This series of short posts will start to skim the surface of where the industry is leading…

Segmentation and Relevancy

Okay this advice isn’t anything new to people who regularly read this blog or other email marketing articles, but it is getting more relevant as we progress through email marketing.

Make your emails relevant to each of your customers and don’t just create a single universal view of your whole list.  According to this report by Forrester Research,  companies that highly segmented their lists, saw results outperform that of non segmented lists by up to 5 times.

It doesn’t take someone with a Masters in marketing to see that although everyone on your list is interested in your products, it may only be certain aspects they’re interested in.  If you continually miss out their interests in your mass mail to your whole list, then they will switch off from your communications.

A great example of this is a previous post I wrote which also advises using passive segmentation to help start your list splitting.

Email Interaction

The noreply@ or other such addresses that discourage responses to your emails is coming to an end now. The majority of subscribers are on social media sites and to them, companies are no longer faceless brands.

Many companies are now contactable and post out information and try to interact with their customers throughout the day – not just posting sales promotions but asking questions and encouraging responses as well.  The ASOS Twitter account is a good example of this that springs to mind.

With email reputation monitors not just judging your emails inbox placement on complaint rates alone, but also the engagement of the list that you’re sending to (Opens, Clicks etc), it would seem that Interaction is the logical progression.

Couple this with recent technologies such as Outlook’s Social Connector and you can start to see how the future is shaping up for not just email marketing, but online marketing as a whole; the rise of the “Pull Customer”……

I personally know that I receive a lot of marketing emails and do read a good majority of them on my mobile.  I will see products that I like and am interested in knowing more about, but I’m not about to go through the hassle of searching for a product online with my mobile – I normally just say that I’ll look at it later on and then forget about it.

I’m pretty sure I can say with confidence that I’m not the only one who does this and it must be having a detrimental effect on a good proportion of businesses email campaigns.

Using triggered emails though may very well help to combat this problem by allowing the user to ask for more information on a certain item or just the whole newsletter at a different time.

Simple links like “send me more about this later” could be placed underneath each product and then you specify a time delay that will hopefully catch them at a more receptive time.

Alternatively, having a link up at the top of the email asking for a reminder later on or actually giving options on when they want to receive the email again may also help you from losing your recipients to being put off from purchasing on a mobile.

There is of course a challenge to this.  We as email marketers are suddenly faced with inserting a myriad of links to cater for all our recipients situations.  Would it be too much? Thoughtful designing would have to come into play to make sure that the look of your email isn’t being compromised.

It is something that could be dropped into the design though opposed to the little links at the top as the benefits can be further reaching than just mobile users.  Most recipients won’t go through the process of purchasing items at work so they could then set themselves a preferred time to receive the email with triggers used this way.

Do you think that you’ve lost customers to mobile emails?  This might be a viable solution to you; there’s only one way to find out though – test, test, test….

We thought we’d carry on this subject to offer you advice on how to make sure that you are doing all you can to avoid the domain blacklists.

Self-Built Mailing Lists

Arguably the best thing you can do to avoid blacklists is have an opted in, self-built list.  The reason for this is that the people on that list have specifically asked for your emails to be sent to them and they will be much less inclined to report it as spam if they have recently asked for these communications.

Correct Sign Up Processes

So you’ve decided to avoid the purchased list route and go for the self-generated option – fine work.  But then you go and sneak in the subscription details where you can and essentially sign people up without them really knowing that they’ve opted in.

This will straight away cause high complaint rates against your campaigns as you’ve not let them choose whether they want to be on the list.  If you’re unsure whether your sign up process is being done correctly, just think “is it opt-in?” Are your subscribers actually requesting this information or are you assuming that they will want it? 

Be Consistent

A trap that people can fall into is that they do have a self-built list but haven’t emailed that list in some time.  At this point, you run the risk of subscribers forgetting signing up for your emails and marking them as spam.  The longer you hold off from sending to them, the worse it will get.

Feedback Loops

A good way to keep control of your reputation with ISP’s is to have feedback loops set up.  Feedback loops allow ISP’s to report the spam complaints they have received from their users back to you.  This allows you to then remove these subscribers from future mailings and also keep track of how your campaign is being received.  Of course, if you’re a mailingmanager customer, this is already set up for you and monitored.

Authentication

This is a subject which really requires a whole post of its own, so I will try and put this is in an understandable nutshell.

Authentication was introduced to counter spoofing and phishing emails being sent to its intended recipients.  A spoofing email is that has had its ‘send from’ and ‘reply to’ addresses changed from the actual sending domain.  This can lead to phishing, which is when you receive an email from someone claiming to be your bank etc and asking you to fill in your details, but they are in fact trying to obtain your card details and money.

The problem is, legitimate email marketing can occasionally be caught in this same net if you use ESP’s.  This is because you’re masking the ESP’s sending domain with your own.  The filters sometimes won’t be able to differentiate between the two and will put your campaigns in the same category.

So Authentication was brought in to make sure that the legitimate senders could be distinguished from the ‘bad guys’.  The different authentication systems are:

Domain Keys
DKIM
SPF
Sender ID

If you are a current mailingmanager customer though, we will for this month only do this for you free of charge.  Contact us to request your authentication file.

Furthermore, any new customer that signs up for a monthly account before March 31st, 2010, will also receive the authentication set up at no additional cost.  The normal cost for this service is £75 + VAT.

With domain listing, you can’t escape as easily.  Your sending domain, regardless of the IP you’re on will still have that listing against it.  Obviously, the IP reputation will still be a bug factor but this added factor of domain based reputation means the sender has culpability for their actions.

So you can’t now escape your bad sending practices – definitely a good thing for the future of email marketing but what could that mean for you?  Well, let’s say you are a good sender but fall into trouble for some reason; you could end up having your works email address blocked due to your marketing activity.

A good way to avoid this is to put all of your marketing mails onto a different domain so that any of the repercussions of your marketing activities don’t directly effect the day to day running of your company.

Of course, that should never happen in the first place if you are a legitimate conscientious sender.

This is why whenever we speak to prospective new clients, we always tell them they should be building lists of their own customers and potential customers*.  People are receiving enough emails from the companies they have requested information from, without other unwelcome senders getting in on their precious inbox space.

So for the legitimate senders out there, here are a few suggestions on what can help your campaigns have that little bit extra…

Be experts in your field

If your company happens to be in an industry that your recipients are genuinely going to be interested in, why not write articles that relate to your industry on a whole.

Say you’re in the cosmetics & beauty industry, you could be writing articles right now about tips for good winter skin and hair.  At the end, recommend some of your products as a good example of what could be used.  Not only are you selling on your products but also offering information that people will be interested in and forward on to friends.

Have additional, useful information

We all seem to be obsessed with gadgets, apps and time saving devices nowadays.  Take this idea on board and try and incorporate this into your campaigns.

For instance, if you’re a financial company you could be having interest rates and projected changes to it as a small widget-like section of your email.  If you’re a last-minute holiday company, why not display the weather forecasts of some of your most popular destinations?

Humour

This is a tough one to integrate into your campaigns but does work.  Think about it, what is the one thing that gets sent to you via email that you will forward on? Jokes, funny stories, random facts etc all seem to be the things you’ll take some time out to read through.

I recommend using this with caution though as humour is something that if not done absolutely right, can cause offence to some.

Not all of these ideas will work for you (maybe none of them), but hopefully this will give you some inspiration for own campaigns.

If you do have any other ideas about what you can do or have done, please contact us via the comment box below or via our twitter page – I’d love to hear how people have innovated in this area.

Other useful posts that will help on this subject:

Email Campaign Life Cycles

Maintaining Engagement and Sometimes Forgetting Targeting

Passive Segmentation

*For any prospective clients who may be reading this – as some personal advice, we do recommend that you use your own data and then tell you we won’t allow you on our system with purchased or rented data.  Please view our anti-spam policy for more information.

Over the past year we have seen some parts of the email marketing industry progress and become more prominent whilst we have also seen announcements which mean certain aspects of email marketing will stay the same for quite some time.

Domain Based Reputation

One of the big issues to arise for me is ISP’s adoption of domain based reputation.  There’s a couple of great articles on it here:

Times are changing for E-Mail Marketing
The coming gold rush with domain based reputation

In a (very small) nutshell, this potentially could mean that you’re accountable for your sending practices regardless of how many different IP’s or ESP’s you go through.

Although in this Return Path post it does point out that rather than being the sole solution to everyone’s problems, it will more likely be another tool for ISP’s to adopt to be more accurate with their reputation filtering.

So what does this mean to you?  Well, basically it’s another step forward in promoting good sending practices and sending relevant emails.  Those of you who are conscientious about your sending practices and campaign content, will see your campaigns strive, whilst those who don’t will see their campaigns continue to lose effectiveness.

Engagement

The best way to adapt to domain based reputation filtering is to keep your subscribers engaged in the emails you send out.  Engagement has become a more prominent issue throughout 2009, and I can see that continuing through 2010.

This post from Mark Brownlow brings up a great point “organizations managing incoming email (particularly the big ISPs) would broaden the list of criteria used to define spam (unwanted) email to include how people interact with a sender’s messages”.

As reputation filtering progresses, so does the definition of spam.  Marketers still looking towards what the law defines as spam will ultimately fail as its definition is now the opinion of each person you send to; legal terms won’t stop a recipient from disengaging or pressing the “this is spam” button.

Have a look at a previous post I wrote for inspiration on how to maintain engagement.

Preference Centres

Another way to keep your recipients engaged is through preference centres.  Okay, not a new subject but it has continued to grow in popularity since it was introduced.

Preference centres are an alternative to unsubscribe links.  They will allow your subscribers to choose what they receive from you.  In theory, this should reduce the levels of unsubscribes you receive – great.  This in turn will allow your subscribers to also choose what emails they receive, which should keep them more engaged in your messages – also great.

So why not use them for your campaigns? Read more here:

Why an email preference center matters
Preference centres and positive unsubscribe processes

Strategy

The new year is a great time for marketers to start to plan ahead for the year.  A post I wrote last year outlines how some campaigns become stale and fall into a rut.  Eventually you could see your recipients becoming emotionally unsubscribed from your messages – an email marketers’ nightmare.

So with the new year in place, why not try planning out a full years campaigns using the email campaign life cycle model?  The idea is that by setting out your campaigns with a definite end to it, it will keep you engaged in your own campaigns as well as your recipients.

Design

News in 2009 was that Microsoft confirming that Outlook 2010 will keep the same rendering engine as Outlook 2007. Despite a big uproar from the email marketing community, the engine in Outlook 2010 will keep the design side of the industry limited.

Here’s an email design essentials post I wrote a while back to help you on your way in this area.

For all designers out there, here is the only guidesheet you need.

For me, it raised something which I had been thinking about recently and even wrote briefly about in a previous post re-activating inactive subscribers.

In Mark’s post, he raised the issue that throughout time the response rate declined for his subscribers.  He mentioned many factors which may have caused this steady decline with the two most prominent being:

• Increased competition for attention in the inbox from competitors.
• Subcribers becoming less engaged as time passes by

The first of these points is one which should shake up anyone who has moved into a comfortable zone in their email marketing campaign.  More and more companies are moving into email marketing and though they might not be your actual competitors in terms of sector, they are now competitors in your recipients’ inbox.

Couple this with subscribers becoming less engaged over time and you could become old news with your subscribers compared to a new, fresh company.

I personally know what it’s like to be that recipient, as outlined in my inactive subscribers post.  The problem I had with that email was that it hasn’t actually changed over the past 4 years – it was the same thing each week and eventually I became disinterested and stopped opening.

In that post I mention that I had moved away from the main purpose of their emails but still remained subscribed as I may be interested in the future.  The fact of the matter was, I still love music, and though my interest in records had passed, the company wasn’t just a record shop – it sells dj equipment, music production equipment, and music cd’s amongst other things.

The reason my interest had passed in these emails is because I had moved from playing records and decided to catch up with the digital times and now use cd and mp3 emulation software instead.  Essentially my tastes had changed slightly but the campaigns hadn’t changed to match this.

They had lost a subscriber who was still interested in what they had to offer.

In this case, I think that the targeting and segmenting they had carried out actually negatively affected them as I’m sure I’m not the only one who has moved that way with my tastes.

So what could they have done?

I offered some pretty standard suggestions in my previous post as to what you could do to re-ignite interest but after reading Mark’s post I have started to think a bit more behind the scenes.

Alternative Email Budgeting

I didn’t really know what to name it but this seems to describe it the best.  Take your campaign and look at it in yearly/semi-annually/quarterly phases.  Then look at allocating different email campaign types for that period.

