I signed up for two clothing companies email campaigns not too long ago, and I have to say that it has been a mixed bag of emotions since.

The first company I signed up to was H&M. They promised they’d let me know when new stock, new offers and special deals were on (I’m a sucker for bargains). I thought that sounded like something I’d be up for knowing about, so entered my address in.

I instantly received a notification email from them and opened it up to find that they had given me a £10 voucher in the welcome email. I printed off the voucher and went down to H&M and spent it. I also told some of my mates about this cracking offer, who also signed up and spent their £10 vouchers.

Since then I have received another three emails from them, two of which had vouchers for me to print out, and the other gave me news of some special range of clothes coming in from some designer.

So not only did they manage to keep to their word but they also impressed me so much that I went and told my mates about it. They went above and beyond my expectations from an email marketing campaign. This is particularly impressive as they don’t actually have an online shop which means they had to drive us to get up and go to their shop.

Now the not so good.

Another company who don’t have an online shop but who I also enjoy shopping at is TK Maxx (did I mention I like bargains?). They promised to let me know when new labels and new stock was coming into the stores. As you really can find some treats now and then in TK Maxx I was quite excited about this idea and signed up.

The first signs that they hadn’t really thought this through properly was in the sign up process. As some of you may know, the clothing in TK Maxx is not the same from store to store, yet they didn’t ask for my postcode or at least general area.

TK Maxx also houses a wide range of clothing and items, spanning the different tastes of the UK population. Yet when I signed up they didn’t ask what areas I was interested in. I could see this going a bit sour.

Like H&M I received an instant notification email from them. I opened it, hoping for some kind of repeat performance of free stuff. What I got was a plain text email telling me that I had officially signed up and then reiterated what I should expect from them.

Since then what have I received? Nothing.

From what seemed like a great idea has just turned into something really quite disappointing, especially seeing the potential I saw in the TK Maxx campaign.

In contrast H&M have really worked wonders with theirs. The emails themselves are nothing spectacular or groundbreaking. But they don’t need to be as they have put the right amount of effort into their campaign planning before hand that they can just send out their campaign to a fully responsive audience.

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.

“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.

Normally, as a company moving into email marketing you have to make a choice.  Do you choose to have your own in-house system or do you go with an ESP (Email Service Provider)? There are advantages for each option, but you really have to look at your company’s specific requirements to see which option is best suited to you.  This article will talk you through the advantages of choosing an ESP and dispel some of the apparent disadvantages of choosing an ESP.   

Small Companies  - Reputation
As a small company starting out in email marketing you have to straight away consider a lot of factors to get underway.  The “buzz” issue in email marketing at the moment is reputation.  Now in all fairness, you may very well be in a good position to start off by having your own dedicated IP address to send out from.  What the webmail providers like to see in email reputation is a consistent email history whilst steadily rising in size.  If you are going to go down the route of an in-house system you will have to put a lot of time and man hours into making this work.  You will be personally responsible for setting up and managing your own reputation.  This means that you will have to learn the ins and outs of email deliverability.  Proper maintenance of your feedback loops, measuring complaint rates and having the relevant authentication coding in place is all essential in making your campaign grow successfully. 
As you can see, this can end up being very labour intensive and unless you can dedicate a serious amount of time to setting up and maintaining your email reputation, you may find that your campaigns are no way near as good as they could be.
On the other hand, if you were to move onto an ESP, you would be moving onto an IP address that already had a well maintained sender reputation.  ESP’s are always concerned with the reputation of their sending IP’s and meticulously check it to ensure that they can provide a high level of deliverability.  All worthwhile ESP’s will also give you guidance on how to set up the rest of the information you need and even provide you with links so you don’t need to put in the man hours to establishing your campaigns reputation. 

Customer Support
As a small company, you are more than likely not going to know every aspect of email marketing.  There are several different factors that effect your marketing campaign that are unique to email marketing.  When you first start out, this can be somewhat of a daunting task bringing yourself up to date with all of this.  With any good ESP’s though, you should receive a high level of customer support.  I know that we personally offer to assist our customers in setting up a campaign which exceeds email marketing best practices to ensure that they can get a good level of open rates whilst also offer advice on how to healthily grow their mailing list. 

