By: Clickz

With the first few weeks in 2012 in the history book, some of us may have already fallen back into bad habits or the email hamster routine that allows for little else other than tactical management of the next email campaign (and there is always, the next email campaign). Others may have big strategic initiatives and a laundry list of plans to evaluate for 2012. Getting them done is hard. Ignoring them is easy.

My recommendation: Have a list for big picture initiatives and blocking-and-tackling measures. Then figure out the best way and resources to accomplish both them and establish a reasonable timeline. Oh, and make sure you avoid some traps that strangle progress and end any chance for positive momentum. My list of things to avoid in 2012 is below. Avoid these and continue to navigate the path to success. Overlook them and it could be an uphill battle.

1. Little to no exposure to the C-suite.
2. Talking about your program exclusively in opens and clicks.
3. Working with a partner or platform that has not elevated your email program at all.
4. A welcome message or series that was created by IT six years ago and hasn’t been updated since.
5. No new acquisition tactics to grow your list and minimize subscriber churn.
6. Lack of focus or coordinated efforts on how the social program can help email, not just the other way around.
7. Not dealing with deliverability and list hygiene issues, assuming that problem will just work itself out.
8. Knowing that your typical email campaign looks subpar on a smartphone and tablet but not understanding why or doing anything to address this.
9. Refusing to revisit campaign processes and the parts of the campaign development that take away valuable time and resources.
10. Improving your subscriber sign up experience at all touch points (website, retail, mobile, social, landing page, etc. ).

By: Promotion World

Achieving email marketing success starts with building an opt in list that will allow you to maintain ‘contact’ with them! Now this approach is one of the best internet marketing strategies you can use and a great way to increase your business efficiency online! On the other hand do NOT expect to get results quickly by constantly sending out promotions because this will result in many unsubscribing from your list!

Here are 3 things every list owner MUST do to maximize the results they get when contacting members of their opt in list!

Offer Useful Information

When you first begin making contact with your opt in list you want to avoid ‘bull rushing’ them with a blizzard of promotional materials! Instead offer information that will be of use and interest to subscribers and since you already know some of their interests, this should be easy to do! Remember that the fact of the matter is this, you are just ‘meeting’ these people for the first time so be nice, courteous and helpful whenever you can! You only have one chance to make a good ‘first’ impression!

Build Relationships

Establishing trust and credibility is crucial to your marketing effectiveness! Once these are established subscribers have a deeper sense of loyalty towards you thereby making them more receptive to your promotional efforts! The content you are offering your opt in list is what helps you gain their trust while building your credibility! Freely offering anything of value or interest is a great way to gain the trust of others and when what you offer is of good quality this tends to boost your credibility as well! A trusting relationship with people who view you as credible is a great foundation upon which to build your business! This is also why using email in this way is considered one of the best internet marketing strategies in use today!

George Bilbrey of Return Path wrote a thought-provoking piece for MediaPost on how marketing objectives interact with deliverability objectives. The article takes on the question of whether deliverability tactics are at odds with marketing best practices.

The response, to paraphrase, was that improved deliverability increases revenue, reduces the chances of damage to sender reputation, and improves engagement rates.

In essence, Bilbrey says that to build lasting success in email, marketers should be bold and follow the hard data, rather than worrying about going against their gut or short-term gains.

I would challenge email marketers this year to bring that bold mindset to acquisition email and to focus on doing things right.

Be Bold . . .

The digital marketing industry is undergoing a sea change in its attitude toward acquisition email. As new technologies on the market make complex targeting feasible, the bold among the industry are blazing the trail from retention email to the acquisition email market.

Acquisition email can bring a number of benefits to a marketing program. Three significant benefits to consider are:

1. ROI – Email has a high ROI, and bringing that ROI to a customer acquisition channel can bring down overall acquisition costs.
2. Data – Email is highly trackable. After a successful campaign you can use your reporting data to scale out that success (both to other email campaigns and to other channels entirely).
3. Skill Transfer – This is the most important thing you can take away from this post. It is possible to bring the knowledge and skills you have amassed in retention email to acquisition email campaigns. Upholding the same rigorous standards for permission, targeting, and content will reward marketers in acquisition email as well.

Just as with any industry change, the first to adapt will see the greatest benefits, both in terms of ROI and in terms of knowledge gained. So be bold in 2012 and test out this new customer acquisition channel.

. . . But Do It Right

While email marketers can transfer much of their knowledge from retention campaigns to acquisition campaigns, there are critical differences in how you should approach this new market. One of the most important elements to get right is respecting subscribers.

Absolute musts – We say this a lot, but permission is especially key in acquisition email. This means working with third-party opt-in records only. You should also make it easy to opt-out of future mailings by making unsubscribe links visible and simple to use.

Honesty is another non-negotiable element. It should be clear to subscribers who you are, who owns the list you are mailing to, and what you are offering. You can (and should) make this clear before subscribers even open the email by using straightforward sender information and a clear, concise, and truthful subject line.

Raise the bar – IBM recently predicted that in the next five years, spam will become a thing of the past because email will be so targeted and relevant. Work to achieve that kind of relevancy by segmenting your mailing through demographic targeting (using information from the publisher) or behavioral targeting (using an email ad exchange platform, like ividence).

What are your goals for your email program this year? And what bold action will you take to achieve them?

By: DMA

I’ve got to admit, I don’t like spam. Not just professionally, it really gets my goat personally as well. It’s not that I’m a particularly sensitive soul when it comes to email communications, but I just don’t like being sent stuff I haven’t asked for. Ok, I acknowledge that most of the downright illegal and virus laden traffic is now being successfully filtered by the great work of the spam filtering businesses and ISP’s, so what’s left to Grinch about?

