A recent survey got me thinking.  It said that 61% of students (I presume that means 18 and under) “never” or “hardly ever” read marketing emails.

I started to look into it more and thought I’d outline the apparent differences within the different age groups.

The survey about students also stated that if they were to open an email it would be because they are interested in the product (60%) and are attracted to a special offer (47%).  To me, contrary to what the article says about email dying as a viable marketing channel for students, this points towards the changing attitude towards email marketing.

Obviously, as this generation grows older, their attitudes will change towards marketing messages so we cannot ever base the opinions of what is going to happen on results of surveys at these ages.  You can though, start to recognise a trend occurring when looking further into the age groups.

This report looks at the next age group up (18-34) and we can start to see an occurring trend within the younger age groups.

This report shows a similar trend to that of the younger generation in which they are predominantly interested in relevant emails.  If this trend does continue, we will be seeing a more empowered recipient in the future who knows what they want to receive and will pay little to no attention to messages from unknown sources.

So far be it the death of email marketing as a viable channel, but more a brighter future for legitimate email marketing.  In the future, the value, and the return of purchased lists within the B2C industry will lessen to an extent that it will virtually become redundant.  This claim can be furthered backed up with a recent post I did called Spam 2.0.

Moving onto the older age group, we can see a definite change within their attitudes towards email marketing.  Where as the younger groups seem to implicitly trust online shopping, the older generations are more cautious over this. 

This survey shows that testimonials within emails will increase the likelihood of the respondent acting upon the email as it alleviates the distrust.  It also cites that they are more likely to respond to emails from known senders.

From everything I have seen, I can say with some confidence that the purchase of B2C mailing lists will be redundant, which hopefully in turn will increase the responses that real email marketers get from their mailings to self built lists.  At the same time, I don’t envisage a drop in use of B2B mailing lists and do actually see a use for them. 

The main battle for B2B lists will be the over use of them that will eventually make it ineffective.   This is something which isn’t being helped by the cheap list companies who’s list building techniques are, at best, questionable.

But what about for email marketers right now?  Well hopefully you can look at the age group that your list is mainly made up of and start to make some decisions on what kind of emails you should be creating.  If you’re marketing towards the younger age groups then try to keep your emails to special offers, new ranges, products, and links to relevant information or interesting articles/blogs.  If you go to create an email for the sake of it; don’t.  It will be much more harmful to your marketing efforts to send something that isn’t of any interest as you risk switching subscribers off.

The older generations are more focused around trust and your emails should reflect a trust worthy company as much as possible.  Testimonials, well designed, professionally branded newsletters will reap rewards.  Introduction text and general information surrounding the company may also provoke a positive reaction from your recipients as they get to feel comfortable with your company.

Please go through the above reports, articles and surveys for yourself though as I have omitted quite a bit of interesting information from this post and it would most definitely be worth your while doing it.

Well it’s another one of those helpful tips blog posts again.  Though I will be using mailingmanager as the loose basis for this example, this can be adopted by anyone.

I think laying the groundwork of your email marketing campaign is really important in the long-term health of your campaign.  Now this could be a bit of extra work at the beginning but once you’ve got it set up and running, it’s effortless.

As I have mentioned previously, contact your new sign ups early on can really help to build up a good, long lasting interaction between you and the subscriber.  Interest is at a maximum in your company at the point of sign up.  The best thing to do is set up an initial autoresponder to reply to them almost instantly after sign up.  So in the inbox they should receive a confirmation that they are added to the subscriber list, then the first autoresponder message that you’ve created.

This first autoresponse message should just be a welcome message and should back up what content they should be receiving from you.  This should also confirm what you promised to send them on your website.  For instance, if you promised a fortnightly email with tips and tricks, then re-iterate this in your opening autoresponse.  You could even link back to online versions of previous newsletters to show them what they should expect. 

So now they know when to expect the newsletters and know what to expect as content.  This doesn’t mean that the autoresponders job is done.  You can now queue up the following autoresponders to maintain interest in your company.  Offer them loyalty bonuses after a couple of months, or free gifts to re-ignite the interest of those people whose might have waned a little (I’ll leave the creative inspiration to you guys on how you go about doing this).

For all of you on mailingmanager, firstly, may I congratulate you; now I’ll show you how to set it all up.

Just go to the autoresponders tab in mailingmanager.  You’ll then be asked to choose your list to create the autoresponder for.  If you just have one, pick that, otherwise choose the one that is linked through to your subscription form. 

Once you’ve chosen the format and name of the autoresponder, you will be prompted to start setting the time for when the autoresponder is to be sent out after subscription.  You can choose in hours or can set it up for a longer period (up to 3 years).  After that it’s just the same as any normal campaign; just create and save.

Voilà!  You now have an autoresponder campaign set up.  Of course, this is just the basics and if you get stuck along the way feel free to email us.

Ok so we all know about the text vs HTML debate that has gone on forever (If you don’t know about this, the answer is to send it multi-part), but when can text emails be a hands-down, more effective form of contacting your recipients?

I read an article recently (there’s a link in my “back from the dead” post) that had a good point about using text-only campaigns to get a fast turnaround response.  In the example it used a baseball (rounders) team that managed  to sell a massive amount of tickets by sending out a text-only email to their mailing list.  Apart from the fact I was massively shocked at how big little league teams’ stadiums are (size of championship teams!), I was impressed to see the use of text campaigns and how successful they could be.

By using a text email campaign  you are less likely to get picked up in Spam filters (no HTML coding to get caught in the content folder).  This also means that delivery rates will increase somewhat as your emails will bypass the majority of filters (just make sure you avoid those “spammy” words). 

So you see, a good campaign can be constructed by using text-only emails.  Now don’t get me wrong here.  Don’t go crazy and delete your html template and convert to text just yet.  I think the best thing to do is combine both of them; HTML for long term branding of your company and text emails for short-term turnover offers. 

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk