Email Marketing should be an essential part of your marketing toolkit because everyone uses and understands email. Email newsletters are easy and inexpensive to send out, they’re easy to track and measure (email newsletter software has analytics that reports on how people are engaging with your newsletter) and they’re an opt-in way to send information to people who’ve chosen to receive your content. If you’re unsure of the relevance of email, see this post and infographic on the value of email.

This isn’t to say that social media tools don’t have their place. Vertical Response reports open rates are 28% higher for brands who use email and social in tandem. As always, marketing tools shouldn’t be used in silos but, instead, integrated into holistic marketing campaigns. Watch this 1-minute marketing video for more information on using email newsletters together with your blog and social media networks.

5 Essential Email Marketing Tips

1. Use an Email Marketing Service Provider

Use a service dedicated to email newsletter distribution. These service providers have strict email rules that keep their servers white listed, which means that your newsletter is more likely to get through spam filters. They also give you the ability to measure your campaigns and manage your email list subscribes and unsubscribes.

Mail Chimp and Constant Contact are both popular email marketing service providers but we prefer to use Campaign Monitor to send out newsletters.

Although it requires a bit more technical know-how, we like Campaign Monitor because:

• The signup process can happen on your website’s URL. This allows you to track newsletter signups (and where they drop off in the signup process) in Google Analytics.
• You can give Client Access to an account so that clients can access to their own newsletter list and reports without having access to all of the accounts you manage.

2. Know When to Send Out Your Newsletter

In general, best practice for sending out email newsletters is midweek (Mondays are too busy, Fridays people are trying to finish things up for the weekend). You want to either send out your newsletter between 7-8am so that it’s in subscribers’ inboxes when they arrive at work and are sitting down to go through email, or send it out at lunch time so that people will read them when they look at their email after lunch.

Despite these general best practices, it is always better to tailor them specifically to your own audience. Find out what day and time your audience is online by going into your analytics and seeing what day and time of day gets the most traffic on your site.

In the new version of Google Analytics:

1. Log in to Google Analytics. Go to Overview
2. Here you can see visits by day and hour by clicking on the icons above the graph on the right hand side

In the old version of Google Analytics (this version gives you a report that’s easier to read):

1. Log in to Google Analytics. Scroll to the bottom and click Old version – Reporting (the new version of Google Analytics doesn’t have this report)
2. Go to Visitors > Visitor Trending > Visits
3. Here you can see visits by day and hour by clicking on the icons above the graph on the right hand side

3. Use Google’s URL Builder to Track Your Campaigns

If your email service provider doesn’t integrate with Google Analytics, use Google’s URL builder to create a custom URL for the links in your newsletter so that you can track them in analytics. For example, if you include www.yourwebsite.com/contact in your newsletter, while you can see in analytics how many visits there were to that URL,  you won’t know how many of those visits were directly from your newsletter.

Instead, use the URL builder to create a custom URL that identifies people coming from your newsletter. Note: the URL builder can be used to track any online campaign, including ad campaigns and blogger outreach campaigns.

Make sure to think through your parameters so that it will make sense in your analytics reports. Here’s an example of the parameters for a newsletter going out this month via Constant Contact:

• Campaign Source: ConstantContact
• Campaign Medium: Email
• Campaign Name: May 2012 Newsletter

To find this report in analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns.

4. Use Email Newsletters in Tandem with Other Marketing Tools

As mentioned above, email newsletters should be used in tandem with your blog and social media efforts.

For your blog, this means organizing your editorial calendar for the blog together with your email newsletter. If you have a quarterly newsletter, for example, publish blog posts throughout the quarter, and then send out your newsletter while slowing down activity on the blog.

Also think about reusing content from your blog in your newsletter. For example, send out a newsletter that is a roundup of the top 5 most popular blog posts on your site that quarter.

For tips on integrating your email newsletter with social media, read 9 ways to integrate email and social media marketing.

5. Measure and Report

Like any online marketing tactic, you should measure the success of your email marketing in relation to your overall business objectives. Possible metrics include:

Objective: Build Reputation

• Number of subscribes
• Number of unsubscribes

Objective: Increase Awareness

• Number of email opens (What’s a good email open rate?)
• Number of shares

Objective: Audience Engagement

• Number of click-thrus
• Comments/Feedback
• Time with content / Number of times opened

For more tips on tracking and measuring the success of your campaigns:

Using Custom Reports in Google Analytics to Inform Marketing Decisions
How to Use Google Analytics Advanced Segments