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?

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Successful email marketers recognize the importance of building relationships with subscribers. But how exactly do you do that?

Well I believe that relationships are built on trust. And trust is gained by delivering on clear expectations. With email marketing, this means making promises to new subscribers up-front and then delivering on these promises time and time again with all of your emails.

So here’s a list of important things you should be saying to your subscribers to help build a long-term, meaningful relationship through email marketing.

1. Would you like to sign up to my email newsletter?

The key to new relationships is getting off on the right foot. With email marketing, that means obtaining permission before you start sending someone your marketing emails. Not only is this the polite thing to do, in most countries (including Australia) it’s a legal requirement with respect to spam compliance. The best way to ask for permission is with a webform that allows people to easily subscribe to your emails.

2. We will not sell or provide your email to any 3rd parties.

This simple promise holds a lot of weight with new subscribers. Most people are very protective over their inboxes, so it’s important for them to know that if they subscribe to your list, they are not going to start receiving unwanted emails from other 3rd parties. So prove to new subscribers that you respect their email by including this statement in your privacy policy and link to it from all of your webforms.

3. You’re in control and you have options.

We all like to feel in control, right? The same goes with how we manage our inboxes. It’s important to give subscribers options for how they wish to hear from you. So let people manage their preferences via update profile forms linked from each of your emails. Examples of what options you might give to subscribers include email frequency (daily / weekly) and email preferences (promotions / newsletters / event invitations).

4. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Spam compliance requires you to include an unsubscribe option in all your email marketing messages. Most marketers adhere to this by inserting an unsubscribe link at the bottom of their emails. But to help build trust and set a clear expectation with new subscribers, it’s also worth including a simple statement within your welcome email to confirm they can unsubscribe at any time.

5. I’ll only send you content that you want.

This is a promise you should make to subscribers every time you send an email. Whilst you probably won’t say the physical words, it’s important you let your email content say it for you. This means only sending content that is of genuine interest and value to your subscriber. If you’re not sure what types of content subscribers care about most, ask them via an online survey.

6. I’m listening and willing to have a two-way conversation with you.

The best email marketers do not simply send emails to promote their business. Rather they send emails that make subscribers feel like it’s a two-way communication. So let subscribers know that you value their attention by giving them options to interact with you. Ways to do this include providing a monitored email address for people to reply to (as opposed to noreply@example.com) as well as inviting them to connect via your website or social media pages.

When it comes to email marketing, email marketers love to throw around big terms that make us sound smart and make it seem as though we’re on the cutting edge of all the cool technology and marketing trends. No doubt you’ve heard terms like personalization, throttling or dynamic content. But really, what is the difference between personalization and dynamic content anyway?

The biggest misnomer about personalization is that we’re simply taking a person’s first name and inserting it in the subject line or within the body of an email as ‘Dear So and So’. Although this is a basic example of personalization, it can truly be any element within your database that is unique to that recipient. Personalization, in its basic form, is really using any detail you may know about a person to append into the email body or subject line that is specific to that individual. This can be the town or city they reside in, their birthday, their pet’s name, or if they have bought a specific product from you in the past. The more you know about an individual, the more you can personalize the email to tailor to their personality, which increases the relevancy of the email. Almost every email service provider will have basic personalization capabilities in order to insert any single element of your database into the email.

Dynamic content is a tool in which large elements of the email creative are changed based on complex rules. The content within the email is in fact dynamic based upon criteria determined within your database. The beauty of dynamic content is once set up, only one email needs to be sent, but may render in dozens of different ways depending on the rules you have specified. Not every email service provider will have dynamic content capabilities. Traditionally larger top tier providers will have more sophisticated capabilities, along with an easy to understand interface to set up the dynamic content.

Let’s look at an example: A fitness chain with 20 different locations wants to send out one email for an offer of free first month membership. They would also like to direct people to the location that is nearest to them geographically by highlighting the address, picture, and unique link directing to that specific locations’ website. Instead of sending twenty different creative’s and segmenting the list in twenty ways, this can be easily accomplished using dynamic content rules and simply sending one email.

