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

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