Outsourcing Email Marketing: Listrak Professional Services

Guidelines for Outsourcing Email Marketing Professional Services

By Megan Ouellet, Director of Marketing for Listrak
August 3, 2007

As the email marketing industry matures, companies continue to be under more pressure to streamline business processes and do more with less staff. It is becoming ever increasingly popular for companies to outsource everything from creative development to campaign deployment to the professional services team at an email marketing service provider. This differs from just outsourcing the email newsletter creation as the professional services include creative development, best practices, launch, subscriber acquisition and retention, testing, segmentation, deliverability, tracking and reporting, list management, training, and consulting.

If you are new to email marketing and need a way to launch effective email campaigns quickly, if you have recently gone through a merger or acquisition, if you are short on staff or lack the in-house expertise, or if you simply want to learn a better way to promote your company through email marketing, outsourcing the professional services is the way to go.

While the professional services team at your email service provider will perform most of the work for you, there are several things that you must be aware of in order to manage a mutually beneficial relationship. Listrak, an award winning provider of email marketing solutions, has put together the following white paper that outlines the procedures that must be put in place prior to the first email send, the roles of both parties, and the deliverables that both parties should expect.

The Procedures

There are many processes that must be decided and put in place before the email campaign can be deployed. Your ESP will already have many of these items in place; however, it is helpful for you to know what each step is and what you can do to ensure your emails are developed, deployed, and tracked in a timely and efficient manner.

Point of Contact: In order to maintain the most efficient and effective relationship with your ESP, you should both decide on a point of contact in your companies to streamline the communications effort. Doing so ensures that the relationship remains strong while ensuring that tasks are performed correctly and on schedule. If you have different team members calling into different people at the ESP, no one will have the high level view of the account and it will take longer to sort out the details.
Knowledge Transfer: Prior to setting up the email campaigns, the contacts for both companies need to discuss, in detail, items that directly and indirectly affect campaigns, such as corporate and industry happenings, competitive landscapes, company objectives, etc. The more the ESP knows about your company, the more likely it will be to create campaigns that are inline with your overall strategies.
Goals: What do you want to accomplish with your email marketing strategy? Do you want to increase sales, raise awareness of a new product, or simply keep your brand in front of your contacts? Chances are, each email will have a different goal, so it is very important to communicate to your ESP what you want to achieve with each and every email campaign.
Appearance: If the ESP is designing the HTML email templates for you, it is of utmost importance to communicate with them upfront how you would like the templates to look. Many times, companies will instruct the ESP to “design something creative” rather than laying out guidelines, such as putting the logo in the top right corner, adding a table of contents in the left panel, using the same graphics from a certain page of their website, etc. You can work with the ESP on several different design templates and options, but in order to save time and money, it is important to communicate your branding aspects, color scheme, logo placement, and other design elements that you want, and then let the ESP design something creative around your specifications. Also, if you use multiple templates, one for your newsletter, another one for your promotional email campaigns, etc., you must be sure to inform the ESP which template to use for each email they create for you. For more information, read Listrak’s white paper “Email Marketing Best Practices: Checklist for Outsourcing HTML Newsletters”.
Content: When sending the content for each email message to your ESP, it is important to remember to send along the message settings – including the subject line, from name and email address, test address, time and date of deployment, how to handle soft bounces, whether or not the email should be enabled for tracking, Google Analytics, pass-along, RSS, etc. While these are extremely important aspects of the message, they are often overlooked as the focus of the marketers usually remains on the message creation and not on the settings. However, if these items are left out, the ESP will have to contact you and valuable time will be wasted trying to gather this information.
List Management: Another important factor to discuss prior to deploying your first email is list management. Will you use multiple lists and multiple suppression lists for each different type of email campaign, or will you use an online preference center where your contacts can opt-in and out of lists, set their own preferences, and manage their own accounts? Your ESP can set up and manage either option you choose, and they can also discuss the time and cost involved for doing both. It is crucial to have organized lists no matter which option you prefer, as you will face being blacklisted and blocked from email clients if you accidently send emails to contacts that have attempted to unsubscribe from your lists. A well organized list helps you send the right email to the right contacts, which in turn increases your reputation, deliverability, and response.
Segmentation: Segmenting your lists is one of the greatest things you can do to increase your open, read, click-through, and conversion rates as it allows you to send targeted, more relevant messages to smaller groups of contacts at a time as opposed to sending out a more general message to your entire list that will only interest a small percentage of those contacts. Be sure to discuss with your ESP how you want to segment your list, the business rules they should follow, and the profiling filters that should be included if you are also using dynamic content.
Personalization: An email marketing best practice is to include the recipient’s name in the subject line of the email. This helps the recipients identify the email as one that they have signed up to receive and it helps your message stand out in their inboxes. However, your ESP will know other ways to personalize the message body to increase the response rate, so be sure to discuss all of your options with your ESP prior to deployment.
Testing: Your ESP will ask you for the date and time you would like to send your message, but are you sure that is the time that you will reach most of your recipients? The ESP will be able to perform tests to determine the best time to send, the subject lines that generated the most opens, the calls to action that generated the most conversions, etc. This way you will know without a doubt that you are sending the absolute best email as possible.

Another important testing factor that you must discuss with your ESP is testing each email in different email clients to be sure that images render properly. They should also test the emails through Spam Score prior to deployment so they can fix any potential problems that could cause the message to be blocked. However, testing should not just be in the hands of the ESP. To be sure that your emails are going out exactly the way you want them to look, you should set up testing email addresses for yourself with AOL, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc., and ask the ESP to include those email addresses with their test sends. That way, you can see exactly how the email will look to your recipients.
Deliverability: Deliverability remains the number one factor for email marketers. You need to work closely with your ESP to be sure your emails reach your recipients’ inboxes. Reputation plays a big part, and ISPs base reputation on the volume of activity over a certain amount of time. Be sure to ask your ESP about their reputation and if they offer dedicated IP addresses and have them use your domain name in theheader of the message and that all tracking links use your domain name as well. Finally, you must make sure that images that are hosted anywhere other than your own websites use your domain name in the image links. This includes any image based tracking technology used by an ESP to track messages. For more information, read Listrak’s white paper “How Reputation Impacts Deliverability.”

Reputation is only one piece of the deliverability puzzle. Several other items must be in place to ensure deliverability, including authentication and accreditation tools, abuse processing systems, and a global suppression list. You should also ask your ESP if they have partnered with deliverability specialists, such as Return Path. Having these items in place will greatly increase the chance of your email reaching your audience.
Tracking and Reporting: Right now, there is not a standard method of tracking emails – each ESP does it differently. While this is something that is currently in the works, you must work closely with your ESP to be sure you understand the tracking reports. It is also a good idea to ask the experts at your ESP to review your reports periodically to identify and fix and problem areas that might not be obvious.
Training and Consulting: Many companies like to start off outsourcing the professional services to the ESP, but like to bring the services in-house when they are comfortable with the procedures. If this is your goal, be sure to look for an ESP that is willing to train you on email marketing best practices, including list growth strategy, customer retention, email relevancy, creative copy and design, subscribe/unsubscribe processes, subject lines, deliverability, testing, and segmentation. You will also want to be sure to be as active in the development process with your ESP as possible prior to moving it in-house. After all, the more involved you are in the entire process, the more improved your campaigns will be.

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Guidelines for Outsourcing Email Marketing Professional Services

The Procedures