“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.

Well it’s another one of those helpful tips blog posts again.  Though I will be using mailingmanager as the loose basis for this example, this can be adopted by anyone.

I think laying the groundwork of your email marketing campaign is really important in the long-term health of your campaign.  Now this could be a bit of extra work at the beginning but once you’ve got it set up and running, it’s effortless.

As I have mentioned previously, contact your new sign ups early on can really help to build up a good, long lasting interaction between you and the subscriber.  Interest is at a maximum in your company at the point of sign up.  The best thing to do is set up an initial autoresponder to reply to them almost instantly after sign up.  So in the inbox they should receive a confirmation that they are added to the subscriber list, then the first autoresponder message that you’ve created.

This first autoresponse message should just be a welcome message and should back up what content they should be receiving from you.  This should also confirm what you promised to send them on your website.  For instance, if you promised a fortnightly email with tips and tricks, then re-iterate this in your opening autoresponse.  You could even link back to online versions of previous newsletters to show them what they should expect. 

So now they know when to expect the newsletters and know what to expect as content.  This doesn’t mean that the autoresponders job is done.  You can now queue up the following autoresponders to maintain interest in your company.  Offer them loyalty bonuses after a couple of months, or free gifts to re-ignite the interest of those people whose might have waned a little (I’ll leave the creative inspiration to you guys on how you go about doing this).

For all of you on mailingmanager, firstly, may I congratulate you; now I’ll show you how to set it all up.

Just go to the autoresponders tab in mailingmanager.  You’ll then be asked to choose your list to create the autoresponder for.  If you just have one, pick that, otherwise choose the one that is linked through to your subscription form. 

Once you’ve chosen the format and name of the autoresponder, you will be prompted to start setting the time for when the autoresponder is to be sent out after subscription.  You can choose in hours or can set it up for a longer period (up to 3 years).  After that it’s just the same as any normal campaign; just create and save.

Voilà!  You now have an autoresponder campaign set up.  Of course, this is just the basics and if you get stuck along the way feel free to email us.

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.

I know I keep going on about this but I do feel it is really important to keep your list well maintained.  This article by Wendy Roth outlines some great pointers for you to keep your list in tip top shape.

I know it may hurt to get rid of some of your subscribers.  Especially if it is a self-built list but sometimes you just have to do it so that the subscribers that are interested in your product still receive your email in their inboxes.

Why not also get some feedback from your campaigns whilst going through the re-activation process?  If you can see what some of the less frequent readers of your campaigns are interested in, you could start to refine your campaign to be more universally appealing.

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 

When analysing your companies’ latest email campaigns performance you have a number of factors to look at that will determine how much of a success it has been.  The obvious indicator of ultimate campaign success is the recipients actually going back to your company and purchasing from you.  But that really is the final link in the email marketing campaign.

So, to diagnose how your campaign is doing you must assess what your statistics tell you.

The first step is to look at your open rates.  Even if you’re getting decent traffic through to your site, you could still be receiving low open rates.  This could be for a number of reasons which you will have to ask yourself.  One of the main reasons for poor open rates is the list quality.  It may be that you have purchased or rented a list and therefore you will not have the same level of interest as a company that have self-built their list.  It could also be down to the age of your list, maybe you’ve had the same list for a long time and haven’t actually cleaned up the list from inactive or uninterested subscribers (find good articles on list hygiene here, here and here).

It could also be attributed to the subject line; something that I have previously outlined as a major factor in why open rates can be low.  If you don’t have a subject line that stands out from the other bulk of emails that are in your recipients inbox, you can’t expect high open rates.  This will become increasingly important in 2008 as more companies start to turn to email marketing (find useful articles and the do’s and don’ts on subject lines here, here, here and here).

Maybe, it is in fact your deliverability.  If you are not incredibly vigilant with your reputation monitoring, then you could be falling foul of your email dropping into the dreaded junk folder, or worse, not even getting to the recipient at all.  This subject is vast and can’t really be summarised in this article as there are so many factors to take into consideration (sender reputation articles here ,here and here).  If you take the time, read as many articles on my blog as possible, most of them are based around deliverability and improving sending reputation.

If open rates isn’t your problem, it’s time to start looking at click through rates.  Basically, your campaign is being delivered and recipients are opening your newsletter but for some reason they are not going to your call to action.

Okay, so for those of you who are only making newsletters that are there to inform, this isn’t as much of a problem, it is more for the promotional campaigners out there.