Email is a powerful marketing channel, and its superb revenue driving potential is now becoming widely acknowledged. Email hasn’t got to this position by itself, it has needed to be understood and strategies carefully put together by some pretty clever people to bring it to where it is today. Some recent DMA reports show that the public now acknowledge email as a marketing channel that provides value. In anyone’s book that’s an achievement, and it isn’t as if everyone is using the same strategies. However the similar thing about all the successful strategies is they are done well, with considerable thought and great execution. So in a channel that is going from strength to strength, why am I throwing my presents out of the sleigh about spammers?

The most fundamental practice and legal obligation regarding sending someone a marketing email, is that you need to have the person’s permission to do so. I’m not going to start splitting hairs about the pros and cons of opt in opt out etc, but it is pretty widely acknowledged that the person should know what they are signing up for. But that’s right isn’t it, you don’t want anyone on your list who doesn’t want to be there, right?

By: Bronto

You’ve worked hard to get people onto your email marketing list, but that’s only part of the battle. What are the things you need to do to make sure people not only stay ON the list, but stay engaged and interact with your messages? Here are 8 key ways to keep subscribers engaged through their lifecycle:

1. Set Expectations from the Start

You want people to be excited to join your list in order to receive certain communications from you.  In the case of Kaleidoscope Yarns – that’s knitting tips and tricks, free patterns, special offers, and more. Subscribers also understand that they are going to get one email a week.

By making it clear WHAT they are signing up for and, roughly, how often they can expect to hear from you, you’ll start your relationship off on the right foot with everyone on the same page.

Setting proper expectations is key to a good email relationship. It helps establish trust.

2. Keep it Relevant – Segment & Target

Another key to creating great relationships with subscribers and maintaining engagement is keeping content RELEVANT. We do this by leveraging data we have on our subscribers.

We can take advantage of the following types of behavioral data:

• Email behavior: What are they opening and click on? That is a demonstration of interest you can pursue.
• Web site behavior: What categories of product are they browsing? According to recent studies, we know that messages that leverage clickstream data, like abandoned cart and browsing recommendation messages, produce 9 times the revenue and 32 times the net profit of standard broadcast messages.
• Purchase behavior:  What have customers purchased from you? How much money do they spend? How many times have they purchased from you? When did they last purchase from you? You can do some really smart marketing if you have this data flowing into your email platform regularly.

We can also leverage demographic information gathered via:

• Sign-up: What are you asking for up-front? Highly consider name, location, birthday and interest areas for future segmentation.
• Manage preference center: You can run an ”Update Your Information” campaign to get data from existing customers and motivate response using a drawing or sweepstakes.

By: iMedia Connection

As marketers, we all know how important it is to make sure that our email and other direct marketing efforts are relevant to our customers. We also understand that customers are taking more control of their relationships with us and are demanding that we engage with them in ways that work. Doing this effectively requires a marketing strategy that integrates efforts across channels, while allowing for us to continuously “listen” to our customers and adjust tactics based on what we “hear” from them.

As we enter 2012, here are a few of the main themes that our analysis shows will be on every email subscriber’s wish list, as well as ways to engage with them and give them what they really want.

To belong

Everyone wants to feel like they are part of something. Utilizing “welcome” programs to initiate a sense of belonging — letting subscribers know more about your brand and your email, social, and mobile programs and their benefits — is a great way to make them feel part of your community.

This year, consider taking your welcome emails a step further and deploy a welcome series. Strategically crafted creative elements, calls to action, and messaging in each treatment of the series can enable continuous subscriber engagement and optimize results with double the open and click rates and three times the transaction rates of promotional mailings.

Integrating your digital programs can also create a sense of belonging and increase engagement. For example, leveraging Facebook to optimize email performance and acquisition by including email sign-up on your Facebook page can bring your digital programs together and make your subscribers feel connected.

By: HubSpot

Whether you’re just starting out with email marketing or you already have some experience sending marketing emails, you’ve probably wondered about the types of email communication you can send to your database.

Should you nurture your subscribers with weekly newsletters? Are dedicated sends better at optimizing your sales and marketing funnel? What about email digests? These are all valid questions that marketing professionals should consider when selecting the right format to meet their email marketing goals.

So which types of emails should you be sending? In this blog post, we’ll discuss the different types of email marketing communication and their respective advantages and disadvantages. This information should help you make both an educated decision when choosing the most appropriate email format to meet your specific goals.

1. Email Newsletter

When deciding whether you should use email newsletters in your marketing strategy, you first need to determine your goal. What is it that you want your email newsletter to achieve? You might want to nurture your existing contacts and become the first brand they think of when they need a product or service in your industry. Or your goal might be to increase social sharing so you attract new people to your list. As you define your goal, think about what metrics you can use to track your progress.

Email newsletters are characterized by three key advantages. First, they can spread your brand awareness. By building habitual communication with your email subscribers, you enable them to recognize your brand and associate it with a positive sentiment. Second, email newsletters can leverage existing content. Many companies do quick summaries of their most popular blog posts and link to the articles from their newsletter. Third, email newsletters give you the freedom to include different types of content that might be important to your organization. For instance, the same newsletter can contain a popular blog post, a new offer, an announcement of an upcoming event, information about a discount, and a link to a survey.

Email newsletters are also characterized by some important disadvantages. First, they dilute the main call-to-action. If you include a series of blurbs or article summaries, the attention of your recipients will most likely be spread across these tidbits of information as opposed to staying focused on a certain element. Second, the design of a newsletter becomes a much more complicated task than other emails like dedicated sends. You’ll have to spend some time deciding on the right placement of images and text, alignment, and prioritization of information.

By: Litmus

Ever get so frustrated with coding HTML email that you start seeing red? In the past couple weeks we’ve heard from a handful of red-eyed users reporting Gmail tests that are seeing black by showing up in inboxes with a black background (when that wasn’t your intended result!)

