I thought I’d be nice and give you some important dates for the summer period. See if you can relate some of these events to your email campaigns:

Sporting Events

Wimbledon - 23rd June-6th July

Major Festivals

Notting Hill Carnival - 24th & 25th August

Bank Holidays

25th August

There’s also Fathers Day on the 15th June

After a recent dispute with someone I started to think about the different factors you need to consider when sending to business addresses.

With webmail addresses it basically comes down to authentication and reputation; with business addresses it’s a completely different game.

You basically have to make a decision. You either:

Accept that some of your emails are going to bounce and not go over the top on compromising on your design and tracking capabilities.

Or

Concentrate your campaign on deliverability and strip out as much as you can. Remove tracking and send a text email.

Okay, so it’s not as black and white as that but you get the idea. And before you ask, there really is no right and wrong answer. I’ve seen customers of ours have success with both methods so it really does depend on what the content is and what you’re trying to achieve from your campaign.

You’ve also got to look at which stage of your email marketing campaigns life you’re in. Are you starting up and generally just looking for exposure? Do you need to gage the success of your campaign to see where you can improve? Is it more the case that you have an amazing offer on at present that you want everyone to see? Is it your companies newsletter that is just updating people on recent events? Are you concerned about really putting your companies branding across?

These questions really have to be brought up at the beginning of your campaign planning so that you have a clear idea of what your goals are.

Unfortunately there is no general rule for business address as each organisation has different rules for what can and can’t get through the filter so don’t be shy to test the water.

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.

“Send to Friend” in emails can be very useful in not only spreading your message but also in expanding your list with customers who are open to the messages you are sending out.

There was a recent debate on the email marketers club from someone who wanted to send out emails to all the contacts he had (500,000 or so) but only 200,000 had actually asked for any further communication from them.  He wanted to send them a free voucher to spend at his company’s store.  The thing is, however tempted you are to send to those others, they opted out for a reason.

That’s not really the point of this post.  There was hefty debate over this mans’ proposal, and though the majority disagreed with him sending to those “opt-out” recipients, some decent alternatives were brought up.

The best idea was an open “send to friend” on this voucher he was going to send his customers.  So not only is he not treading on anyone’s feet, but any forwards that his recipients are sending are increasing his own marketing spread.  Not only that, but his recipients are actually doing some marketing work for him; sending the message to friends who they think might be interested in the product.

It’s not all that easy though.  You can’t just stick a send to a friend in the newsletter and think that people will instantly be inclined to forward it.  Like the above example, send an incentive to both forwarders and the recipients.  Something like “refer a friend to our list and receive 15% off of your next purchase with us”.  As ever I’ll leave you to work out what incentive would best suit your company, but just think of the potential that a well-constructed “send to a friend” could do for your company.

It wasn’t too long ago that social networks didn’t exist.  You actually had to speak to one another, in person.  The quickest, cheapest (and well, best) way of keeping in touch with people who had moved away was via the old and trusted method of email.  No longer is this the case.  People don’t want to speak to one person anymore; they want the whole world to know that they’re staying in and having Spaghetti Bolognese for dinner tonight.

Tonight’s dinner aside, this is something which needs to be paid attention too.  I have read blogs recently from people who are saying that they are turning back to email in protest to social networking and stating that email is still king.  These people also happen to be in the email marketing field.  Unfortunately, the world of email marketing can’t exist just because there are stubborn email marketers out there who are refusing to change over.  Email marketing will still work with the younger generations; we just have to remember that the concentration on their inbox is probably going to be considerably lower than the older generations of email users.

I’m lucky enough to be in a situation where I a) have brothers and sisters who are full social network addicts; and b) Am at an age where I once used email and converted to social networking, so have knowledge of my own changing attitude towards email.

So when are the younger generation going to use their email inboxes?  I read somewhere that 91% of internet users still read and send emails.  I find this quite a crude generalisation in favour of the effectiveness of email.  Don’t get me wrong though, I do believe email does still work effectively.  What has to be considered is the age generations that read email, read them with different drives.

Okay, so that really isn’t a revelation.  Marketing 101 would tell you that different age generations have different motivators. This though, is about a generation actually changing their motivation from the pre-defined one.  Social Networking has basically drawn the attention away from the inbox and towards them in terms of personal communication.  Though I haven’t read any data to back up this claim, this must mean that the time actually spent looking at their inbox has drastically reduced.

So it comes down to how exactly to grab their attention in that shorter time frame you have.  From personal experience, I don’t really bother with any of the newsletters.  If I’m going to open an email it’s because it says something like 75% off - end of season sale.  I basically don’t want lots of content; I want deals and plenty of them.  I also pay absolutely no attention to emails that have come from 3rd party sources so being on an email list is pretty pointless with me.

Now I know I’m only using a very small group of people as my test subjects (me, my family and close friends) but there was a general consensus that this was the case with the rest of them as well.

What’s even worse is that the emails I do actually bother to open are what I advise our customers not to do in terms of design.  They are just one giant image with clickable links in the image itself.  This has led me to think that content filtering will become even less important in the future of email deliverability and that emphasis will be further placed upon whitelisting and sender reputation.

Why not also consider when these recipients are most likely to concentrate harder on their online email accounts.  Working hours are probably the best time to send your email marketing campaigns.  As most work places have blocked facebook and myspace, the concentration will have shifted towards email during working hours (providing that email hasn’t also been blocked), especially seeing that you can actually view facebook posts from your email account now.