The graphic designer or email marketing manager will need to design the email in such a way that one block of HTML can be swapped out for another leaving the remaining template in tact. A small block of code will need to be created with all the different elements and loaded into the dynamic content interface you utilize with your ESP. Next you simply need to map out your rules to insure the right content is displayed to the right people. Some ESPs will have a comprehensive testing screen that will allow you to preview the email and apply your different rules to make sure the content is displaying correctly.

Both personalization and dynamic content are tools within the email marketers toolbox which allow you to create messages that are a little more relevant to the recipient. We all know relevancy has become more and more important as technology becomes more sophisticated. Also remember – personalization and dynamic content are only as effective as the quality of your database and the information you know about your recipients. Maintaining a complete and up to date database will allow you to utilize personalization and dynamic content to the fullest.

The fear of a bad reputation or negative feedback keeps many businesses from engaging in conversations with customers and prospects on social media. At the basis of this are often misconceptions and a lack of strategies to efficiently monitor, analyze and respond to online feedback.

This leads to missed opportunities and often to wrong investments of time, resources and budgets in tools, practices and efforts that provide no business value.

Monitoring and analyzing online sentiment, reputation, trends, influencers and conversations must lead to insights and actions. It must be measured and is a must for businesses that care about what people say and do and about their brand.

Social marketing is still unknown territory for many businesses. If you have been working with social media for a longer time, you know that most of the brand reputation and negative feedback related fears with social media marketing,  are what they are: fears. However, many businesses do not have this experience yet and are still just exploring the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and (perceived) threats of social media and public online feedback.

Every day, people and businesses tell me that, regarding social media, they are most of all concerned about a “bad” reputation or criticism. In a way it’s normal: for many businesses the whole social media phenomenon is new and overwhelming. That is all too often forgotten by early adopters and experts.

However, the fear for the extent of possible criticism on social media and Internet is not realistic and a clear illustration that many organizations are not used to really listening to what people say. Businesses also often fear that they will need too many resources to deal with all the criticism.

What they unfortunately fail to see is that social media feedback and interaction offers a huge opportunity to gain business and customer insights, detect trends, enhance communication and improve the customer experience.

3 things you should understand about social media monitoring, reputation and sentiment:

1. Social media monitoring, sentiment and reputation management are not a matter of constantly being on guard as a watchdog. Brand equity matters, but you do not strengthen it by ignoring or silencing online feedback.
2. One doesn’t always have to respond immediately, or even at all, to every form of criticism everywhere all the time. Yes, we live in a world with increasing customer expectations and both positive and negative customer experiences can travel fast. And, yes, customer service and relationship marketing are key factors, but business is still a combination of customer satisfaction, the bottom-line, selling and ROI.
3. Companies that are active in social media often take on a defensive attitude and are prepared with a small army of opinion makers and brand advocates to stamp out the negative buzz as it were. There is no need for that. Even a seemingly negative social comment can be an opportunity if you react positively and constructively.

Social media phobias cost.

• You invest more time and resources than needed
• The ROI of such practices is negative
• You don’t help your clients at all
• Traditional “PR” tactics are likely to be viewed as insincere by social media users
• You don’t focus on your core business and value creation processes
• Fear keeps you away from one of the main information and communication channels your prospects and customers use: social media

Are there threats? Yes, you always have the malcontent former employee, unethical competitor or eternal complainer.

So what do you do?

• You monitor and analyze in a structured and efficient way
• You use the thus gained insights to improve your communication strategy
• You ensure an optimal customer experience
• You define a reputation management plan
• You define the resources and structural needs to put it in place
• You listen to feedback and respond correctly
• You define some guidelines
• You offer people channels to give feedback
• You keep the communication lines open
• You measure and improve
• You don’t just listen, you act
• You use a tool that enables you to act

But most of all: you act, react, interact and focus on the positive instead of the negative.

Takeaway: Negative feedback and reviews are not a threat but an opportunity if you listen and act the right way.

As an email marketer, you’re probably well-versed in strategizing your content across a variety of platforms, and you mobilize your resources to do the most with what you have. But are your emails mobilized? In this case, we mean optimized for mobile. Get it? Mobilized! Defined as: streamlined or otherwise mobile-friendly version of your email content.

