Email technical requirements

Director of Digital Strategy

We’ve reviewed best practices for approaching your audience and creative specific to email marketing (if you haven’t read them yet, I would 11/10 recommend). However, email marketing is only as successful as its foundation—the email technical requirements behind the campaign. This includes everything from your Email Service Provider (ESP) to your back-end tracking. Here are a few suggestions to make sure your email foundation is solid:

Separate Your Accounts and IPs

This one seems obvious, but you would be surprised. Manage your clients on separate accounts, not on one single account. This is to avoid consumer overlap. One blanket email list is not ideal, or appropriate, for multiple profiles or businesses.

Manage Your Audience

A lot goes into managing your audience on the back end of your ESP. Using tags or segments to categorize is key to maximizing your email marketing efforts. You can further segment based on user activity and engagement, age, gender, location, or time and place they subscribed, and more. This will allow you to cater your communications and increase relevancy to each recipient instead of blanketing the same message to your entire database.

Segmenting and tagging also provides your team a clear view of the overall email operation and target demographics. This oversight will help improve your campaigns over time, ensuring you continue to evaluate and categorize who is engaging with your content.

Audit Your Email Campaigns

This doesn’t need to be a fancy-schmancy audit. But at the bare minimum, you should monitor the unsubscribe rate and spam complaints about each campaign. Extreme fluctuations in these metrics can be a sign that something is off with your email list or ESP.

Use UTMs to Track Clicks and Web Activity

We love data in this household! UTMs, or Urchin Tracking Modules, are codes added to URLs that tell Google Analytics (or other analytics tools) which marketing campaign your site traffic came from. Understanding where site traffic originates is a key success metric and can be used in other digital marketing efforts, but that’s a blog for another day.

Sharing this:
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Email
Print
Director of Digital Strategy
Aaron loves a good problem. That means he asks questions. And the more questions he asks, the closer he gets to the solution. This makes Aaron happy. And a little sad. Until a freshly shrink-wrapped problem arrives in his lap, and he can start the process over again. Throughout Aaron’s 15-year career, he has gained diverse skills in building digital experiences. His multidisciplinary background, including user experience, design, engineering, and data analysis , enables him to develop solutions that create pleasurable and frictionless experiences for end users who build value for his clients.

Our Take

Nobody likes to hear people squawk about marketing. So, we wrote it all down for you.

This website stores cookies on your computer.

These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with our website and allow us to remember you.  We use this information in order to improve and customize your browsing experience and for analytics and metrics about our visitors both on this website and other media.  To find out more about the cookies we use see our privacy policy.