In order to give you the best perspective on social media and digital marketing topics and trends, I’ll periodically invite other industry professionals to participate in Q&A blogs.

Today’s blog features C. Alexis Brown, MBA, and Director of Strategic Marketing & Panel Engagement for Oceanside Ten Management, Inc. / ClearVoice Research located in the Jacksonville, FL, metro area.

Q: What are top three trends we are seeing with regard to e-mail marketing?

A: Personalization and targeting based on behavior, as well as Omni channel communications. These are defined as multi-device and multiple touch points to reach your customers and/or subscribers. For example, if you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer, requiring customers to submit their e-mail address in order to access free WiFi in your store; by accessing the WiFi, they are agreeing to sign-up to your marketing list.

Q: How does a brand go about making e-mail marketing effective for their business growth efforts?

A: Pay attention to your subscribers. They don’t care what you have to say or what you are trying to sell them. It’s about what’s in it for them. Why should they open your emails, much less be subscribed to your list?

Q: What type of infrastructure is required for a successful e-mail marketing program?

A: This can be a multifaceted answer, but essentially make sure as a legitimate business you authenticate your e-mail to secure your brand and online reputation with SenderID and DKIM, and SPF records. This should be obvious to any valid email marketer, but your sending domain MUST be able to receive mail as well as send mail. Set up and monitor postmaster and abuse mailboxes for all domains.

Q: What are the top five e-mail marketing tools out there today?

A: Marketo, Pardot, ExactTarget, Constant Contact, etc.

Q: What if a brand can’t justify the cost for an e-mail marketing tool? What grassroots (or no-cost) efforts can be undertaken?

A: You can collect people’s e-mail’s manually at events and input them into an excel spreadsheet and then copy and paste e-mail’s, etc, etc. There are lots of ways to do this grassroots approach. If you do this, you run into making sure you remain CAN-SPAM compliant during acquisition; so your grassroots team needs to be organized and excellent communicators, and then verifying the email addresses. If you are collecting emails at an event, there will still be at least some cost in verifying the emails (BriteVerify or FreshAddress) unless your team takes the time to manually type each and every email address by hand into an excel sheet. At that point, you run into the risk of human error. In this example, if they choose to collect email addresses with an iPad or some other mobile tool, there will be time and coding effort involved with creating the acquisition page, verification mode, as well as integration processes with your ESP or other SaaS platform.

Connect with C. Alexis Brown on social media:

• Twitter – https://twitter.com/AlexisBrownPR
• LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/in/calexisbrown