An E-mail Marketer's To-do List

During the final session of the ClickZ Specifics: E-mail Marketing conference, five panelists were asked a series of questions and given 1 minute each to respond. When asked, “What two things should e-mail marketers be doing, but aren’t?”, they came up with a varied list of action items:

Jeanne Jennings, online marketing consultant:
1. Really look at content to make sure it’s relevant and does what you want.
2. Segmentation. There’s so much you can do, but don’t go overboard. Come up with logical groups.

Jordan Ayan, CEO of SubscriberMail:
1. Testing. Not enough e-mail marketers are testing their subject lines, creative, or content.
2. Make sure you’re checking deliverability stats.

Jack Aaronson, CEO of the Aaronson Group:
1. Testing. Once you’re done with the strategy and creative, you’re still not done. You need to test, make changes, and test again.
2. Immediacy. Even beyond relevance, you should be looking at Web site clickstream data to see what people are interested in now, not just what their profile says they may be interested in some time.

Al DiGuido , former president and CEO of Epsilon Interactive:
1. Customer retention. Considering the time and money spent on acquisition, marketers should be spending more time on customer retention.
2. Think about how to react to non-responders, instead of focusing solely on those who respond to an initial e-mail campaign.

Jeanniey Mullen, senior director of e-mail marketing at OgilvyOne Worldwide:
1. Landing page optimization. Marketers will see lots of attrition if they send users to a catch-all landing page.
2. Establish a corporate welcome campaign. Reach out to new customers, new subscribers, and set expectations for what you promise to deliver in the relationship, and what they can expect from you.