After digging into some testing, I realized that this issue isn’t limited to Gmail—in fact it affects a number of different clients depending on how you apply background colors in your code. As with anything HTML email related, this can be super frustrating since standard web code won’t always work the way you anticipate when sent to an email client.

Read on to get the scoop and find the one fail safe way to code background colors for consistent results across the board.

HOW TO CODE A BACKGROUND COLOR? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS…

Usually, background colors are applied to a few common HTML elements:<body> <table> <td> <div> and <a>. Depending on your experience and coding style, you might use one of six (yes, six) different ways to apply background colors to elements in your email:

• Using the HTML bgcolor attribute with a 3-digit hexadecimal color code
• Using the HTML bgcolor attribute with a 6-digit hexadecimal color code
• Using the HTML bgcolor attribute with an RGB color value
• Using the background-color CSS property with a 3-digit hexadecimal color code
• Using the background-color CSS property with a 6-digit hexadecimal color code
• Using the background-color CSS property with an RGB color value

Between smart phones and desk jobs, people are checking their email at enormous rates. As a business, this can be an important way to reach customers. Yet, with an ever growing amount of spam and sales junk, people are learning to skim through their inbox, eyeing the most important emails and deleting or ignoring the rest. You don’t want to be one of those emails.

Still, ATYM Market Research found that 27% of people prefer company updates in the form of emails. Thus, there must be companies that have successful email tactics. The question is: what are they?

2012 is the year of the customer. With so many tools at their fingertips: Facebook, Twitter, etc, they are in the driver’s seat.  To get your emails up to speed, you should take advantage of exactly that.

Ask For Feedback

It is safe to assume you already have some sort of email newsletter right now. This will be a good start to deciphering what your customer wants. Through a simple feedback form, you can get instant information. Before you can hope to get any information, though, you need to get their attention. To do this, you should consider your subject line.

• People will react to numbers. Because you should be giving your customer a reward for their participation, use your subject to tell them what they’ll get. “60 points toward…” “30% off…”

Take to Social Media

Valuable tools you already have are your social media accounts. Whether you have a blog, Twitter account, or Facebook page, there are a variety of ways you can employ them for your benefit.

• An astounding 42% of people have mentioned a brand in their Twitter. Social media users want to be heard, all you have to do is listen. Here they air grievances, positive thoughts and questions, which are all hints into what they want to hear more of.
• Facebook is considered a more interactive network, and it’s here that you can post questions in your status updates.  A Constant Contact survey found that 77% of consumers interact with their favorite brands on Facebook via posts and updates. Posting questions here presents a valuable opportunity to get the information you need.
• Reading through the comment section in your blog is another easy way to find what your customers are looking for. This is a place for them to discuss what they think is missing within the post, what they like and what they question. Take this into consideration as well.

Sign up for competitor email newsletters

Apparently there are companies that currently have an email campaign that has been successful. Because every business and their cousin are offering an e-newsletter, sign up for a few. What do you like? What don’t you like? You aren’t taking ideas, simply contrasting current and potential ideas.

Focus Group

A focus group would be ideal. With an unbiased collection of people, who have been exposed to a variety of corporate emails, newsletters, etc, you can get invaluable information. Within this group you want to ask the right questions, and be very specific.

• What do you look for in emails from companies?
• What are the most appealing subject lines?
• What causes you to open an email?

Website Analytics

Social media marketing becomes more popular with each passing day, because of which there have been a variety of programs created to help businesses measure how effective they’re efforts are. While the software can be used for various information gathering, a program such as Google Analytics is able to give you important details to create a better email campaign. You can find out:

• What keywords brought them to your site? This is helpful in determining what your customer actually wants.
• What pages are they looking at? With this you can determine what products or information they are most interested in.

With all the tools you now have, it can be very easy to discover exactly what your customer wants. While it may take time to gather this information, and recreate your tactics, the tools are available and ready. When you figure out exactly how to use them, you’ll have no problem building the best customer emails.

By: Direct Marketing News

I’m angry, and I’m not alone. Almost every time I wind up on some company’s database, I get punished for it — with email that insults my taste, shows no regard for my intelligence, and doesn’t value my time. Since we’re both in the email marketing business, let’s agree to stop pummeling each other in the name of selling. Instead, follow these six tactics.

• Be useful. Just because our shared agenda is to sell something, it doesn’t mean our email needs to act like a used-car salesman. Let’s tone down the rhetoric, and start to bring our customer useful helpful tips, ideas or how-tos. They’ll actually look forward to the next email you send.
• Design for skimming. Yes, some people will read reams of email copy. But most won’t. That doesn’t mean every email should squeeze all of its business above the fold, though. Long-form is fine, but keep each copy block brief and let subheads carry the story.
• Hold their hand and never let go. We’re not just asking people to read our little email. We’re asking them to take a journey. It falls on the copywriter to make every new step in that journey feel connected to the last — from the email’s line to its headline and call-to-action, then to the landing page headline and all the way through to a “thanks for your order” page. The entire journey should be written as a single narrative. That’s how it’ll be read.

By: AWeber

Your website and email marketing lists aren’t just business tools that help you connect with customers and prospects – in effect; they’re the digital manifestation of your presence and personality.

So while it’s tempting to think about these resources as simple text blocks and images, don’t underestimate the psychological impact these bits and bytes can have on your readers.

One of the best places to employ tactics that appeal to a reader’s emotions is in your email list, when it comes to managing your unsubscribe rates.

If you’ve been having trouble keeping these numbers down, check out the following psychological strategies on how to reduce your current unsubscribe rates:

Strategy #1 – Harness the Power of Words

There’s no doubt that many words are psychologically charged, but the two that you want to focus on here are “quit” and “give up.”