The problem could lie within your email design.  If you have a poorly designed and amateurish looking email, your recipients are unlikely to take you very seriously.  They will have seen hundreds and thousands of below average emails, and they’ve predominantly been spam.  When they open yours, you only have a few seconds to make an impression on them and if it looks vaguely like spam, your email will be closed and never be looked at again.

Maybe your email isn’t spammy looking, but in fact wonderment to the human eye; a masterclass in HTML design.  Problem is, you’ve not being pay attention to the email marketing world for several months and haven’t noticed that ISP’s have different rules regarding how emails will now render in their browsers. Silly you.  Your once amazing email looks like a whole lot of grey with some words sporadically dotted around the place.  Who’s going to even bother with that as far as first impressions go?  It’s time to move on from that age of image heavy emails into the brave new world of HTML lite.  Try to keep your companies branding and layouts professional but cut down on the imagery and embrace background colours to keep the email looking bright.

Another issue that could hinder your click throughs is the layout of your campaign.  If you’re looking to get recipients to click through to your site somewhere, make sure it is clearly obvious where they need to click, it needs to stand out.

Also making sure that the subject line corresponds with the email content is vital too.  If they’ve opened your email from reading the subject line, and found that the content is different or is misleading, you’ll lose your click throughs.  Once again, make sure everything is clear and accessible (read a blog on this here).

Finally, I go back to email design for one more piece of advice.  There is still a lot of scepticism around online shopping, it’s getting better but there are still areas that are concerned about transferring their bank information over the internet (article here).  It is your duty to try and ease those fears.  The best thing to do is offer your customers an all-over branding of all communications with them.  Try to match your newsletter to your website, and in particular, the landing page that they will be directed to from the email.  This way confidence can be instilled in your communications and actual money conversions will increase (find articles on landing pages here and here).   

I read a recent Mark Brownlow blog and thought that I should probably pass on this information to all of you….

I have outlined in a previous posts (here and here) the importance of welcome emails, and how it can be advantageous to your company as you’re reaching the recipient at a point when the interest in your company is at a high.  As Mark Brownlow pointed out in his blog though, this is also the email equivalent of “first impressions” so it needs to be something you should give some serious thought to.  Marks’ blog links through to a few other articles so you can get a real grasp of the art of creating a decent welcome message.  Read it here

If any of you need any help setting up an automated welcome email, don’t be shy, give the office a call or email me!

01604 790007  alex@ihm.co.uk

Using mailingmanager has its obvious benefits that I’m sure all of you are aware of.  What we thought we’d do was offer you some tips on how to get more out of the system.  We’re starting off this series with a look at how you can improve your market research using mailingmanager.

This article will concentrate on the subscriber form in mailingmanager to capture the consumers data.  Okay, so you will be limited to asking only a few questions in this form, not due to any limitations on mailingmanager, but you want people to actually sign up!  No-one likes to take forever and a day to actually sign up for something so bare in mind that you will only have a few vital questions to ask them initially, you can get a bit more in-depth once you’ve created an initial segmentation to your users.

What you have to decide is which information is most important to your initial research.  Will you be interested in seeing the geographical spread of your subscribers?  Maybe you want to see how many of your subscribers are local to your business in order to offer pick-up only deals or local in-store promotions to these people without alienating the rest of your list.  How about segmenting by age groups?  Or by purchasing habits? Or by people who have actually purchased something from you and people who are just interested in your product?

As I already mentioned, once they’re into these basic groups, you can start to do some serious profiling of your recipients by sending out further questionnaires to get an idea of what appeals to your customers.  Now don’t be scared to create a lot of mailing lists whilst segmenting your recipients, it will all work in your favour in the end.

How do I do it?

This really is very simple in mailingmanager.  Firstly, you need to create the information you want to collect in the custom fields section of mailingmanager (mailing lists > manage custom fields).  The custom fields will also have to be linked through to a mailing list that you have created, but you will be prompted to do that in the custom fields set up wizard anyway.  Once you have created your custom fields you are ready to create your subscription form.  To do that, just go to website forms >create website form and the preset form is already the subscription form.  Then it’s just a case of following the wizard through the steps and copying and pasting the html coding it creates onto your website.

Though this may be a bit of work in the short-term, this level of attention to your email marketing will work wonders for you in the long-term, and once it’s set up there won’t be any extra work to do, meaning a much more effective campaign for you.  This data can also be transferred to any other marketing activities you may carry out and can be used as a basis for how your whole campaign is shaped.

As ever, if this has inspired you to do something similar by using mailingmanager but you’re a little unsure on how to set it up, don’t be shy.  Just give the office a call or email me personally and I’ll work out how to best do it.

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 

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