Silverpop's CEO explains why it's better to invest in your email marketing program than simply to spend more of the same old money.

As a former venture capitalist, I've spent years evaluating investment strategies. A favorite quotation comes from the economist John Maynard Keynes, who once said, "Successful investing is anticipating the anticipation of others." Nothing could be closer to the truth when it comes to investing in email marketing.

As digital direct marketing continues its evolution into a customer-driven partnership, companies that invest in highly personalized, advanced tactics designed to anticipate customer needs and benefit recipients will generate extraordinary returns. Unfortunately, too many companies fail to invest truly in their email programs. Instead they fall prey to the same limiting email tactics. They force their campaign thinking into one of two categories: a single specific message that appeals to a subset of their list or a broad set of topics that applies to most or all of their list. They fall back on managing frequency rather than relevance to avoid damaging valuable customer relationships, rather than implementing programs to grow results and revenue.

Investments in email deliver strong returns. JupiterResearch found companies that deliver email lifecycle campaigns were twice as likely to achieve conversion rates of more than five percent, in contrast to those that send only static promotional campaigns. And email campaigns tied to recipient behavior at a sender's website improved revenue nine times over broadcast mailings. Even after taking into account the additional expense of setting up such campaigns, JupiterResearch found that they still lifted net profits by an average of 18 times over broadcast mailings.

So with that in mind, it's time companies invest in their email marketing programs to move them from marketer-centric messaging to customer-centric messaging.

Here are some tactics and strategies to help you invest wisely.

Get started with web analytics integration
Enabling a two-way flow of actionable information between your email and website analytics applications will allow you to target and trigger email campaigns based on website click-stream data more efficiently-- these are the details of how someone interacts with your website.

For instance, if you know an email customer is conducting product-specific searches or browsing particular pages or areas of your website, you could follow up with an email message that includes product information and incentives related to those products or categories.

Now is a great time to undertake this tactic. Over the last year, several large email service providers and website measurement firms have partnered up in order to make the integration of their applications faster and easier for marketers.

Incorporate lifecycle automation
Lifecycle automation adds another dimension to targeting-- time. Rather than assuming that every recipient wants to receive a message at the same time, lifecycle automation times each message so that each recipient gets a message when it's most appropriate. Some examples include welcome, subscription renewal or product replenishment messages.

With lifecycle automation, open rates can soar to 70 percent and clickthrough rates can get well into double-digits. But possibly the greatest benefit to lifecycle automation is its ease. Once set up, it will automate many of your formerly manual marketing and communications efforts. Your job will evolve from hands-on campaign execution to monitoring and fine-tuning ongoing campaigns.

Next: Get support for your efforts