When it first came on the scene in the early to mid 1990s, email marketing was the hottest, most productive marketing tool on the map. Response rates and profits were many times greater than snail mail and other forms of selling. Then things changed. Response rates have dropped precipitously, and general productivity has evaporated.

What happened? Too many marketers devoted their efforts to sending millions of e-mails (Hunting for sales) instead of building relationships with their subscribers (Farming). That’s why Successful E-Mail Marketing Strategies: From Hunting to Farming was written. The authors, veterans of both the traditional marketing and email marketing wars, share their wisdom about how to make this exciting new marketing tool an effective tool for finding new customers and mining existing customers more profitably.

The authors cover campaign performance management, hunting versus farming, developing segments, using analytics and testing, improving customer loyalty and retention, and more. They explain how to create powerful subject lines, how to use interactivity and viral marketing, how to listen to customers, how to apply your strategies to specific types of markets.

Successful E-Mail Marketing Strategies is the one volume you will be able to depend on to develop and use state-of-the-art email marketing strategies to find more new customers, turn more prospects into loyal customers, and make more money for your company.

Chapter

1. E-mail Marketing: Something New and Wonderful
2. E-mail Marketing: Hunting or Farming
3. Campaign Performance Measurement
4. The Farming of Subscribers
5. The Importance of Relevant E-mails
6. E-mail Subscriber Lifetime Value
7. E-mail Marketing to Subscriber Segments
8. Acquiring Permission-Based E-mail Addresses
9. Creating Powerful Subject Lines
10. How to Write Compelling E-mails
11. Listening to Customers
12. The Frequency Debate: How Much E-mail is Enough?
13. The Power of Transactional E-mails
14. How to Send Triggered E-mails
15. Interactivity: Making Each E-mail an Adventure
16. Testing to Improve your Marketing
17. Customer Retention and Loyalty
18. Viral Marketing
19. Using Analytics to Boost E-mail Success
20. Business to Business E-mail Marketing
21. Building Retail Store Traffic
22. Organizing and Managing E-mail Programs
23. The Future of E-mail Marketing


Appendix: The Discount Rule

E-mail Marketing Glossary

About the Authors

Index

From Hunting to Farming is a Master Class for e-mail marketing in the 21st Century. The book is destined to become the new must-read strategy playbook for e-mail marketers today and required reading for CMOs and CFOs looking to grow their businesses through this effective and efficient channel. Arthur Hughes, the premier author on database marketing strategy, makes a compelling business case for the “Farming” approach to e-mail marketing with a wealth of charts and examples for effective measurement. Each chapter addresses the key tactics and best practices for a “How-To” guide for delivering a state of the art e-mail communication strategy. It’s an enjoyable read offering a thought-provoking look at the promise of how the medium can benefit your company.

Rob Befumo
Director of E-mail Marketing
Publisher’s Clearing House

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Successful E-Mail Marketing Strategies delivers a dynamic new framework for thinking about your subscribers. The real-world examples included throughout the book will get you buzzing with new ideas for jumpstarting or revitalizing your e-mail marketing efforts.”

Heather Johnson
Manager of Online Strategy
AirTran Airways

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 What’s missing for many e-mail marketers is plain old attitude. The two Arthurs make it easy to see the difference between primitive “hunting” and customer-centric “farming.” The data, technology, expertise and opportunity abound to make all e-mail marketing wildly successful, getting to the heart of what makes it work: creating great subscriber experiences. This is a game-changing attitudinal shift. If you want your e-mail marketing to succeed, learn how to farm.

Stephanie Miller
Vice President
Return Path

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This book is a must-read for new and seasoned e-mail marketers alike. Hughes and Sweetser have written a powerful manual filled with innovative strategies and eye opening statistics to help you bring your email marketing program to the next level.

Megan O’Donnell
Manager, Email Marketing
OfficeMax

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Combine all of your webinars, training events and reading materials. Now throw them all away. This is the single most important marketing book you need for today and beyond. Live, breathe and learn the techniques to take your campaigns from flat to fat based on methods from people who have truly lived through the ups and downs of the changing face of marketing.

Melanie Singleton
Senior Marketing Manager
Norvax, Inc., a Fortune 500 Company

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E-mail marketing is unique because it can be a truly personalized communication between a company and a single recipient. That’s immensely powerful, but only if a marketer understands the science of learning from the customer. At the same time, they must be able to accurately measure the lifetime value of a subscriber in order to properly allocate resources. Hughes and Sweetser explain how to measure that value in elegant and accurate language. They build upon that to help the marketer determine the ROI of their email communications with easy to understand calculations that can be used by all e-mail marketers to measure their own success and continually improve upon it.

Stefan Tornquist
Research Director
Marketing Sherpa

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When they write, “. . . e-mail permits an entirely new and better way of building relationships with our customers . . .” the authors of Successful E-mail Marketing Strategies, Arthur Middleton Hughes and Arthur Sweetser have hit the enter key right on the head. Their useful exploration of the fast-expanding world of e-mail marketing provides numerous actionable strategies that cannot help but make e-mail marketing more profitable and effective. Best of all, their exposition of the medium makes clear what Obama’s campaign has proven so stunningly: involvement of the audience through the new language of marketing success and using this powerful electronic medium has come of age.

Peter J Rosenwald
Partner
International Associates—Strategic Marketing Consultants
Author of Accountable Marketing