There’s No Such Thing as Best Practices in Email Marketing

I was not able to attend this past week’s Email Evolution Conference in Miami, but as any avid Twitter user and email marketer would, I followed the #eec10 tweets. And one of the tweets really stood out to me:

“Best Practices = Best Practices that work for your client.”

Otherwise known as: there’s no such thing as universal best practices in email marketing.**

Seeing that tweet made me feel better. Why? Because I’ve spent a good deal of time ...

reading blogs, articles, and books as well as corresponded with email marketing folks over Twitter, Facebook, and email, and while I’ve learned a lot, the ultimate answer you get is “It depends.”

The operative word in “Best Practices” is practice. It takes a lot of practice–trial and error if you will–to learn how best to communicate with your customers through email. Engagement metrics like open rates, clickthroughs, and click-to-conversions vary dramatically from product to product and industry to industry. Regardless of what people tell you, there’s no “average open rate” for email marketing. Believe me, I asked the question–that’s the answer I got.

Based off of this semi-rant, some takeaways I can pass onto you:

Case studies are good sources of ideas to try, but not prescriptions for broken email programs.

Testing is extremely important. Without testing, you have no benchmarks. Without benchmarks, you can’t really improve your email program.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. As a customer, how would you want to experience your brand? Test based on that.

Again, it’s all about the customer experience.

–End of semi-rant.

** I will concede that there are best practices in email deliverability, but that’s because the ISPs control that relationship, not the product or customer you’re dealing with.

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