A welcome email is the first point of contact from you to your recipient and can be a very effective message if thought about properly. 

As they have just opted into your email list you have to consider that they’re at the time of the welcome email reaching them, highly receptive to any material you put forward to them.  Knowing this fact can enable you to secure a high long-term deliverability and open rate. 

One of the best things you can do is ask the user to “whitelist” you.  To ask them to whitelist you, you simply have to ask them to add your address to their contacts list in their account.  This will then enable you (in certain email inboxes) to bypass most of the spam filters they have in place as the user has you as a trusted sender.  This will allow you to be a bit more creative with your design and not so creative with your wording; the email marketers dream.

This is also a time where you can start to entice them with special offers.  In the first welcoming email you could offer a “sign up” discount for all new users or just display your current offers.  Just remember, you’re guaranteed a really high open rate and it would be a shame not to capitalise on that just a little bit. 

When I say “a little bit”, I really do mean it.  There is a limit to how much you can hit them with to start with.  Remember you’re not whitelisted just yet and bombarding them with promotions is not advised.  The majority (79%)  of welcoming emails are constructed in html (source:EEC – Retail Subscription Benchmark Study) but most of them are constructed in html “light”, a scaled down version of html with emphasis placed on text content, not image.  So bear this in mind when constructing your welcome email template.

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

It’s one of those things that like the email subject line, can be a bit of a second thought in your email campaign construction.  But this can have damaging effects on your long-term email deliverability if not looked after. 

I’ll quickly explain what exactly I mean by list hygiene.  You’re sending out a newsletter to roughly 20,000 people.  Some of these people have been signed up to your list since 2005.  The only thing is, your email marketing lapsed for a little while and you haven’t sent out an email in 6 months.  But you’ve decided that the Christmas period is a great opportunity to start again. 

So your Christmas campaign starts to go out, but you haven’t set-up a proper email bouncing address.  The email bounces for no longer valid email addresses flood into your inbox and instead of removing them from your mailing list, you just delete the notification email.   

This is now leaving your list ‘unclean’ and can be very dangerous as you are running the risk of one of those addresses becoming a “spam trap”.  There is a full article on spam traps here but in short spam traps are set up by main email hosting companies such as hotmail or yahoo.  These are addresses that have been set up and not used, and haven’t had their details given to any companies so that any marketing emails sent to that address can be singled out as illegal emailing and the companies doing it can be blacklisted. 

The problem is that hotmail and yahoo also use accounts that used to be live but have since become inactive and been deleted.  This is where your ‘unclean’ list can come and bite you.  If you happen to have one of these once inactive, now spam trap email addresses in your list you could be heading for the blacklist.  This could mean that you would be blocked by one of the major email hosts such as hotmail, which for some companies is a large proportion of their list.  In turn you will see your deliverability rates severly decrease and that will lead to poor open rates and click-through rates. 

At this point your whole email list is then in trouble. You will probably have to resort to drastic matters such as sending out a re-permission email to get all legitimate names and recreating your email list from scratch.  This will of course mean losing a lot of legitimate email addresses as people will not bother to sign up again. 

So the moral of the story is…. 

Don’t be lazy when it comes to processing bounce addresses.  That list needs to be clean so that you can build up a legitimate and successful email campaign and avoid falling into a spam trap. 

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

I know how daunting it can be to walk into a new subject and try to get to grips with it all straight away. It always seems like the more you read up on it, the more you realise you know absolutely nothing and end up with your head spinning from so much information. And in all honesty a lot of it you don’t really need to know straight away. What you need is to get the basics without being swamped with a load of information that’ll sidetrack you from your primary objectives.

Luckily for you I’ve decided to compose a no-nonsense start up guide to help you along the way.

What kind of email campaign are you trying to construct?

This is probably the best starting point for your campaign. Will it be a sales campaign? A brand building campaign? An informative newsletter? By stating what you intend to do at the beginning will help you to keep track of how the campaign should be designed.

Subscribers

The success of your campaign depends on the quality of recipients you have. If you are a company that has bought your mailing list from a company then you can’t expect high open rates.I always recommend that if you want high open rates and high returns from your campaign, one of the best ways to do this is to have your own self-built, double opt-in recipient list. If you have the latter, then you are more likely to get a far greater ROI from your campaign. This though can’t be taken lightly, your self-built list will be a lot less effective if you are not regular with your emails immediately afterwards.People need to start being contacted as soon as they sign up. If this doesn’t happen and you leave it a month or so before contacting them, you run the risk of people forgetting about signing up to you and not opening your emails (or worse, marking you as spam).

Email Content

Make sure the content of your email is legitimate sounding. As the email filters advance in stopping spammers, so do the spammers evolve in getting round the problems. What has started to happen now is that perfectly normal words are being brought up as spam by the filters. This means you have to be inventive in the wording you use and work around these filters. As a legitimate company though, this shouldn’t be a problem as long as you stick to these golden rules.

Avoid Spammy words such as free, click here, free shipping, Bonus, Discount, Saving…. There are many more words but you get the idea. If you want a guide on what not to put in, just check your personal bulk folder and have a look!