Mobile is here to stay, and it’s growing exponentially each day. Many people are using their mobile devices to check their email in places ranging from their commute and standing in line to previously unlikely rooms for emailing such as the bedroom and bathroom! Email has always been a quick and immediate form of communication but the growth in mobile use creates even more immediacy within the medium, since one of the most popular ways people use their mobile devices for email is to quickly scan, delete, and flag for future follow-up.

If you’ve put off thinking about how your email marketing campaign renders on a mobile device amidst all of your other tasks (we know, you’re busy!) there’s no better time than the present to consider it. Ensuring that your emails are effective on mobile platforms is only going to become more critical as time passes.

Luckily, there are a few fairly easy things you can do right now to make sure that your emails are just as effective on a mobile device as they are on a computer.

1) Readability: What do your emails look like in different email clients and on different mobile devices? If your emails don’t render effectively on a smartphone or tablet, you run the risk of not only having a bad user experience and ignored email, but damaging your brand as well. But as scary as the possibility of poor rendering on mobile devices is, it’s also one of the easiest fixes. Since devices will all render emails different, to have the most effective reach across all platforms and devices, consider creating a text-only version of your emails.

Devices that don’t support HTML will typically revert to a plain text version with active links. Try creating a simple HTML version that’s designed to work in all mobile browsers.

2) Optimize Your Subject Line and Preheader: What’s a Preheader, you say? Don’t worry if you don’t know. Email marketers typically treat the preheader as a throwaway. Which is a shame, because it’s a golden opportunity to continue the story the subject line introduces to further grab the reader’s attention.

The preheader text appears after the subject line on mobile devices and is usually reserved for text like, “Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.” or “Viewing on a mobile device? Click here to view this email in text.”

Think about using this space as the next part of your subject line; like a subheading to a headline. Get creative and optimize this otherwise dead text. I guarantee after reading “Having trouble viewing this email? Click here” mobile users won’t click: they’ll close and delete.

For more on subject lines and preheaders, Media Post (http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/116661/) has a great article with examples and critiques of actual emails using preheaders: (http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/116661/)

3) Design with Mobile Screen Sizes in Mind: If a specific template for mobile versions isn’t enabled in your ESP, create a mobile-friendly HTML template to ensure it’s still viewable on a desktop computer and a tablet device in addition to mobile screens. This can get tricky since different devices have different screen resolutions and screen sizes. And for email, you need to be primarily concerned with the horizontal display of your email.

Typically, mobile screen size ranges from 350px X 380px but this can vary depending on device. iPhones generally size the HTML to fit the screen, whether viewed in normal or landscape mode, but other devices will show the email in full scale rendering. This makes for a potentially terrible viewing experience: the worst-case scenario is when a reader has to scroll horizontally back and forth through the email to read the content. Not good.

The solution? Use a fluid layout, which will allow the message width to adjust to the size of the device screen and optimizes readability no matter what device your customer is using. And make sure to test it on multiple devices.

4) Mobilize Your Call to Action: What are you asking the recipient to do? Typically, CTAs in email marketing messages involve clicking through to a landing page. This means that the landing pages need to be optimized for mobile devices. It also means rethinking your call to action: your mobile email reader is on the move with limited time and limited internet browsing capability. People generally use mobile email in order to sort through their email and decide what they want to read later. So that might change your call to action from ‘”Click through to buy now” to “Save this email. It contains your coupon code!” Consider testing various CTAs on different devices and ensure they are attention-getting and clearly defined. Do they lead to a mobile-friendly landing page or site? This is the true test of an effective CTA. If it’s effective on a mobile device, they’ll be even more effective on a computer.

5) Keep it short: By definition, everything on mobile is smaller, lighter, and shorter. That translates to shortened subject lines, shortened links, shortened texts. If your email marketing messages must be content-heavy, consider providing a link to a mobile-friendly version on the web or to mobile-friendly landing pages.

