• A targeted list of subject categories, selectable by: academic names, nonacademic names, scientific disciplines, subject categories, countries, states, SCFs, date of publication.

Best Practices for Publisher & Association List Marketing

List effectiveness   Ask the right questions of the list provider and clearly understand not only where the names are derived from but more importantly how have they become part of the file, ensuring all procedures and elements are 100% compatible with international data privacy and anti-spam regulations.  Make sure you are comfortable with knowing that the names and email addresses are truly pre-qualified.

Targeted mailings    It is important to clearly understand who you are ultimately trying to reach with your targeted messaging.  In today’s advanced technological world, it is key to ensure you are targeting appropriately. As we see that science, technical and medical areas are becoming more and more interdisciplinary, it is essential to investigate further into the specific discipline, thus creating a unique and customized search profile.  Find a marketing list that allows you to search on specific keywords so you can be ensured that the broader scientific discipline is appropriately targeted within the specific area.  This will then enable you to target your marketing campaign directly to your business challenge and not just deploy a campaign strategy based on broad target marketing.

Day of week mailing    Don’t rely on historic industry trends, really work with your list provider and understand the dynamics of the list you are purchasing and find patterns of when the click thru rates seem to be highest.  For example, for the Web of Science Author Connect List ® currently Thursday and Friday deployments provides the best click thru rates (based on 2009 data), which have been days many have avoided in the past.

Add Social Media Links    Don’t be shy.  Let your campaigns reach out to others via social media site links such as Facebook, Twitter, Refer-a-friend & LinkedIn.  When adding these, it is important that you track the social media link.  This will help educate you which perform better than others in regard to sharing of information.

HTML campaign testing    Deploy marketing campaigns via a technology that has the capability to ensure that if the recipient can’t receive HTML, they will then receive a text message instead. This guarantees that recipients who want HTML receive it and those who do not (or are unable to display it) get the text version. Test all campaigns running the HTML code through all spam filters (including checking ALL links to see if anything is blocked); and test how the HTML creative will be rendered in multiple email operating systems.

Measure Clicks to Opens ratio    Whether internal or external lists, ensure you can measure the click to opens metric ratio.  This is the ratio, represented by a percent, based on the number of unique clicks divided by the number of unique opens. The reason why this is so important is that if you know that someone has opened the email, then whether they clicked or not becomes vital. Did the message motivate them to take the next step? This is the best predictor of response and the productivity of the creative since you are measuring the actions of those that opened and viewed the creative to see if they took action versus the people who may have saw the subject line or from address only.

Understand Institutional Marketing    In the past, many publishers and associations targeted based on topics or categories not taking into account an institutional strategy.  In this economy it is essential to clearly understand which institutions are key to a certain discipline, ensuring marketing campaigns are deployed to these specific institutions.  This approach helps with end user marketing and ensuring renewals and new institutional subscriptions.