MANAGING EMAIL MARKETING

CHECKLIST
A Fast Start Checklist reviewing the key activities
needed to improve your Email communications
Author: Dr Dave Chaffey, SmartInsights.com

Published: May 2014

Introduction
Improving Email marketing

Email marketing still demands attention from businesses

Although some social media commentators have suggested it, email marketing is far
from dead. In fact, the main social networks all rely heavily on email marketing as a key
technique to support their audience engagement.
We see email marketing as one of the todays key communications channels both to
develop deeper relationships of subscribers with a brand and to deliver commercial
returns. Email offers a range for developing prospects and customer marketing.
What is it? Core types of email marketing
You will be familiar with what Email marketing is, but its worth bearing in mind that,
for a business looking to use email to grow, there are these three core types of email
marketing:
1. Emails sent to a third party list owned by a publisher featuring an offer
from the brand. These may be a publisher enewsletter or a co-branded email
featuring the business offer.
2. Emails sent to prospects who have registered with a brand. These emails
are ripe for marketing automation where automated email marketing sequences
can be created to boost conversion to sale. Newsletters are also effective to
create preference and purchase intent for a brand.
3. Emails sent to customers on a house list. The aim of customer
communications is to encourage purchasers to make additional purchases or
share recommendations through reviews or on social media. Different types of
emails are effective for house list emails from newsletters and targeted campaign
or solus emails to behavioural emails.

In this checklist we focus on 2 and 3 using email to market to a house list of

subscribers. This is where most businesses focus their email marketing efforts.
The aim of this Fast Start checklist is to help you complete a comprehensive review of
your email marketing capabilities. These are the main activities to improve your email
marketing whether youre just starting out or already have different email programmes
in place.

Managing Email Marketing Checklist

Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please go to www.smartinsights.com to feedback or access our other guides.

 Introduction

About Smart Insights

Smart Insights provides actionable marketing resources to help businesses succeed
online. More than 60,000 Basic members use our blog, sample marketing templates and
weekly Emarketing Essentials newsletter to follow best practices and keep up-to-date
with the developments that matter in digital marketing.
Our Expert members use our planning and management templates, video courses and
guides to map, plan and manage their marketing using the RACE Planning framework.
Here are 10 reasons why Expert members use our resources.

About Technology for Marketing

Weve teamed up with TFM&A to share these recommendations. The Technology for
Marketing and Advertising conferences have charted the rising importance of digital
technologies and media to marketing for over 15 years and today is the UKs largest
multichannel marketing, media and advertising event.

About the author

Dr Dave Chaffey is CEO and co-founder of digital marketing management advice site
Smart Insights. He is author of 5 bestselling books on Ecommerce
including Total Email marketing and Digital Marketing: Strategy,
Implementation and Practice and was recognised by the Chartered
Institute of Marketing in 2004 as one of 50 marketing gurus worldwide
who have helped shape the future of marketing.

Managing Email Marketing Checklist

Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please go to www.smartinsights.com to feedback or access our other guides.

MANAGING EMAIL MARKETING

FAST START CHECKLIST

About this checklist

This checklist covers the key strategic activities you to need to work on to improve to get
better results from your email marketing. We have grouped these activities around the 7
main steps in our Email marketing guide.
Structure of this checklist
This checklist is based around these 7 key steps to email marketing we cover in our
Step 1 Review your Email marketing capabilities and set goals
Step 2 Build a quality email subscriber database
Step 3 Select segmentation options and targeting techniques
Step 4 Email proposition and communications strategy
Step 5 Create effective email marketing templates and creative
Step 6 Optimise Deliverability
Step 7 Test, learn and refine email marketing effectiveness
We hope you find this guide useful, do contact us with any questions.
To learn more about how to improve your email marketing, click through to the
recommended free articles and Expert member resources listed on the right.
Recommended resource? Smart Insights Expert member Email marketing advice
We have grouped our member resources on our Email marketing hub page. If youre
serious about improving your Email marketing we recommend our in-depth 7 Steps guide
to Email marketing which has a deeper explanation and examples for each step. Other
resources for Expert members include:
Email marketing effectiveness audit spreadsheet
Email campaign calculator spreadsheet
Email contact strategy template

Managing Email Marketing Checklist

Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please go to www.smartinsights.com to feedback or access our other guides.

Email marketing checklist

Email marketing management activity

Recommended resources
Step 1 Review your Email marketing capabilities and set goals
1

Assess current effectiveness of email

marketing programme
Its essential to go beyond top-level open and
clickthroughs for campaigns and assess value

Track email campaigns using

Google Analytics
Measuring email subscriber
engagement

Email marketing campaign

calculator (Expert members)

Services for email broadcast

and management

generated, both overall and for individual segments.