So the future for email marketing will pretty much stay the same in all honesty.  A few things will have to change.  I can see the lure of buying or renting lists diminishing in some areas of the business world as the effectiveness of them decreases.  I can also see us stepping back a bit in terms of content and design.  I think people have already, and will continue to care less about the content and how they word their emails and focus more on the sending reputation they carry.

I would love to hear your thoughts on what I’ve said.  Whether you agree or disagree, it’d be great to let me know what you think.

If you think about it, transactional emails are an email marketers dream.  They’re guaranteed a high open rate, the recipient will already be interested in the message you’re providing and the message will be arriving to them at the exact point when their interest in your company is at a high. 

The key to marketing through promotional emails is subtlety.  As the recipient is already paying attention to your message, there is no need to go over the top on sales patter in the message as this could leave the recipient put off from your company.  Instead, try to place a few links to other products that you’re selling. 

Probably the most feasible idea would be to place links in your transactional email that show your offers for that month or maybe your best selling products.  I receive an email from a leading electronic company that I have purchased from before that did this.  I found that even if I wasn’t actually looking to purchase anything at the time, I would still be interested in what they were putting on offer and would always open up the email due to the fact that I know that the email would have some offers in it; and I love a good bargain.   

As they set down the standard of what I could expect in the transactional email (though toned down from their actual newsletter) I was happy to open up any other communications they sent towards me.   

Another option could be to include a money off voucher for all first time users of your company to encourage repeat use.  Once again, the users interest is at an all time high at that point and by offering something for free to them will only improve their impression of your company (at a point where they are still making their mind up about your company). 

Obviously these are just a few ideas on how you can use transactional emails to your advantage.  Something that I feel is a little underused in smaller retailers and could really build upon a successful online marketing campaign. 

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

After another busy week at mailingmanager towers, we were left wondering what we should base this week’s newsletter on.  “Why don’t we do something different and offer them advice on how to better their email campaign?” one bright spark said.  And here it is…. 

Don’t just hard sell to them 

Though obviously you want to sell your products by using email marketing, if you only sell you will find that users will start to switch off.  If you offer a bit more than just what products you have, you will see a constant reader base that will come to expect your email and will be more receptive to your messages.  By doing this you’re laying the foundations for a successful, long-term campaign. 

Let the customer get to know you 

So you’re no longer just hard selling to them, good.  But hold off from giving yourself that well deserved pat on the back just yet, there’s still some work to do.  Try to introduce your company’s personality into your newsletters.  Don’t just write in a formal manner and state facts; be friendly.  This will bring you closer to the customer as you will go beyond just visual branding and customers will be able to relate to the company on a whole. 

Be Consistent   

The last thing you want to do is let the customer forget about you and your company.  If you leave massive gaps in between your campaigns your recipients will have either lost interest in your product or will have forgotten that they signed up for your newsletter in the first place.  Either way, it will lead to a higher complaint rate which will have an adverse effect on your sending reputation, and ultimately deliverability.   

Make it more interactive 

If you want to keep your recipients attention, try to do it by having different forms of interaction in the newsletter.  Small things such as a quick survey can keep their minds focused on the whole newsletter opposed to a quick skim read.  This will also allow you to grab some much needed information about your service or your customers habits that can help to shape future campaigns.  “How do I get them to fill out the survey?” I hear you ask. Read on….. 

Give them something 

Everyone loves free stuff, and people will be much more inclined to spend a couple of minutes filling out a questionnaire if they have a golden carrot of “prizes” at the end of the questionnaire.  Also if you keep offering prizes as a regular feature (perhaps not every issue), then you are guaranteed of repeat opens.Another helpful tip is to include the winner of any prize in the next newsletter.  Not only does it validate that people can win your prizes, but also adds extra content to your newsletter.  And you can be sure of some positive comments about your company from the winner. 

Keep it short 

No-one wants a newsletter to scroll down for what seems like an eternity, so try to keep your message short and clear.  If you have articles for your newsletter, just put an extract of it in your newsletter and then link back to your site for the whole article.  Doing this not only keeps your newsletter short, but also drives recipients to your website.  What’s even more useful is that you will also be inadvertently adding content to your site, which will get picked up in the search engines, and improve your ranking. 

Matching Design with web site branding 

With parts of the population still unsure about trusting e-commerce, you must do everything to alleviate their fears.  With one of the most recent scams being phishing, the recipients will be wary about trusting newsletters that may or may not be from the actual company.  One of the best ways to maintain trust in the newsletter is to have it branded to match your website.  Not only does it maintain trust in the validity of the sender but also that you are a professional company.  Branding is always important. 

Subject Line Tweaking 

Though I have gone on about this in my blog quite a few times, I cannot stress how important a decent subject line is.  If you’re receiving low open rates you have to look at why, and if you’re not receiving massive amounts of bounce emails, then the problem is probably stemming from your subject line.  I have posted a couple of blogs on subject lines here and here. 

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

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

And I started to catch up on the latest blog posts from the email marketing world.  I found a great article which highlighted the advantages of a combined format email campaign.  Though the case study used is a sports team, I’m sure you can think of how you can adopt the ideas for your own company.  Find it here.

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