to achieve.

My job involves email marketing on a monthly basis and although I'm capable of sending emails I want to be maximize the results and perfect them.

I'm sure that those reading this agree and have looked into perfecting their email marketing campaigns over the years.

Can those with experience point me in the right direction with this?. I'm open to all resources both free and paid including videos, blogs and other various resources.

If you can recommend a book of some sort that would also be appreciated. Personal experience and advice would also be fantastic.

As mentioned, I'm capable of actually sending emails and we use 'dotmailer' as it features analytics. I need to know how I can better my skills and ultimately increase the success of email campaigns.

Kind Regards,

Luke Hutchinson.

[Asher]

I use constant contact and occasionally mail chimp.  Constant contact, in my experience, is the most complete.  It gives you analytics and all the data you could possibly want.  In addition it gives you video tutorials on how to use constant contact and what you get in return, as well as click throughs and things like that.

If you want to do it yourself however, what you do is set up conversion codes within your google analytics or whatever analytics tool you are using that redirects to the specific page within your site and track the click throughs that way as it will appear as part of your conversion code in your analytics.  I don't have much experience with this method as I prefer to use constant contact because of all the functionality that it provides.  I hope this helps with your answer.

[josh-riley]

Luke - quite the project you get! I admit, I usually stay away from books since they can get out of date pretty fast for this subject matter, so here's some websites to check out:

We've recently invested in Eloqua for our marketing automation, which is probably too big of a tool for many companies, however they have great email campaign resources. http://www.eloqua.com/resources/

And, Marketo is sorta similar to Eloqua: http://www.marketo.com/b2b-marketing-resources/

This site has some great examples people post for A/B testing, so there's usually good learnings you can gleen: http://www.abtests.com/ and implement.

I also like content Hubspot creates: http://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing-automation/ & http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-automation-information/

Hope that's a decent start!

[LukeHutchinson]

Thanks for the replies. I will look at both resources and let you know how it goes. I'm guessing that most optimization and knowledge comes from trial and error?. As far as analytics goes, dotmailer tracks everything from who opens, forwards, reports as spam, doesn't open, how many times opened, links clicked, popular links, email clients used and % / numbers, bounces, unsub requests, social network views and a massive variety of other analytics. It also allows you to view a copy of the email with hotspots showing click through areas and % statistics etc.

In regards to actually learning how to lay the emails out and improve click rates I will read the guides provided.

Thanks all.