2

Define objectives for future email

marketing to make case for more
investment
Use an email conversion calculator to set worst and
best case objectives.

Effective email marketing platform in

place?
Most companies use Email service providers or ESPs
for managing their email broadcasts. Although today
most have capabilities to deliver relevant emails based
on the factors in this checklist, features differ greatly in
sophistication and ease of use.

Step 2 Build a quality email subscriber database

4

Review options to increase your list size

Assess the best touchpoints and promotional
techniques to grow your email list. You can optimise
sign-up by testing the benefits and calls-to-action.

Improve your list quality

Improving list quality starts with defining list profile

15 techniques to grow your

email list
Case study - 9 real world
strategies to grow an email list

Defined in Step 2 of our 7

Steps Email guide

Email preference centre design

best practices

fields and setting targets.

6

Develop customer preference centres

You can miss a lot of opportunities to capture email if
you dont explain the benefits of sign-up.

Step 3 Select segmentation options and targeting techniques

Targeting options should be reviewed alongside Step 4
7
Demographic targeting options selected? Email segmentation and
targeting options
A top-level identification of which audiences such as
Using personas for email
personas and demographic groups need different
communications.
marketing

Managing Email Marketing Checklist

Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please go to www.smartinsights.com to feedback or access our other guides.

Email marketing checklist

Email marketing management activity

Lifecycle email targeting selected?
Additional targeting options defined based on position

Recommended resources
Hub page on behavioural email
marketing

in customer lifecycle, response to email and sales

activity.

Step 4 Email proposition and communications strategy

9

Email value proposition defined?

Different email and content types relevant for different

Integrating email marketing

and content marketing

audiences to support business goals reviewed?

10

Options for enewsletters selected?

Smart Insights Enewsletter hub

Different content types relevant for different audiences

reviewed? Is the Sell-Inform-Entertain balance right?
11

Options for campaign emails reviewed

Defined in Step 5 of our 7

Steps Email guide
Opportunities for different types of campaign to support

communications and sales objectives reviewed?

12

Options for behavioural email selected?

Email trigger events and sequences should be defined

Hub page on behavioural email

marketing

for different audience context, e.g. welcome when

joining list, reactivation when list members become
inactive.
13

Contact policy or touch strategy defined?

A summary of the aims for email frequency setting
caps on numbers of emails per month and the interval

Email frequency and intervals

are discussed in Step 4 of our
7 Steps Email guide

between emails (important in larger businesses).

Step 5 Create effective email marketing templates and creative

14 Options for template features reviewed
See the recommended
templates for newsletters and
Template features such as pre-headers, headers,
campaigns in Step 5 of our 7
sidebars, body content and footers reviewed for
different layouts.
Steps Email guide
15

Use of dynamic content

Dynamic content is inserted as imagery and text into
panels for different audiences to increase relevance.

See the recommended

templates for newsletters and
campaigns in Step 5 of our 7
Steps Email guide

Managing Email Marketing Checklist

Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please go to www.smartinsights.com to feedback or access our other guides.

Email marketing checklist

16

Email marketing management activity

Templates support imagery and where
relevant video effectively
The best emails use images or videos to engage, but
the creative is still effective when images are blocked.

17

Mobile and responsive templates

The majority of emails are now viewed on mobile

Recommended resources
See the recommended
templates for newsletters and
campaigns in Step 5 of our 7
Steps Email guide

Hub page on mobile email

marketing

Email deliverbaility is
discussed in Step 4 of our 7
Steps Email guide

devices, so its essential that creative works on mobile

while still being effective on desktop.

Step 6 Optimise deliverability

18 Email delivery reviewed and improved
Webmail platforms like Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo!
Mail will block commercial emails if they look like spam
false positives, so delivery needs to be reviewed and
steps taken to maximise inbox deliverability.

Step 7 Test, learn and refine email marketing effectiveness

19 Options to optimise email implemented
Slideshare talk by Dave Chaffey
These include basic ad-hoc tests of different content
and offers to more structured AB testing, for example

with examples of testing and

review

of subject lines through to more advanced multivariate

testing.

We hope you find our summary of 20 key activities to manage email marketing useful.
Please let us know if you have any questions about email marketing through our Answers
forum.
Dave Chaffey and the Smart Insights team

Managing Email Marketing Checklist

Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please go to www.smartinsights.com to feedback or access our other guides.