Whether or not we like to admit it, these words exert a powerful psychological force on readers. Quitting and giving up don’t simply mean “stopping” something – the strongest connotation with these words is actually “failure,” and nobody wants to admit that they’ve given up on or failed at something!

This is why we stay in bad relationships longer than we should, and it’s why we dread having to tell Great Aunt Sally that we’ve left bad working environments over the holiday dinner table. Heck, even the tobacco companies know that most smokers experience a psychological hurdle at the thought of quitting smoking (even if quitting is a good thing in this case!).

So how can you incorporate this technique into your email marketing lists? Well, imagine if – instead of being unsubscribed automatically – subscribers were shown the following options, as developed by Copyhackers:

It’s easy to focus exclusively on the content of your messages when it comes to creating engaging emails. But all too often, it’s the interactions at a more fundamental level that will make the most difference. If you’re not considering these four engagement opportunities, you could be missing out on the chance to earn or keep the attention of your subscribers.

The Sign-Up Process

Because it’s your initial point of interaction with future subscribers, the sign-up process gives you the chance to make memorable first impression. Prepare for a long and happy relationship with new subscribers by:

• Using Double Opt-Ins

Verify new subscriber requests by sending a confirmation e-mail that must be clicked for final activation. This ensures that the right person signed up using the right e-mail address and that they’ll be expecting your messages.

• Creating Expectations

Let the subscriber know how often to expect messages and what kind of content they can expect to see. No surprises.

The Welcome Letter

Don’t settle for boring or generic welcome letters. This is your chance to get the subscriber excited about the wonderful messages he’ll be receiving from you. Send the welcome letter promptly and start by thanking the subscriber and remind him or her of the current opt-in preferences. Personalize the message with the subscriber’s name so they are connected by being addresses directly. And offer your new members reasons to be immediately engaged with you or your company; provide valuable content such as a link to special promotions on your website, a link to a previous newsletter, or a new subscriber discount offer.

The Subject Line

The subject line is your chance to grab subscribers’ attention and tell them your email is worth opening. Don’t focus on gimmicks to avoid the spam folder; instead, show the subscriber that you respect their time by clearly relating what he can expect to see when he clicks.

The Unsubscribe Landing Page

Although often viewed as distasteful, the unsubscribe page can be a chance to create a positive impression even for dissatisfied subscribers. Make the unsubscribe link clear and easy to follow from your email; don’t try to hide it. On the unsubscribe landing page, remind the subscriber of the great benefits they’ll be missing out on  when they leaves and let them know you’ll miss them. Ask for feedback (but don’t require it), giving the subscriber a chance to share his feelings. And finally, when all is said and done, make the process easy, clear, and prompt.

Use eConnect Email’s list management feature, email creation templates, and autoresponders to ensure that you’re taking full advantage of every opportunity to engage with subscribers. Let them know you value their loyalty by treating them respectfully at every stage of the email campaign.

Sharing a good bottle of wine with friends is simply a much richer experience than consuming one alone. Additionally, a mutual appreciation for the same types of wines you and your friends consume creates a far more substantial sharing experience. In this two part series, I’ll explore why mutual associations with brands will dramatically increase open rates and drastically reduce spam complaints, paving the way for better deliverability metrics, engagement and brand reputation.

As marketers, we put too much pressure on our subscribers.  First, we insist they recognize the label on our wine bottle, (The From: Name) then we expect them to read our subject line, and subsequently we hope subscribers actually “taste” (open) the email and glance at what we’re peddling.  If we haven’t lost their attention by now, we continue to plague them by asking them to share the given email using a functionality called SWYN (share with your network).  If that isn’t enough, we still yearn for a conversion…..and it all gets to be too much, ultimately, perhaps, pushing the subscriber away.

Messaging of this nature is still outbound.

What lies ahead is a significant evolution in email marketing which will work in concert with social networks to “reverse engineer” the social characteristics of email and bring social directly to your inbox.

Email offers will drastically change in the near future.  Next-generation emails will benefit from a deeper level of peer transparency. This new level of transparency will be earmarked by advanced or universal preference centers and highly intuitive sign up processes. By selectively capturing social media credentials of your subscribers, several layers of data points will become immediately available to harvest.  These socially focused data points will change ordinary subject lines to engaging peer notifications from a given brand.

Consider this:  you are far more inclined to “friend” someone on Facebook if you have mutual friends, correct?  And, you are more inclined to become a fan of a Facebook page if other members and colleagues of your social network are fans of that same page.  So, why not apply this same concept to email?

Industry statistics from Bazaarvoice illustrate that 74% of online shoppers who receive advice from their friends on social networks allow that advice to influence their purchasing decisions. Also, this article by Shiv Singh supports that statistic with its discussion of when and why we trust our peers when determining types of online purchases. Furthermore, in a recent Purchaser Influence Survey by EXPO, featured in emarketer.com, over 90% US Moms trust peer reviews more than manufacturer information. (Special Thanks to Anthony Schneider of Mass Transmit and Jeffrey Rohrs of ExactTarget for that snippet.)  With that said, we must reverse-engineer the current dynamic of outbound marketing based emails and bring our social networks to the coveted inbox.  At its core, should be a socially focused “über-email” program which acts as your brand’s private reserve.

Shoppers of a given brand instinctively want to know what “a subset of their trusted friends” bought online.  Similarly, shoppers also want to know what their friends think about those same products before they decide to purchase them.  Our marketing based email messaging should produce unbiased, first-hand knowledge of how our social networks “feel” about a product, not a subjective marketing message from your brand with ordinary subject lines.  Moreover, user-generated content is comprised of written and/or video testimonials of a product or service.  But, these testimonials which are often placed in an email, or on a brand’s landing page come from random people we don’t necessarily know. These testimonials although sincere in nature, don’t reverberate.

