David Greiner is the co-founder of Freshview, the company that created Campaign Monitor, a ridiculously easy to use newsletter management tool

built just for designers who can create great looking emails for themselves and their clients, but need software to send each campaign, track the results and manage their client’s subscribers.

We use Campaign Monitor to send and analyze our monthly newsletter (you can sign up on the bottom of the page) and love the product. Why spend months creating a newsletter management tool when David and his cohorts at FreshView have already come up with such a clean and functional product?

I talked with David to get his perspective on the best practices for creating, sending and managing email newsletters. Quotes that specifically caught my eye are in italics.

eCommerce Cache: How important is double opt-in? I know you guys don’t work with anything else, but can you give a basic description of why it matters?

David: Unlike plain old single opt-in, double opt-in requires your subscribers to validate their email address before being added to your list. When a new subscriber completes your subscribe form, an email is sent to that address containing a verification link that needs to be clicked before their subscription is complete.

This process ensures the validity of the address and reinforces permission, leaving you with a cleaner list and customers who know you stick to best practice. If either of these benefits is important to you, then double opt-in is the only option for getting permission from your customers.

eCommerce Cache: What are good instances to send newsletters? Once-a-month, a-week or other time based segments, or only when you have a sale or new products to announce?

David: That’s definitely one of those “it depends” questions and has a lot to do with the type of products you’re selling. If your online store focuses on a particular niche, then I’d always recommend complementing any sales or product announcements with a regular email newsletter.

Let’s say you sell gardening products online and plenty of customers have given you their email address. At a bare minimum you should be sending them regular announcements on special sales you might be offering.

If you’re really looking at creating loyal customers though, why not complement these emails with other things your customers are passionate about. For our gardening store, this could be gardening tips from your resident expert, highlighting the current plants and vegetables coming into season and regular recipes made from produce you actually sell. Unless your subscribers look forward to your weekly/monthly newsletter arriving, you’re probably not doing enough.

eCommerce Cache: What are the benefits/cons of using different lists?

David: By different lists I assume you mean sending more targeted emails to specific segments of your subscribers, as opposed to a one size fits all email sent to your entire list. Sending your subscribers only the content they’re interested in can dramatically increase your response rates and further strengthen your relationship with each customer.

Let’s go back to our gardening store example. Perhaps we can segment our subscribers into two categories – hobby gardeners and landscaping professionals. Now let’s say we’ve got a special deal on some amazing new tomato seeds. This is probably not the best news to send to a busy professional landscaper, but it’s perfect for those customers starting their own veggie patch.

The pros for segmenting and targeting your list really speak for themselves. The only real downsides to this approach are the additional costs of designing different creative for each segment and the additional overhead of managing a more complex list. If you can plan the types of segments you’ll be targeting from day one and keep them manageable, this approach is certainly recommended.

eCommerce Cache: What effect does CAN-SPAM and moves such as AOL announcing a fee to get through spam filters have on e-mail marketing? What are ways to make sure your message doesn’t get filtered?

David: While CAN-SPAM wasn’t the silver bullet many anticipated, it has put better email marketing etiquette on the minds of most marketers. To be honest though, much of the industry has already moved well beyond the legal recommendations and embraced best practice list management and permission practices. The return on investment for respecting your customers instead of blasting them with irrelevant email should really sell itself.

AOL’s recent support for the Goodmail pay for delivery system certainly caught the media’s attention (and confusion) for a few weeks, but when it became obvious that this wouldn’t impact how they currently accept email and was only available to a few, the fuss died down very quickly.

As long as you follow these simple steps, you shouldn’t have any problems delivering email to all your subscribers, including those at AOL:

1. Enforce a very strict permission policy and only ever contact those that have explicitly given you their permission to email them.
2. Use double opt-in on all subscribe forms and never assume permission, even if the customer has purchased from you. Instead, add an opt-in checkbox to your checkout process a customer must tick to join your list.
3. Remind each subscriber how you obtained their permission and include a single-click unsubscribe link in every email you send.
4. Send your email through a reputable Email Service Provider (like Campaign Monitor) that has a strong relationship with the bigger ISP’s.
5. Only send interesting and relevant content. This one’s not really related to deliverability, but it’s so important that I couldn’t resist.

eCommerce Cache: Do you have any thoughts on what are good open and click-through rates for a campaign?

David: Unfortunately this is another “it depends” question. The current industry average rates in the retail/e-commerce industry are an open rate of around 19% and a click-through rate of around 3.3%. Having said that, I’d be careful comparing my own rates to any industry averages.

Your best bet is to try different offers, formats and frequencies for your own emails and measure the results for each approach to find what works best for your own recipients. Better yet, why not ask your subscribers what kinds of information they’d like to hear from you and then give it to them.

eCommerce Cache: How important are analytics/metrics for email campaigns? We use you guys and I love being able to see which links received the most clicks/etc.

David: Without a doubt, one of email’s biggest strengths is its ability to accurately measure its own results. Click-through, open and unsubscribe rates can give you a great deal of insight into what your subscribers are interested in and by comparing the results across multiple campaigns you can certainly see what is and isn’t working.

Having said that, I think it’s important not to get too swept up in any specific statistics and instead focus on giving your customers exactly what they want. As long as you focus on interesting, relevant content and your recipient’s look forward to hearing from you, your rates will take care of themselves.

Hopefully this information has helped you out. If you want to learn more about Campaign Monitor head on over to campaignmonitor.com.