The New Basics for Email Strategies - To Outsource or Not to Outsource?
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The first thing we will look at is whether outsourcing is necessary for any aspects of email campaigns, ranging from copy to delivery. One of my favorite ezine consultants is Michael_Katz (in terms of content only, not deliverability). I learn new ways of making copy interesting simply via his own emails and podcasts. Outsourcing for all stages of your email campaign is quite expensive, and if you are a small operation, it may not be feasible.
Assuming that your in house staff is sufficient to handle every thing that comes up may be dangerous, however. The technical aspects of email deployment (setting up a mail servers, security, and so on) can only be handled if you have full time system administrators who have experience with mail server software. Again, in terms of cost, only if you have a major operation would you be able to set up your own servers and have your own server administrators.
Apart from the technical aspect, there is creative (we will also look at the next level after creative in this article) and then copy, and finally deliverability. To reduce the work load and cost of your operation you can set up a dedicated email server if you have a large mailing list, and have your own in house creative and copy. Delivery can be also be outsourced to a third party (like postmaster direct or aweber) assuming that you can handle all of the above (especially if you have a large list).
But doing it in house will be inefficient in terms of cost and time management. If you outsource, you can skip all of the technical staff and put the money in customer relations management. Establish a list of your needs and get a vendor that will fill them.
However, depending on your core strengths as an organization, you may be able to handle all the aspects of your email campaign in house. Next we will look at interactive design for your email.
Creative Design or Interactive Design?
This is not really an either/or situation. The wonderful thing is that you can have both a beautiful design, and at the same time an interactive design. Interactivity is what the Internet is about. If your site does not have interactive features (blogs to comment, forums, polls) you will reduce your users' flexibility.
On emails creative design has always been the priority, but now interactivity has to take its place in email campaigns. How do you increase interactivity? Interactivity is about dialogue -- communication between you, your user and other users. A great way to increase this communication is with Q and A; another way is to send polls through emails. The really creative writer is now finding ways to create interactivity with the subscriber.
This will make designing the “creative” more than just a graphics task. More intense programming and coding will go into “interactivity,” making it compatible for users' browsers and ensuring that the code is not stripped off before it enters the mail box. More likely than not, there will be some links back to the interactive content and then some copy to encourage users to click on said links.
currently its almost impossible to find anyone who does anything serious about interactive email design, so it’s a wide open field. A lot of designers should look at it as the next level of “creative” (web services for email clients perhaps).
Content is King; the Customer can Depose Him
No matter how good your content is, no matter how you design your interface and arrange your email campaign, if you do not consider particular needs of the customer, even your good content is in danger of becoming irrelevant and in some cases bad for you. There are three things we will look at that can ruin your relationship with your customer, and will ensure that he or she will unsubscribe from your email. The factors are customer service, after sales customer service and email, and what Al Diguido calls “pushing,” which simply means sending emails that are not relevant to that particular subscriber. We will start with pushing and work our way backwards to customer service (CRM) during sales and after sales.
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