Reverse engineering social email

Would you like to know if any of your friends subscribe to the same brands as you do?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see which of your friends reviewed that new trendy restaurant on Yelp? Would receiving immediate notifications from peer actions with the brand build trust, directly after that review?

Currently, dynamic content in email allows us to customize a message to a particular segment or to an individual on your list, based on attributes in their profile.  We’ve learned that FedEx has as many as 144 attributes for a given record, which allows for granular customization of each email communication for each given email stream.  With increased social media data points culled together through an evolved master preference center adds an increasingly richer dimension for email marketers.  With these richer dimensions comes pinpoint information about your friends’ recent actions associated with a given brand.

Savvy marketers will ameliorate the quality of such social media data points by dynamically inserting social attributes into a given email program. This concept completely reverses the current outbound system which is somewhat dysfunctional, because marketers still rely on subscribers outbound actions. The evolution of such a program will bring these messages to the inbox and will have far superior return on your email marketing investments, because this messaging adds increased value for the subscribers.  More value equals a more relevant email. With more relevant messaging comes drastically reduced spam complaints and dramatically increased open rates.

Let’s say you received an email from Barnes and Noble.  And, Barnes and Noble has been granted permission by you and many members of your social network, to publish information about actions your social network is undertaking with Barnes and Noble. Images of your friends may be dynamically and creatively populated in the creative, so when you open up your email, not only will you see friends’ images with links to their social media pages, you’ll also know which of them are subscribers, and which ones purchased that new Stephan King book Barnes and Noble is featuring.  What’s more is that the subject line will be highly engaging because it’s about your network “first” and not about the item being featured.

Part II of this series will discuss the challenges associated with this concept and why future marketing based subject lines will no longer matter.
Subject lines will become highly relevant notifications, and how these “relevant notifications” will increase open rates and dramatically reduce spam complaints.

Here at GetResponse, we recently launched our segmentation feature, and we already have the use of personalization and dynamic content.

So we encourage you to gather as much data as you can on your clients, so you can have the ability to ‘Market to One’.

But is there such a thing as too much data?

Today I am going to talk briefly about some key points to remember when creating your web forms and the data you need to know.

Tools of the trade

First, lets talk what you need. This is of course specific to your industry, but email address and name are a given for any serious marketer. What next?

Fields that relate to location, age, or gender are normally acceptable, however the subscriber is going to be thinking, “Why do you want that data, and how are you going to use it?”

Don’t ask for gender, and then blast your entire list with offers for women’s clothing when there are men on your list. They trusted you with vital info, and you must repay that trust by making your newsletter relevant.

Plan ahead with your newsletters and autoresponders, and think where you want to make it specific. Once you have done this, you can then think about what information you will ask for.

Too many questions can result in subscribers bailing on you!

Here is a stat to show you what asking too much information can result in:

For every additional field of data you ask for, you lose 6% of sign ups. (courtesy of worldata.com presentation at DMA2010)

Test your web form

That doesn’t mean testing the technology, like if your sign up form is working. It means you need to test the ease of your webform, and the commitment it takes for a subscriber to sign up.

Do you make this easy, with only a few fields, or are you driving your customer away by asking for too much data?

How best to test your web forms

I recommend asking a 3^rd party to go over the form with you, and to ask them to answer honestly, giving you a real representative of how easy your form is to use.

Forms that take more than 45 seconds to fill out have a 48% fall out!

So with this in mind, if you’re close to 45 seconds after a completed form, look to make it easier somewhere. Maybe not losing a field, but change a text box for a drop down, or a tick box.

Data collection can be ongoing

My last point within this post is that you do not have to stop collecting data at the sign up form.

Once a person has committed to your campaign, you have the ability to gather more information as time goes by. Include a small survey in a newsletter, or even a questionnaire.

The key is to continue to engage your subscribers and ensure you communicate with them the information that they want.

Do you agree with this? Have you had success by removing a field from your forms like the Name field or drop-down menus and check boxes? Drop me a comment!

Until Next Time

Mick

Takeaway: Don’t ask for more information than you can use or which makes the sign up process too long.

By: ClickMail

Business relationships differ from personal ones in a very big way: Sometimes it’s just time to move on.

Case in point: Your marriage might be for life and your kids are around for good, but your ESP could be a temporary relationship. As much as you might like your ESP, as long as you’ve been doing business with them, there still might come a time when staying with the ESP you know so well could mean a lower email marketing ROI.

If you’ve been with the same email service provider for more than a year, consider these five signs that it’s time for a new ESP:

1. Your in-house email list has grown.

With over 100 ESPs to choose from, you’re going to find that capabilities differ among them. This includes scaling to meet your needs as your volume of email grows.

2. Your email deliverability has shrunk.

As strange as it sounds, the email deliverability rate you’ll get with one ESP is not the same as you’ll get with another. As an email marketing agency, we test different ESPs with the same list and we get markedly varied results. When even half a percentage point in improvement means more email ROI, having the highest possible email delivery rate is imperative. It could be your ESP isn’t keeping up with your needs, and that’s affecting your bottom line.

3. You’re ready to automate.

Triggered, event-based email marketing is the way to achieve the most targeted, relevant messages possible. If you’re ready to go that route and your ESP isn’t, it’s time to move on…not get left behind.

The 80/20 rule is one of those deliciously consistent truths from the world of statistics. At its essence, the rule implies that 80% of effects are brought by 20% of causes. For example, about 80% of the comments on your blog come from about 20% of your audience. The rule is also referred to as the Pareto principle.

