The way company’s carry out direct marketing has started to change over the past few years.  There are obviously still a lot of companies that consider direct marketing to be sending brochures and offers to a mailing list, either via snail mail or email (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I’ll come to that point in another post).

The more socially aware marketer though, will be portraying more of a company personality in their communications.  As mentioned in my previous post, with email reputation monitors now judging on user interaction with your messages, it would favour you to portray your company personality as approachable and responsive.

A great way to do this is to use Social Media sites such as Twitter or Facebook.  These accounts you can use on a daily basis, and keep in touch with your followers, which should consequently boost your emails response rates, and success.

Your company personality should be considered carefully though.  It’s something that can win customer loyalty, but carried out incorrectly it can have the reverse effect.

Take a look at the Fly53 Twitter account and you will see that they are quite open and talkative – they don’t just offer away special offers but talk with their followers on a very basic level of anything that interests them.  This approach can work for a company like them as their target market wouldn’t consider this unprofessional.

But something like the BAE Systems Twitter account could never take that approach as its purpose is to update business clients on latest developments.  Entering into general conversation would be considered unprofessional.

Considering your organisations profile and ensure that your social and email personality is an extension of that profile is the key to a successful online marketing campaign.

Also, making sure you know your customers and what they want will help in shaping the integration of your social and email campaigns; something that I will go into detail in my next post.

So we’ve been having a little test of things in the mailingmanager towers over the past week or so and thought we’d pass on our findings for you.

The effects of images on email inbox delivery

So we had a thought about fully image based emails and how it might be possible to increase the deliverability of them by extensively using the alt tags to raise the image to text ratio.

Basically, the thought process was that Spam filters only read the emails they have received in code view anyway.  So if the content of the email was just inserted into the alt tags, the spam filter could still see the content and give it a more favourable score.

Using the Delivery Monitor system, we used one of our clients emails to test (thanks go out to Crimestoppers for letting us use their email – see the email here).

We sent out 5 variations of the email which are as follows:

Email sent at 10:35 – Full Image, No Alt Text

Email sent at 10:45 – Full Image, Alt Text Included

Email sent at 11:10 – Email split into multiple images, Alt Text Included

Email sent at 11:15 – Email split into multiple images, No Alt Text

Email sent at 12:25 – Full HTML

View the accompanying results here.

Though it can be argued that the Alt Text helped a bit with deliverability, there really isn’t a great gap between each variation.  What this did manage to do though, is outline how important it is to get a decent HTML designed newsletter created.

When you look at the inbox deliverability drop between image and html based email, are you willing to sacrifice a fifth of your subscriber list out of laziness?

A way of judging forwards without the forwards stats

I’ve always found the forward to a friend reporting system a bit of a pain as it is always so much easier to just click forward in your email client than go through the long winded approach that we have to use.

The only successful way I’ve found for this to work is to offer some kind of promotion code in the forward to a friend process, which allows them discount once the forward to a friend form is completed.

This though, really doesn’t manage to capture the “true forwards”, of people who have forwarded an email on to colleagues or friends as they found it interesting.

Now to my point.  Can I just say now that this is just an observation and in terms of getting a lot out of it, I’m unsure you can really use it as a metric.  This is really just something we realised in the office.

Sometimes you will find an email address has multiple opens within a really close amount of time.  This, it would be logical to say, is actually evidence of that person forwarding their email onto colleagues and friends.  The opens will still be registered to the original recipients address as the email has that users ID in it, but to say they opened it 6 or 7 times within two minutes seems a bit much.  

And yes, I know that this theory has a superb amount of holes in it but it may be worth considering that those multiple opens could actually be unique opens from people not on your mailing list.  Just a bit of food for thought for you.

Within your list you will have a number of different groups; there will be the regular openers who trust the quality of your campaigns and will subsequently open virtually every email as they have a genuine interest. 

Then there’s the occasional openers who pick and choose when to look at your emails.  These people are more likely to be affected by relevance of email, timing of email, enticing subject header etc.

Finally there is the dead email addresses.  People who have only opened your email once, twice or sometimes never. 

Understanding what makes these people tick is the key to unlocking the full potential of your whole mailing list.

Firstly, the advocates of your company.  These people are already delighted with your company and it’s email campaign.  The key for them is to keep up what you are already doing.  No sharp changes in your format or direction of your emails will keep your core subscribers happy.

The occasional openers will require a little more research.  You need to look back at your previous campaigns and see where you had high open rates and then look at the factors which may have caused it.  An ideal thing would be to carry out A/B split testing on your list to see which factors encourage or discourage opens. By constantly testing your campaign you can get those occasional openers to at least become more regular.

Now for the dead emails.  This is always a tough decision for an email marketer to make but sooner or later you’re going to have to ask yourself “when is it time to remove them from the list?”