For instance, budget yourself to have a couple of emails that offer some big discounts for your subscribers even if it does end up making a loss in the short term – the engagement level will be increased from such offers which in the long term will produce better returns.

Okay, so there’s nothing new in that suggestion but the thinking behind it is different from how this type of campaign is predominantly carried out.  The fact that you have allocated yourself a certain amount for the year means that you can be proactive about your campaigns and gives you a plan for the year.  Instead of being reactive to maybe a recent dip in open rates or responses, you could actually plan it before a dip even occurs.  Also, by having allocated yourself a certain amount for say, a year, you can control the amount of these emails you use – the last thing you want is for your subscribers to become accustomed to these emails and only switch on when a discount offer drops in.

Another variant on your usual campaign could be to look at using cross-selling emails throughout the set period.  Though the subscriber primarily asked to receive information on a certain area of your company, that doesn’t mean that their tastes don’t change and evolve over time.  It can’t hurt to plan out emails that offer them the chance to view and subscribe to other products/services that you offer.

Just by planning your campaign in this way will stave off the monotony that can sometimes creep into a campaign after a certain amount of time.  It also allows you to try and adapt to your older subscribers changes in tastes and wants – keeping them just as engaged as the day they signed up.

More on engagement strategies in my next post….

I think the general Idea behind our Twitter account will be to link you to our favourite blog posts for the day or any really useful resources/guides/apps we find to help you through your email marketing.

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I’d never really thought about it from the subscribers’ point of view so had a think about it.  The newsletters in question were a couple of large online record stores that I subscribed to years ago when I used to buy a lot of vinyl.

Since then though, I have moved away from that and don’t really need the emails anymore.  Then I started to question why I hadn’t actually unsubscribed myself from the list.  Granted, a big part was due to laziness but there was a part of me that thought that I may be interested in it at some point and therefore didn’t want to unsubscribe at the moment.

The problem is, I’ve been like that for quite a while and they still haven’t sent anything which has reignited my interest in their newsletter.

If you’re reading this and think that a big proportion of your mailing list could be in the same category as me, it might be time to start a re-activation campaign.

I personally think this is something which should be carried out at least twice a year.  This keeps you staying fresh with your email marketing campaigns and stops you falling into a rut of the same formulated emails each time.

Instead of just one re-subscribe email though, I propose a quick series of emails.  This way as well you can carry out a bit of passive segmentation on your mailing list.

A few ideas for you –

A promotional offer to get non openers back is always a good start.  Who do you know who doesn’t like discounts, vouchers or special offers?

It could be worth going down the personalised subject header route if you’re not doing it already.  Try to grab their attention again in a cluttered inbox.

Using a current topic as the basis for your email could ignite your apathetic subscribers’ interest again.  Try to keep it relevant to your target market though.  Once opened, hit them with a re-subscribe offer.

Some of these people though just may not require your products/services anymore.  This doesn’t mean they won’t open your email still.  In this situation, it is worth a prominent forward this offer to a friend button to try and counter that inactive subscriber with potential new subscribers.

If you get no response from these people after your series, it may very well be time to call a day on them and remove them from your list.  Though your list will deflate, in essence they were never there anyway.  Furthermore, it will allow you to get more accurate statistics from your active subscribers

So for all you eagle eyed people out there, yes you’re right, there is absolutely no unsubscribe link…(pause for a collective email marketing gasp)…

I was literally in shock that a company of Hovis’s size could actually disregard the absolute fundamentals of email marketing.

But then I re-assessed the situation.  When I first opened it, my only thought was “oooh free coupon”.  It wasn’t until I actually went into email marketing mode that the unsubscribe became apparent.

It’s always hard to now think on the other side of the fence of email marketing as most recipients still aren’t really that proactive with email marketing regulations. 

Now there is a very good chance that this email got an amazing amount of Spam complaints but I’m just wondering whether they didn’t receive that many as it was essentially an e-coupon, and who wants to turn down free stuff?

This is especially so as bread is virtually consumed by everyone in this country and getting a reduction on it is always welcomed.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.  Put yourself in a consumers position – would you really mark it as Spam when they’ve just sent you a discount on something you’re likely to buy anyway?