The power of the 80/20 rule is that it can force you to think more strategically about where you invest your time and effort. The trick, though, is that you first have to realize where this rule applies. There are several common places you can find the 80/20 rule at work in your email marketing

#1: Engagement and conversions

If you go to your email dashboard and run a report you are likely to find that about 80% of your opens come from about 20% of your audience. Dig down further and you might find that 80% of your clicks come from about 20% of your opens. Go deeper yet and you might find that 80% of your conversions come from 20% of the people who clicked.

Don’t expect your metrics to follow this principle precisely, because they won’t. That’s not the point of the rule. The point is to get you to realize that the largest chunk of your engagement is driven by a fraction of your audience. If you need to get more opens, clicks, or conversions, you can work to identify this 20%. Find out what makes them click and give it to them. Then, find out how you can convince the remaining 80% of slackers to join the elite fifth.

#2. SPAM complaints

When someone marks one of your emails as spam or junk, it leaves a black mark on your reputation as a sender. If you get too many black marks, your sender reputation falls into a ditch and takes your delivery rate with it.

You will likely find that about 80% of your SPAM complaints come from about 20% of your audience. You might even find this audience to be smaller, like around 10%, but the principle still applies. Find out what is causing this vocal minority to sully your name and either fix the problem, remove them from your list, or prevent them from receiving your emails in the first place.

#3. Design and production

Time management is another place you can apply the 80/20 rule. You will likely spend 80% of your time focusing on 20% of your email program. For example, maybe there is a monthly campaign that takes forever to plan and design, but the rest of your program is a breeze. Or maybe you spend 80% of your time creating content for your program and hounding coworkers to send articles for your newsletter. Or maybe you spend all your time in analysis and measurement.

A fraction of your tasks are likely eating the majority of your time. And just because you focus on them does not mean that they generate the majority of your results. The trick is to find the 20% of tasks that generate 80% of results and make sure that they are executed as well as possible.

Takeaway: The 80/20 Rule can be a useful tool to reframe your perspective, sharpen your focus, and produce desired results in your email campaigns. 

By: Sydney Morning Herald

The average reader spends just 51 seconds on your email newsletter, some experts say. And most readers fail to read past the first three items on your list, says marketing agency blog, Public Relations Sydney.

Given the bombardment of email these days, just getting readers to open a newsletter is tough. Still, most agree that email remains a cost-effective marketing tool that will keep playing a key role in the digital marketing mix.

Two business experts explain how to produce an email marketing letter that exploits the medium’s direct marketing clout.

Ten secrets of effective email newsletters

1. It’s all about the subject line, says marketing strategist Fran Iseli-Hall. “Your newsletter subject line makes a huge difference in the opening rate and it can make or break a campaign,” she adds.

So, “split-test” subject lines – measure which your target market prefers. Most customer relationship management systems (CRMs) enable split-tests and reveal opening rates and bounce rates, Iseli-Hall says, and points to MailChimp, Sendpepper, AWeber, and Constant Contact. Whichever you use, remember to put the recipient’s first name in the subject line to boost the opening rate, she says.

2. Keep the newsletter short and sweet, Iseli-Hall says. Her reason: long newsletters often get filed for “later reading”, destined for oblivion.

Be brief and your audience will get used to your message and open it because it takes minutes to read.

3. Never lead with your branding. “This one is huge,” Iseli-Hall says. Even design agencies get this wrong, she adds.

If you put your branding at the top or all over your newsletter, it will look “super-salesy”: a no-no.

“Most people don’t care about your brand – they care about what’s in it for them,” Iseli-Hall says. Branding should go at the bottom with your contact details.

By: Trada

E-mail marketing is an extremely effective tool — if used correctly. I learned from the lessons of hard knocks on what to do and what not to do. As with everything, it’s always better to ask the experts. This time we asked experts from Marketo, SendGrid and social media agency Room 214 for their thoughts on how to use email marketing, understanding regulations and how to create email marketing lists.

Meet the Experts:

Tim Falls, a Community Manager for SendGrid, an email delivery system that simplifies the process and produces better results. Check out hisSendGrid’s blog and follow him on Twitter @timfalls.

Maria Pergolino, Sr Director of Marketing at marketing software automation system, Marketo.  Check out the Marketo blogs and follow Maria on Twitter @InboundMarketer.

Ingrid Getzan, Group Practice Director at social media agency Room 214. Check out the Room 214 blog, Capture the Conversion and follow Ingrid on Twitter @igetzan.

Email marketing is one of the most heavily regulated online marketing components. What do companies need to know before getting started with email marketing?

Ingrid Getzan: Companies need to know the very basics;  go with a trusted email software company, don’t buy lists, don’t use certain words in the subject line that will be marked as spam, know an acceptable frequency to send emails, and most importantly, know your plan.

Too many businesses send out emails because they think they should, without having a clear agenda of what they would like to communicate. There is no better way to get blacklisted then sending out irrelevant or spammy emails – a sure way to kill your email marketing efforts immediately. Sit down and figure out at least a 6 month plan of what you want to tell to your subscribers. Figure out why they want to receive your email and make the information within your email valuable to them. Don’t just pick a template or extend promotional offers to them – make it exclusive and worth their time.

Maria Pergolino: Get familiar with Can-Spam Laws – this goes far beyond the laws in your country, exptending to anywhere you market.  Just because you are in the US, doesn’t mean can ignore laws in other countries you sell your goods.  To learn about Can-Spam Laws, check out this great guide by the FTC.

The Top 25 Questions You Must Ask Before Sending Any Email Newsletter

By Denise Keller

As a small business email marketer, your newsletter can be considered in many ways to be the face of your entire company to a large number of your customers. You can ensure that your newsletter is coherent, correct, and adheres to readability and legitimacy standards by properly answering these 25 questions.

