I stumbled across Michelle Bowles “5 Top Email Marketing Tactics for 2010″  blog and had to share it with everyone! The blog discusses 5 tactics that will help any company’s email marketing efforts. If you are familiar with this blog, these tactics may seem familiar to you. In May 2009, we published a blog about Roadrunner’s social media pioneering. They are an excellent example of  a company that has utilized social media and email integration, as well as launching a full re-engagement strategy. (For more neat ways that our clients pioneer and utilize email marketing best practices, you should check out our video “Five Clients in Five Minutes”)

Bowles’s blog offers 5 ways to improve your email marketing:

1. Integrating Email With Social Media

-Using a blog to highlight content from an e-newsletter once or twice a month, inviting readers to download the full content via a landing page. Which reminds me, click on the blog homepage to get the full “Is Email Endangered?” white paper.

- Leveraging social media to offer different ways to interact with the subscriber– twitter feed promotions, rss feeds and a monthly newsletter

2. Focusing on Engaging Subscribers

-Personalize subject lines

-Incentivize click-throughs

-Make it as easy as possible for an email to be shared on social networks and forwarded

3. Re-engaging Inactive Subscribers

-Incentivize and create reasons to open the email ex, free trials or whitepapers

-create sense of urgency around an ending subscription

-segment inactive subscribers and cut back on the frequency of communications

4. Creating Viral Campaigns

-Instead of generic terms like “forward to a friend”, tailor them to a specific email/campaign (Ex. “Forward these tips for building credit to a colleague”)

-Make content available to everyone and easy to forward

-Vary the placement of share this links

5. A/B Testing and Optimizing Landing Pages

-Use this testing to find out the best response and layout for an email

I highly recommend that you read this article and utilize these tactics! We have found these techniques invaluable.