Finally, know the demographic makeup of your customer, how your customers interact with your brand, and what devices they use to browse your website. That means using analytics to track what devices your subscribers are using when they’re reading your email newsletters. This data will include not just browser and operating system data but will also include screen resolution data, so you’ll be able to gather a good amount of information on what kinds of devices your subscribers are using, so that you can further fine-tune your email designs to be mobilized!

We have a list of 17 insightful infographics to help you make sense of email marketing and the world of online.

Due to an “Infographic Labor Union Strike”, the other 6 infographics will be back working once a labor settlement has been reached.

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What does your email provider say about you?

By: Credit Karma

Download Infographic Here

EMAIL BEST PRACTICES FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON

13 STEPS BEFORE YOU CLICK SEND!

By: delivra

Download Infographic Here

What do people think of spam?

By: Flowtown

Download Infographic Here

Anatomy of an Apple Email

By: Flowtown

Download Infographic Here

The Evolution of the Geek

By: Flowtown

Download Infographic Here

Why email marketing is still in vogue

By: Flowtown

Download Infographic Here

The history and evolution of email (and other online communication)

By: Focus

Download Infographic Here

Email subscribtion patterns for fashion retailers

By:PadiAct

Download Infographic Here

Email vs Snail mail

By:Pingdom

Download Infographic Here

Email campaign delivery checklist

By: Pure360

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The best and worst time to send your emails

By: Pure360

Download Infographic Here

5 Most Unique States by Email Usage

By: Rockspace Hosting

Download Infographic Here

The evolution of email

By: Splashpress Media

Download Infographic Here

The 12-step landing page rehab program

By: unbounce

Download Infographic Here

Is Email Dead?

By: Visiblegains

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How the world spends its time online

By: Visualeconomics

Download Infographic Here

When was the last time you created an email and sent it out to your entire subscriber list? Last week? Lifecycle marketing offers a more personal approach to creating emails by targeting them toward customers at various stages in their relationship with your company. By segmenting your audience based on their current interest level, you can create emails designed to elicit the next logical response. Still not convinced? Take a look at how lifecycle marketing approaches these three common groups of subscribers.

Subscriber #1: The Newbie

• Profile: This subscriber has just expressed interest in your company by signing up for your email list.
• Email Type: Send the newbie a welcome email that makes him feel appreciated and that encourages him to engage immediately.
• Email Goals: Encourage a first purchase, educate him about your company, promote your website, and let him know you’re glad he’s on board.
• Email Approach: Thank him for signing up and offer him a discount off his first purchase. This is also a great time to let him know what benefits he can expect to receive as a member of your subscriber list.

Subscriber #2: The Supporter

• Profile: This is the loyal gal who loves to shop at your store and opens every email you send.
• Email Type: Respond to the loyalty of this customer by giving her the VIP treatment. Make her feel like a valued customer and she’ll reward you with return visits and recommendations.
• Email Goals: Encourage increased purchasing, offer excellent customer service, and increasing loyalty
• Email Approach: Offer sneak previews for upcoming sales, give special valued-customer discounts, target email creation based on viewing history, send abandoned cart reminders, and provide immediate customer service interactions when appropriate.

Subscriber #3: The Bystander

• Profile: This person has been a member of your email list for a while but has no recent purchases and may fail to open or click on any of your email campaigns.
• Email Type: Seek to win back the loyalty of this subscriber with special offers and “we miss you” messages.
• Email Goals: Jump start re-engagement, understand her concerns, and keep her from transferring loyalty elsewhere.
• Email Approach: Solicit comments by asking for social media involvement or survey responses, offer incentives for purchases or website visits, and seek to make her feel like a valued member of your list.

The goal of lifecycle marketing is to segment your subscriber list based on their customer behavior and then to create targeted emails that encourage greater levels of participation. eConnect Email can help you reach these goals by managing subscriber data, analyzing list metrics, and building segments based on custom criteria.

I’d like to ask you one question: how you are going to make your next test as remarkable as it can be?

This is the opposite of boring
When you are designing email marketing optimization, normally your goals are the best starting point: conversion or customer value. That might be translated into things more measurable like opens, clicks, sales, ROI, etc. The percentage of increase in the results of your optimization is called gain. And the goal is to get the best results you can for your email marketing. But that doesn’t mean that your tests should be boring. A test is even better when it is the opposite of boring: remarkable.