1. Is your call to action powerful and clear or does your email offer too much confusing or contradictory information?
2. Have you checked your email through simulators and emulators to ensure that it is easily readable on every possible screen between the tiniest smartphone and the largest desktop LCD?
3. Have you multipart MIMEd the email so that it can display as an HTML as well as a plain text, depending on what browser or device the subscriber is using to read it?
4. Are your alt image tags clear enough so that any subscriber with images off can make sense of your email?
5. Have you color coded each image block so that the images off subscriber can understand that there was supposed to be an image there?
6. Is all of your most important and engaging information and offers placed clearly above the fold?
7. Have you spent the same amount of time crafting just your subject line and preheader as you have to compose the rest of the content of the email newsletter?
8. Are your social networking links placed in the upper right hand corner of the email newsletter template and use the standard and highly recognizable logos of Facebook, Twitter, et al.?
9. Do all your links work and do they go to the desired point in the page through anchor linkage?
10. Have you ensured that the overall tone and style of the email newsletter is informative and entertaining without the slightest hint of hype or hard sell?
11. Does your email’s layout harmoniously match the logo, colors, and style of your landing pages, advertisements, and social networking presences?
12. Has your subscriber been informed in this newsletter to ensure that the sending email address is in their whitelist so that it doesn’t end up in the junk folder by default?
13. Have you incorporated a link to your Preference Center so that the subscriber can easily provide valuable personal information to assist your segmentation efforts, and can cater the frequency and other elements of your newsletter to their wishes?
14. Has every single word been meticulously proofed to ensure that it is spelled correctly, forms a coherent, grammatically correct sentence, and most importantly is accurate?
15. Have you cross-checked your email newsletter copy against lists of widely acknowledged spam words to ensure a high level of deliverability?
16. Is every aspect of the email compliant with the Federal CAN-SPAM Act?
17. Does your newsletter focus on providing authoritative information, attractive offers, and reputable policies in order to engage, retain, and satisfy the requirements of your subscribers?
18. Is your email newsletter written in such a way that it focuses on a single, obvious offer, or are you obfuscating your presentation by incorporating a number of confusing options?
19. Have you provided a channel whereby your subscribers can inform you of their opinions about your newsletter and the facts contained within, or can complain about something you’re doing which irritates them?
20. Can your reader choose to unsubscribe successfully in three clicks or less?
21. Has your subscription list been segmented thoroughly in every possible way including demographically, geographically, and based on the subscriber’s previous online behavior patterns?
22. Is each segment being provided with dynamic content particularly tailored to their preferences and requirements?
23. Have you implemented a thorough process whereby your subscribers’ behavior as pertains to your site is fully tracked beyond the click-through?
24. Do you have a suitable analytics program in place and most importantly can you clearly understand what all those numbers and charts are actually telling you about your subscribers?
25. Are you testing every possible element through A/B Split or Multivariate testing methods?

Running this checklist before you hit Send should be a prerequisite for all business email marketers. It seems like a lot to remember, but after following this list for a while, you’ll answer these questions and do these things automatically.

Online retailers love email marketing because of its high potential to drive profit while keeping the campaign costs pretty low. Besides, done right, email marketing  is permission-based and is, more or less, easily automated. Big brands do it: GAP, Victoria Secret, Overstock, Timberland, and pretty much everybody else.

Together with my PadiAct colleagues, I wanted to get a glimpse of the techniques used by online fashion retailers to increase email marketing lists.

When you’re trying to promote your own business, people often say that it’s all about connections.

Unfortunately, the advice tends to stop there. How do you meet people? More importantly, how do you keep track of everyone? Networking opportunities come in all shapes and sizes, from the workshop to the convention, but the most frustrating part can be remembering who you talk to and what those people do.

This is precisely the problem with which Jill Singer, founder of Jill Singer Graphics, recently wrestled.

“I’m involved with so much networking, and many people I meet are also networking all the time,” she explains. “It’s a continuous challenge to stay on top of it all. Meeting and staying connected with people can be tough, too.”

Her graphic design firm, based out of White Plains, N.Y., has been helping clients to create professional-looking promotional materials for almost 30 years. And, as a one-woman show, she has had to mostly rely on networking and self-promotion to get the word out about her services.

At the end of a hard day of networking, Jill would always have business cards scattered in the bureau, a few in her wallet, and some contact information in her iPhone. It was overwhelming to remember who was interested in her business. This past August, that all changed when a client asked her to help with his Constant Contact Email Marketing campaign.

“He was really tricking me,” she laughs, “because he knew that it would be a great tool for me to use, too. And he was right.”

Following Up Through Email

Once Jill started using Constant Contact (and getting permission to send messages to those people she had met), she suddenly found that she had one safe place to put all of the information she exchanged at networking events — and even better, a way to stay in touch with those people.

“Emails gave me a great way to highlight pieces from my portfolio. So now if someone asks to see a sample of my work at a seminar, I can just tell him that I’ll send him an email,” she explains. “Email marketing is an easy way to stay organized and stay in touch.”

The more people you have on your email list, the more marketing messages you can send out and the more responses you can potentially get. But, growing an email list can be a slow and difficult process. There are no shortcuts to building a large, qualitative list of subscribers. In fact, it can be so much of a bulk email marketing migraine that after a while some people might feel like giving up on promoting new sign-ups altogether.

So, how do you build your subscriber database without all the worries?

1) Make signing up as simple as possible

Email opt-in should be made easy. The more clicks and keystrokes a potential subscriber needs to make in order to sign up, the more of them will abandon the process before you have them securely on your list. Why force a person to take multiple steps to do something that they want to do, if there are ways for them to do it with just one?

Lubricate your subscription process by testing the success of rate of single opt-in versus double opt-in. Think about reducing the amount of required fields on your subscription forms — most of which are always details you can ask your subscribers about later. And rewrite your confirmation emails to be as brief and skim-easy as possible.