Large Companies - Reputation
So as a large company you’re in a completely different situation to a small company when it comes to choosing between a dedicated IP and an ESP. The question that you have to ask yourself is – Does your campaign have time to wait whilst you slowly build up your campaigns reputation?  Hotmail recommends that on an IP address with no previous mailing history, that no more than 5000 emails are sent from it a day.  If you send more than this, you will risk an email throttle which will severely damage your deliverability.
With ESP’s, you’re moving your campaign onto an IP that already has an existing emailing reputation that should have been looked after by the provider.  This means it will be consistent and without high complaint rates and therefore you will be able to start sending high frequencies of emails automatically. 
There is always this doubt cast by people in the email marketing community that when a company is on a shared IP with other companies, you have the worry of one of the companies letting the whole IP down by sending dodgy emails and getting the reputation of the IP damaged.  What they don’t seem to remember is that the ESP’s themselves don’t want this to happen and if you’re signed up to a decent ESP you should know that they will monitor each customers emailing activity.  If the ESP doesn’t actually do this then they will lose their decent customers which will adversely effect the ESP’s personal growth and success.  This of course would be against an ESP’s best interest. We’re not just here to take your money and leave you to it!   

Customer Support
You may or may not know this but the ROI on email marketing has decreased over the past couple of years (see article here).  This of course has several factors that affect it; the introduction of Bacn could possibly be one of the biggest factors in this by watering down results.  The other major factor is that email marketing is getting very popular and more and more companies are starting their own campaigns.  This of course means that your campaign is going into the recipients inboxes with a lot of other emails; each one vying to be opened AND actually read.  For your campaign to be as successful as it can be, your campaign will have to stand out from the rest. 
Not only that, but the email marketing world is changing rapidly.  It wasn’t long ago that the main issue in the email marketing world was wording and html to text ratios, now it’s reputation and deliverability, and undoubtedly it’ll be something else in a couple of months.  Unless your company has a dedicated member of staff to email marketing there is a good chance that you will slip behind the times and end up having an ineffectual campaign.  ESP’s are only interested in Email Marketing and dedicate their whole day to reading about (*and writing about*) Email Marketing.   

So in conclusion, if you are one of these companies that do have the time and available resources to dedicate members of staff to solely controlling your email marketing campaign you may want to consider the in-house IP address method.  Dedicated IP’s give you complete control over your system and what reputation you receive is literally down to you and how you maintain your email marketing campaign.  If though, you need a campaign to start running on its feet and always have a helping hand along the way; ESP is probably the best choice for you. 

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 

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

With Google announcing their new IMAP accounts for customers, we thought it best we start to look towards the future of email marketing.  For those of you who don’t know what IMAP is, it simply means an email account that can now be synchronised with mobile technology.  So if a recipient checks their emails on their mobile, that will now be marked as read in their inboxes opposed to before where a copy was generated just for their phone. 

So what does that mean to us?  Well, to start with email marketers are going to have to consider mobile email marketing a bit more than previously.  I had already outlined in a previous post that b2b email marketers would have to consider mobile marketing a bit sooner than b2c orientated companies, but now that seems to be shifting somewhat.  If it turns out that IMAP accounts prove popular with customers, you will be sure that the other leading email providers (hotmail, yahoo) will follow suit.   

You must then consider that your message will now only get read once by mobile users, and that they may not read your email on a pc as your email will already be marked as read.   Your email design will have to change somewhat to cater for this quickly expanding area. It will be worth your while to set up your own Google account so that you can see what your message will look like on mobiles.   

Obviously that brings you back to one of the longest running debates in email marketing, HTML design vs Text.  If you’re considering mobile marketing it may be more tempting to move towards text as not only does your message render well in the recipients screen but it would also skip a lot of spam filter checking meaning a higher delivery into inboxes.  I don’t believe this is the answer though.  Successful email marketing campaigns evolve around differentiating yourself from the competition, and however interesting your subject matter may be, users will switch off if every promotional email they read is in a text format.  I’m already an advocate of the HTML light (30% image, 70% text) method of email design and believe that email marketers should work around that still as recipients will still read the majority of campaigns on their pc. 

So how can we cater for this market without sacrificing our whole design strategy?  My personal thought is to start to heavily concentrate on list segmentation.  For instance, if you placed all your Google recipients into a sub group you could then alter your main campaign to render well for mobile devices.  This would of course mean a bit more work, but who’s scared of that when the chances of extra revenue increase?   

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