2010 is about having interesting, engaging emails to send to your subscribers.  With your recipients receiving more and more marketing messages, yours really does have to stand out from the rest.

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.

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

The effects of images on email inbox delivery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Email sent at 12:25 – Full HTML

View the accompanying results here.

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

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

A way of judging forwards without the forwards stats

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

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

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

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

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

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