2) Focus on converting web visitors

If (like most marketers these days) you are promoting your business via online channels, chances are that your website will be a hotspot for catching new sign-ups. This means that your email newsletter opt-in should be compelling, obvious and everywhere. Make sure the form is prominently placed on all your web pages and make it stand out visually. Also place, sign-up promotions on relevant content such as within articles and blogs, and at the end of slide shows.

To accelerate the performance of your email marketing program, you need to go beyond best practices and marketing intuition. Only with a measurable and repeatable methodology can you effectively engage your customers from introduction to conversion.

According to MarketingSherpa’s new Email Marketing Handbook 2^nd Edition, this can be broken down into six actionable steps, giving you a methodical way to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of your email communications.

1. Identify impact and purpose – Assess and prioritize placement in the path to purchase where email can have the most impact on your bottom line
2. Email marketing integration – Learn the evolving best practices to leverage the power of social media for sharing content and generating list growth
3. Content creation – Learn the three keys to relevancy: contagious content, segmentation and real-time communications
4. Quality list growth – Develop a strategy to build a quality list of brand evangelists for your company based on your resources and target audience
5. List hygiene and monitoring deliverability statistics – Know your relationship with ISPs and how your reputation affects your deliverability success
6. Testing and optimization – Understand what works for your organization and your customers to continuously test and optimize your email messages

This 252-page handbook helps guide marketers through a step-by-step process to elevate their email program results. You’ll also receive worksheets and exercises designed to help you prioritize and fine tune your message when adding lifecycle communications or promoting the latest mobile app.

Our goal is to have this handbook become your trusted resources for executing meaningful email communications.

Launch Special: Order your copy today and save $100, courtesy of Eloqua (Ends Feb. 17)

Case Studies and Insights Included in the Handbook:

• How Microsoft used triggered email to increase or 800% and CTR 2,100%
• iPhone-targeted landing pages boost conversion rate 40%
• MarketingSherpa’s six steps to accelerating email marketing performance
• How Kodak added 33% more email subscribers and 53% more YouTube fans
• Sign-up ad campaign increases email database 300% among target audience
• Anti-newsletter strategy nurtures $1.5 million in leads in 4 months at Citrix
• How cutting a house list 95% helped double sales
• 6 tactics to leverage social check-in to grow email lists and improve engagement
• 3-part triggered series generates 53% click-to-conversion rate
• Growing Email Lists with Social Media: KFC’s Facebook tool adds subscribers
• 5 tactics to engage and convert smartphone users
• Reformat, Reuse, Recycle: 5 strategies to stretch your marketing content
• Segmenting a database and delivering more targeted content
• How JetBlue’s automated triggers get 1,640% more revenue-per-email
• How to use SMS and relevant content to add opt-ins

Here’s a Summary of the Table of Contents:

• Chapter 1: Email’s sphere of influence (pg. 11-18)
• Chapter 2: Identify impact and purpose (pg. 19-56)
• Chapter 3: Measurement and results (pg. 57-68)
• Chapter 4: Integrate email into the mix (pg. 69-90)
• Chapter 5: Produce relevant content (pg. 91-122)
• Chapter 6: Developing and keeping quality lists (pg. 123-155)
• Chapter 7: Deliverability and legal compliance (pg. 156-176)
• Chapter 8: Executing engaging email campaigns (pg. 177-194)
• Chapter 9: Testing and optimization (pg. 195-206)
• Appendix and Research Library: Marketing and Optimization Glossary of Terms (pg.217-252)

For more information on the handbook, click here to download a free excerpt.

P.S. As MarketingSherpa newsletter subscriber, you can save $100 off the regular price of the Email Marketing Handbook 2^nd Edition. But hurry – this offer ends on Feb. 17.

By: Email Brain

3 recommendations for 2012 that has just started!

1) Begin your year’s communications with an email marketing plan

Keep your plans simple and make sure they’re realistic and reachable. Don’t waste time in 2012 on things that won’t help you. After all, it’s a lot more rewarding when you know your goals are within your grasp.

2) I resolve to make 2012 a year of measurement

With the statistical tracking features provided by most email service providers (ESPs) there’s no reason to practice guess-marketing. But if that’s what you’ve been doing, then there’s no better time than the present to become a monster of metrics.

Comparing your current figures against last year’s numbers, if you have them, will give you a better idea of how you are growing, what to expect, and let you anticipate high and low business periods before they happen; which also makes it easier to budget.

By: iMedia Connection

In this age of split-second attention spans and increasingly skeptical consumers, email deliverability is more important than ever. And, while a marketer’s ability to reach consumers with timely, relevant content is still paramount, there are more pieces of the puzzle to consider. When detailing the fundamentals of deliverability, it is important to note that the integration of your data with the sent content plays an instrumental role in closing the gap between you and your customers.

It’s essential not to overlook the fact that even the most brilliant emails will go unnoticed if your messaging isn’t received at the right time — or worse yet, not at all. Just making it to the inbox can be a harrowingexperience. Therefore, here are the requisite steps to ensure that your messages reach their destinations, efficiently increasing your campaign’s effectiveness.

The basics

The fundamental ways to reach your costumer’s inboxes are white listing, formatting messages correctly, creating solid subject lines, maintaining lists, and making sure your campaigns are CAN-SPAM compliant.

Delivery rate boosters

Maintaining a good relationship with internet service providers like Yahoo and Gmail helps ensure successful message delivery. In addition, choosing the right email service provider makes a significant difference, as one bad client can impact the deliverability of other clients. Furthermore, creating messages that don’t heavily rely on images can help you find the inbox, and obtaining up-to-date data boosts delivery rates as you reach customers with highly relevant information. Additionally, it’s important to scrub out un-subscribers and bad email addresses frequently.