The remarkable optimization
I would advise everyone who is designing an A/B or multivariate test to try and make it a remarkable optimization. What makes a test remarkable? It has potential to be one of those great email marketing stories that your colleagues and customers will love. They just have to tell it to a friend because it has that “I like it and I have to share this” quality. Ok, you can call it a ‘viral optimization’ if you like. Another buzzword is born.

Keep it on the agenda
A remarkable test is also very useful. It will allow you to talk about testing, results and the importance optimization. In your organization, but also with clients. While telling an interesting story. Also it helps to keep testing on the agenda and get some broad understanding about what optimization is all about. Besides that, it could also make for some great PR material and make the company look cool.

Viral optimization
With a bit of creativity you could probably think of a few things you could test that would be remarkable enough to get some viral effects going in your company. Think about all the memorable, epic things you could do with product pictures, incentives and headlines.

Takeaway: Push the testing envelope! Don’t just test what you have to; test what you can do.

So get creative and share with us how you are going to make your next test as remarkable as it can be?

Whether you’re new to email marketing or a seasoned campaigner, you’re probably familiar with the term “automation”. In fact, it’s probably something you’re already doing in a really simple way with email autoresponders.

If so, then you already know that automation is an extremely useful tool for:

• Saving time in handling repetitive tasks
• Improving timeliness and relevancy for subscribers
• Creating efficiencies for your business

What you may not know is that with the right planning and the right tools, there are some really clever ways that automation can help you succeed with your email marketing. And they’re actually pretty easy to do.

Here are 5 common types of email campaigns made easier with automation.

1. Double opt-in for new subscribers

This automated campaign is best practice when it comes to gaining consent with new subscribers. It works by triggering a confirmation email to a new subscriber once they submit the subscription form. The email contains a confirmation link which marks the subscriber as having double opted-in within the database. Once clicked, a second step triggers a welcome email to the new subscriber welcoming them on board.

2. Multi-part newsletter series

These types of campaigns are excellent for lead nurturing as they allow you to guide a prospect down a desired path by delivering timely and relevant content. They work by triggering each part of a newsletter series over specified timeframes. For example, when someone subscribes to your newsletter series, immediately trigger them the first email in the series. One week later at 9am trigger the second email and so on for the remaining emails within the series.

3. Birthday messages

A single-step campaign that triggers a customer an email on the morning of their birthday. This is an excellent way to build relationships with customers. For best effect, ensure the message has a personal touch and include a special offer in the email as a way of saying “happy birthday”.

4. Managing events

Automation is a huge time saver when it comes to managing communications for an event. The “set and forget” aspect of the campaign allows you to focus more time and energy into other aspects of your event management. Event campaigns begin by triggering a thank you / confirmation email to someone immediately after submitting your event registration form. This is followed with an event reminder email and/or SMS message triggered to registrants on pre-determined dates before the event. A final step is to trigger a post event survey email to attendees 1 day after the event.

5. Bounced email management with SMS

This is a really simple, but clever way to maintain a clean database as it kicks in automatically when an email sent to a customer bounces. If a mobile phone number exists in your database, you automatically trigger an SMS asking the customer to reply with their current email address. The database automatically captures the new email address via reply SMS and triggers them the original email message to the updated address. If no mobile phone number exists, a notification email is triggered to your sales team for them to place a phone call to the customer asking for an alternative email address.

People love to play online. Part of the appeal of Facebook is that it gives you so many opportunities to interact with people and with the companies you’re following. Email has traditionally been less interactive than websites or social media, but the current trend in email marketing is to enable interaction with the subscriber. That way, you can capitalize on the surfer mentality (give me something fun to do) while still taking advantage of the more personalized and intimate communication venue of email. Here are some ideas to get your subscribers involved.

• Ask for a vote

Whether it’s a vote on a new ice cream flavor, a cutest photo contest, or a new logo, asking for a vote gives readers a chance to click a button and get involved!  It also makes your subscribers feel valuable by encouraging them to influence the decision you make as a company.