We have a customer who is currently going through this question with a sizeable list.  The first thing to do is try and eliminate all possibilities before believing that it is a lost cause.

Try changing the format or style of your email.  If it is quite a graphical email, there’s a chance that some of them are just not receiving the email. 

Another alternative could be that that you have never managed to entice them in.  In this case maybe offering these people a decent sized incentive to open the email will tempt the recipient back into the loop.

Eventually though, if you’ve tried these ideas and still had no response it may be time to part with them.  Some of them may have just signed up to enter a competition or entered in a hardly ever used email address just because they didn’t want their own inbox swamped.

Either way, with each passing campaign that you send out and they ignore, it will be getting more dangerous for you to keep sending to them.  The last thing you want is to have your reputation affected by someone who opens up the email after a year and has forgotten who you are.  Though your list will look less impressive, you will at least be able to concentrate your efforts on your active subscribers.

This article will have links to previous posts I have created throughout it that go into further depth about certain subjects.  I hope this helps!

1. Your open rate is low

Okay, so your campaign is stumbling at the first hurdle.  You need to ask yourself the following questions:

How was my recipient list created? 
If the answer to that question was “it was bought” then you can’t be expecting miracles.  If you’re receiving opens of around 10 – 15% I wouldn’t be that surprised.  If your list was self built, I’d expect your open rate to be between 15 – 30% as a minimum. 

Is your email subject enticing them in?
It’s all well and good having amazing offers and content in the email, but not letting the world know about it in the subject line is a cardinal sin.  The subject line needs to be a very short summary of what they can expect inside.  Scrap the “March 2008 issue #1” and go for “15% off of selected items with this email” or “deliverability articles and tips”.  That way you can entice people who are interested in the content in. 

If you are doing this but are still receiving low opens you have to ask yourself “am I putting in subject lines that might be specialised to only a group of my recipients?”  By no means is this a bad thing. In fact, it could improve your eventual sales as you’re targeting areas of your list.  Just because you’re getting an open rate of 15% doesn’t mean that the same people are opening your emails; you may have an active readership of 30% but your emails don’t appeal to all of them.  Just remember not to stick to one area though or the other subscribers will switch off.  The best thing to do would be to segment your list into several lists and then send targeted emails to each of them.

Are you receiving a high level of bounced emails?
This could be a deliverability issue.  Firstly, is there a large amount coming from a certain server?  If so, you could have been blacklisted by them.  You will need to contact the postmaster there and sort out the issue with them before sending again.  To prevent this from ever happening though, make sure you have a decent list hygiene routine in place.

If your list is predominantly business addresses opposed to webmail addresses, the likelihood is it is your content that is causing the blocking.  The problem with business addresses  is that there is no standardised reason for getting blocked by them, some filters block tracking links within the email, some block it because of words within the email and some just don’t get along with html altogether.  It really will be a case of trial and error.  Be prepared to compromise on your design and content though.  You may have to lose your tracking facilities to increase the success of your campaign.
 

2.  My link click-through rate is poor

Your open rate seems fine but your click-through isn’t.  The good news is your list are at least still listening to your message but for how long we don’t know.  This can be attributed to the content of your email.

Content
You need to be clear and to the point.  Don’t go over the top with content or you risk losing the recipients attention.  IT could be that the recipient just isn’t interested in what you’re writing about.  In which case you need to look at what you have previously promised, or done.  That subscriber may have initially signed up as you promised to give away special offers exclusively to your email subscribers.  Now though, you’re just updating them on developments about your company and informing them of new lines of clothing….but where’s the offer? 

Design
Maybe you’re keeping to your promise of content but you’re still not getting those click-throughs you desperately want.  Well the finger can be firmly pointed towards your design and layout.  Is your offer tucked away near the bottom of the email?  Is it bold and stand out enough?  You need to make sure that your recipients eyes are directed to wherever your “call to actions” are.  Do this and you will see those click-throughs rocket.   It could though, be that your email just doesn’t look that nice.  People make judgements within the first few seconds of looking at an email and if they don’t like the look of it, they will not even bother with the content (which is also another reason for having your call to action in an eye catching place).

3. My Conversion Rate is Poor

This is probably the most important indicator of your campaign.  If you have so far followed the advice on this article (and the rest of my blog) you should be seeing a good level of conversions now.  If that is still not the case then there could still be a couple of issues that need resolving. 

Firstly, are you directing your recipients to the exact page they wanted to go to.  If they wanted to see the offers on some of your products don’t go and send them to your index page.  Having to look for the product they want will turn them off of the idea. 

Secondly, make sure that your campaign matches your websites branding.  There is a lot of spam on the internet (you may have noticed) that is still hindering people’s confidence in e-business.  It is your job to minimise this, and the best way to do so is by having a consistent branding throughout your communications with the public.

Well, that should have your campaign back in working order now.  If you’re still having problems, email me with your problem and I’ll try and give you a hand.