DON’T SHOUT in your emails. Using excessive amounts of capital letters in a newsletter is bad news. This will trigger the filters straight away and people are getting wise to this and will consider your email to be trying to sell them things instead of letting them know that you have products available which may interest them.

Don’t get too excited!!!!! Don’t start throwing exclamation marks all over the shop. This is very much like the last point with shouting. Spam filters will pick this up straight away and people are once again wise to it and will turn off as soon as they see anything spammy like that.

Email Design

A well designed email campaign will do wonders for your open rates and revenue returned. A poorly designed campaign will reflect badly upon the image of a company and can cheapen the brand itself, causing a lot of harm to the image of your company. This is where you have to be really careful because no matter how good the message is inside, people will judge the design of your email as it is the first thing they will notice. This is put into better perspective if you think that there will be many other companies doing exactly the same as you; and if your email branding is inferior to theirs, you will be losing out on custom just because of peoples perception of your company.

Another really good tip is to create an email template using good HTML coding. By this I mean don’t use programs such as Word to create your campaign. When you copy and paste text from word it attaches a lot of hidden script behind it that gets embedded into the HTML coding. Spam filters don’t like this and will trash your email straight away as a lot of spammers use this process.If you are to construct a HTML email for your campaign, you need to make sure that you have a good balance between image and text. This also means that you can’t just create a pdf file and paste that into the email. You need there to be a higher ratio of text to image. If you’re not sure how much is acceptable, then keep trialing your email through online filters. Set yourself up a hotmail, yahoo and gmail account and send your email through to it. If it’s getting in the spam folders, you have some work to do.I’ll give you an example of what a good email campaign should look like. The example is a newsletter from St George’s Bristol (a concert venue). This newsletter is easily identifiable to the brand of St George’s, which helps the recipient to recognise the email and will be more inclined to open it. On top of that, the quality of the email is high. The general layout is simple and not overcrowded, whilst also looking fresh and modern.The content has been written with the original principle of the campaign in mind. It has informed the recipients of upcoming events and news from the venue, and in turn offered a non-aggressive sales campaign that will not have subscribers reaching for the unsubscribe button.

Learning from your results 

Unless you are the greatest email marketer the world has ever seen and got a 100% open and follow-up rate from your first campaign, you will need to see what you can do to improve.   

Poor Open Rates 

Several factors can cause there to be poor open rates.  You will need to analyse your campaign to see which might be hindering you. 

Quality of subscriber – If you are using a bought email list you shouldn’t be expecting high open rates at all.  Anything more than a 20% open rate should be considered a very good campaign for you.  If you have a self-built list, you need to ask yourself if you have been frequent and consistent in your mail outs to your recipients.  If not, the recipients may have forgotten about you or lost interest in your company. 

Email Content – You may be experiencing an open-rate issue because the content of your email is being flagged by spam filters.  This would mean that your recipients may not even see your message let alone decide whether they want to open it or not.  Make sure you’re not using words which may get caught in a spam filter.  If you’re unsure of what is spammy and what’s not, you can always get a spam check of your email through several companies on the Internet. 

Subject Line – Though normally considered an afterthought in an email campaign, this can be the deciding factor on whether the recipient opens the email or not.  The subject line is the first bit of information the recipient gets to before even judging the design and content so make sure it is good! 

Poor Click-Through Rate 

If your opens are high enough but click-throughs not so, you have to ask yourself if you are expecting high click-through rates.  If the campaign is basically a newsletter then you don’t really need high click through rates.  If your campaign is a promotions campaign you have to look at the layout and see if that’s causing you problems.  Maybe the layout isn’t allowing the campaign to be noticed easy enough.  Alternatively, the campaign might just not be appealing enough to your customers. 

Whatever your results are, you need to keep them for future reference.  Try and get a grasp as to why they might not have worked and don’t be scared to be thorough and drastic if things aren’t improving. Also don’t forget to take into consideration external factors such as seasonal trends.  All these things will help you to shape up your campaign for years to come.  

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

You have spent ages writing a well worded, perfectly designed email campaign.  You sit back, proudly, and marvel at your work.  But then you notice you’ve forgotten to put in a subject line for the campaign.  You take a second and then write the first thing that comes into your head…”New low prices on our [insert product name here]!”…Congratulations. You have just managed to ruin your email campaign.  You might as well have just mashed your face into the keyboard and sent that out instead, it wouldn’t have made any difference as no-one will read it. 

In todays email marketing climate you can’t afford to be so careless with what can be considered one of the most important parts of your campaign.  Though the subject line can be considered a second thought at times, you have to think that your recipients aren’t going to care how good the content is in the newsletter, they will make a judgement there and then on whether they will read it.  This means that a lot of effort has to be put into constructing the right balance for your subject line.   

Your subject line should be appealing whilst at the same time not sound spammy.  Stefan Pollard offers a good way to check if your subject line may be flagged as spam in his article “How Spammy Subject Lines Hurt Delivery” and also gives an example of the consequences when you don’t pay enough attention to it. 

I think the best course of action is to, like the timing of your newsletters, be consistent in your subject line.  Make the subject line similar each time you send out a new newsletter and your recipients will come to recognise it.  And like Stefan Pollard suggested, go and check your bulk boxes and see what the spammers are writing, then write something that avoids this.

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