While the opportunity is great, the risk is also high. First, email marketing is a regulated practice. Due to the unpopularity of spam, Congress has enacted laws to differentiate legitimate email communication from unsolicited and illegal mass emailing. Second, ISPs have gotten into the act by blacklisting emails from origination points that are associated with known spammers. In simple terms, this means that your entire email marketing efforts can be dramatically undermined if AOL, Yahoo! or Comcast decide that you are not complying with the CAN-SPAM act.
For these reasons, I often recommend the use of email marketing services such as Constant Contact or Vertical Response. (Of course, Sitecore also has a newsletter module that is well worth investigating.) Email marketing services help you manage compliance with CAN-SPAM. They also have relationships with ISPs that help reduce the chance that your email campaigns will be blacklisted. If email is so integral to your business that you don't want to outsource the functionality -- for example, if you are sending tens of millions of emails a month -- you may need to go with a homegrown solution. In any case, you should make sure that your campaigns are on the right side of the law and ISP policies so that your marketing efforts will be successful.
How do you integrate your email marketing with your CMS-driven website? The answer will vary depending on which CMS you use. With Sitecore, integration is simple. Both Constant Contact and Vertical Response provide web service APIs that allow the execution of most system functionality remotely. What this means is that you can manage your user lists, subscribe, unsubscribe and even generate reports from within your Sitecore-managed website.
A simple example using Sitecore's demo site is below. Users subscribe using a Sitecore-generated form on the website. This subscription request is then sent to Vertical Response using the Vertical Response API.
This is the simplest possible example -- consider it a starting point for your vision. For example, you can provide a list of newsletters and let users choose which newsletters they want to receive. Because the subscription form is managed in Sitecore, it can be versioned over time so that you can test different messaging strategies and evaluate conversion rates. Your Sitecore form will also be multilingual, allowing users to subscribe to newsletters regardless of their native language.
To populate your newsletter, you need to find the right user interface. Many email marketing vendors require you to use their authoring interfaces to create your email. These interfaces are powerful but, for the most part, do not accept feeds from external datasources. Find out from your email marketing vendor whether they accept data from external feeds, whether they allow you to specify a Sitecore URL or whether they require old-fashioned cut-and-paste.
Constant Contact and Vertical Response are examples of email marketing vendors with open-APIs that connect with Sitecore. If you use a different vendor, you can be assured that Sitecore integration is available if the vendor has a web services interface. Alternatively, vendors may provide pre-built widgets, such as opt-in forms, that can easily be added to your Sitecore solution.
Finally, you might consider working with a Sitecore partner to help you with your email strategy.
