With St. Patrick’s Day only a few weeks away, you may find your thoughts are turning to drinking green beer at your local Irish pub. As an e-marketer, St. Patty's Day makes me think about luck and its role in email marketing. Or, the role luck doesn’t play. Which is to say, if you rely on luck by sending out frequent e-blasts to your entire list with the blind hope that they will hit their mark, you’re going to need a pasture-full of four leaf clovers to see any kind of ROI!

There’s an Irish proverb that says, “There is no luck except where there is discipline.” And email marketing - or any kind of marketing for that matter - has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with discipline. But for some reason when it comes to email, marketing managers often think it’s okay to just create one generic email and blast it out to their entire list. Well, there’s no discipline and no strategy in that!

Take it from Darrell Royal, winningest coach in Texas Longhorn football history (or Seneca, the 1st century Roman philosopher), “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” In other words, you can’t have luck without practicing discipline. In email marketing, this means:

• Segmenting your list into target groups that are meaningful to your business;


• Developing different versions of your email, personalized and relevant to those different segments;


• Testing the subject line or the offer to determine which will get the best result before you send out the campaign; 


• Compiling and analyzing the results so you can do an even better job next time around.

By following these email marketing best practices you just might discover a little bit of the luck of the Irish, the pot of gold being better returns on your marketing investment.

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