• Include Video Links

While embedding a video in the body of your email isn’t a good idea, you can include links to videos hosted on your website. Ideally, you should include a linked screenshot of the video to arouse interest rather than a text-based link. Videos can engage subscriber attention by offering how-to demonstrations, funny clips, or new product demonstrations.

• Ask for Subscriber Input on a Marketing Concept

You can spin subscriber input a couple of different ways. If you’re brave, ask for subscriber submissions—photos, content, designs—and promise to include the winner on your site or in your next email. Or, you can simply ask subscribers to share experiences and ideas in a comments section on your website, giving them a link to click in the body of your email. This is an excellent option to showcase testimonials.

• Consider a Secondary Call to Action

If your email is primarily sales oriented, a secondary call to action can seek to engage subscribers who may not be quite ready to buy. Use any of the ideas above as your secondary call to action or simply give them an opportunity to find out more. The goal is simply to get them interacting without the commitment of hitting the buy button.

Subscriber interaction with your emails can provide excellent opportunities not only to direct people to your website, but to build anticipation in your audience for the emails that you send. Using eConnect Email’s tracking tools, you can test which campaigns produce the best results in order to generate emails that gain the attention and involvement of your subscribers.

Email is a unique marketing channel because it is permission based. That’s one reason email has a high return on investment: If consumers raise their hands and say, “Please market to me;” they are likely to purchase in the future.

But building a large opt-in subscriber base takes dedication, strategy and time. Here are seven tips to help with that process.

1. Use Strategic Sign-up Locations

Your email sign-up box should be easy to find and obvious on your home page. Additionally, allow visitors to sign up from other pages, especially on the most popular pages of your site. Many top retailers are moving their subscription boxes to the bottom of the page. But I disagree with this. If gaining subscribers is a top priority, the sign-up box should be above the fold, and perhaps in more than one location on the page.

2. Keep the Form Simple

When designing your email sign-up form, ask only for information you absolutely need. Because consumers are impatient and will abandon a lengthy form, keeping your email sign-up form as short a possible — while also gathering all the necessary information — can be difficult. A strategy that works well is to design a two-step process. When consumers enter their email addresses, they are subscribed. They then proceed to the second step and — if they choose — fill out additional form fields.

Crutchfield does a good job with its sign-up process. After entering an email address, a new window pops up (a) asking for additional information, (b) describing the benefits to subscribing, and (c) inquiring if you’d also like to receive the company’s catalog.

Screenshot of Crutchfield’s email sign-up form.

3. Highlight Benefits

Give your subscribers a reason to sign up. Communicate to them that they will receive exclusive offers or valuable information. Treating your visitors as VIPs is a smart strategy and gives them a reason to not only subscribe, but also to remain a subscriber for the long term.

4. Be Upfront

Make sure to explain how often subscribers can expect emails and what types of communications they will get. Content sites that provide third party advertising should inform subscribers ahead of time to reduce high opt-out rates. Monitoring your opt-out rate may give you an indication of how you are delivering on your promises.

5. Use Contests and Promotions

Having periodic contests is a great way to increase your subscriber list. Remember that customers who sign up for contests may not be as responsive as “normal” subscribers, and contest subscribers may warrant a different email strategy all together.

6. Consider Pop-ups

Yes, pop-ups may be obtrusive. However, site visitors sometimes need a bit of nudging to take action, especially something as easy as signing up for a newsletter. It is something worth testing for many sites. The size, location and triggering action of the pop-up can all be altered to find the best combination that will yield results.

7. Use a Welcome Email

A welcome email is like a face-to-face interview with your prospective new customer. Welcome emails get high open rates, so make the most of the opportunity by presenting attractive offers. There is a lot your new prospect may not know about your site. Welcome emails should be sent in real time shortly after the customer signs up to your site.

Takeaway :

Your subscribers are the backbone of your email program. Don’t lose sight of optimizing your basic subscription process as well as employing tactics to easily increase your file. Don’t be afraid to get creative and try something new.

The MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 – the world’s largest vendor-agnostic email marketing event - is coming to Las Vegas on February 7-10, 2012, and you have a chance to win a free ticket. When you leave a comment telling us your biggest challenge in email marketing, you are automatically entered into a random drawing for a free ticket.

We will randomly draw the winning ticket and notify the winner by email on Tuesday, January 3, 2012.

With a full slate of sessions packed with valuable training and research, the 2012 summit will be held at the spectacular Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino. Take advantage of this special ticket giveaway from The eMail Guide.

What is your biggest email marketing challenge? Leave a comment now for your chance to win!

20 Holiday Subject Lines that Light Up the Inbox

A few weeks ago I did a blog post on 10 fab fall email subject lines, and now as we plunge into the holiday season, I wanted to share some eye-catching and inspiring holiday subject lines that have been delivered to my inbox. I hope this will spark your own holiday email marketing and subject line writing.

20 holiday subject lines that stand out in the inbox

1. Don’t wait till Friday; shop online Thanksgiving Day for Members-Only Savings!
2. Best of BLACK FRIDAY COUPONS & FREE SHIPPING
3. Feast on 30 Tasty Gifts under $30‏
4. Save 20% + FREE SHIPPING. 2 Days Only – Cyber Sale
5. A Wine Discount to Brighten Your Holiday Table
6. Holiday sneak peek: Benefit, Dior, Kat Von D + more
7. Tis The Season To Give Great Gifts + 20-40% Off‏
8. Santa’s worked his magic – 15% Off‏
9. Christmas Countdown: 40-50% Off Sweaters‏
10. Top 10 Holiday Gifts + 10% Off & Free Shipping‏
11. Technology gifts…Open me
12. Our most popular gift is…
13. Stocking Stuffer Sunday…Save on Gifts, Gadgets, and More‏
14. Ho ho home: Free shipping when you spend $50 on select holiday home updates.
15. Order Early For Extra Savings & a Stress-Free Holiday Season
16. Jingle Your Way to Savings! HOHOHO Coupon Enclosed.
17. Hurry! 10 Days Left to Save $10 with HOHOHO Code
18. 12 Deals of the Holidays
19. Extreme Holiday Celebration, Ornaments and Big Savings!
20. Exclusive Holiday Gift Set Preorder + Complimentary Shipping & Deluxe Sample!

What holiday subject lines stood out in your inbox? I’d love to hear them. Leave a comment!

Takeaway: Use a little Christmas imaginative magic in crafting your holiday subject lines. A good subject line should catch someone’s attention just like reindeer landing on the roof would!

Website: http://blog.verticalresponse.com/verticalresponse_blog/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/janinepopick

Three Holiday Retail Email Marketing Lessons for Non-Retail Companies

If yours is a services business, B-to-B firm or solo-entrepreneurship, this time of year it can certainly seem like all the marketing focus is on retailers.  Yet just because retail eclipses other industries during the holidays doesn’t mean non-retailers can’t take a few lessons from retail marketers and employ similar strategies in their own communications, especially email.

In the spirit of the season, here are three email marketing lessons non-retail businesses can swipe and deploy from holiday retail marketers.  Here’s hoping they enlighten your email for 2011!

Vary frequency and cadence seasonally

Retailers live and die by the holiday gift giving season (hence the term “black Friday” for the day after Thanksgiving, traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year on which many retail businesses that haven’t yet made an annual profit will go from “being in the red” to “being in the black”).  Even before the days of e-commerce, holiday messaging was much more frequent than advertising done at other times of the year.  This increase is easy to see in the email marketing frequency of retailers, which goes from monthly or weekly to as often as weekly or daily during November and December.

It may not be at holiday time, but chances are there is a period or there are seasons when it makes sense to increase your email frequency.  Perhaps it’s prior to the typical fiscal year-end for companies in your industry, right before your big event, prior to a warranty, service or lease expiration date, or coinciding with a major trade show in your market.  Or, it could make sense to increase your frequency during a particular climate season of the year, like spring for lawn care providers or late summer in preparation for back-to-school products and services.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  It’s important to have both consistency and variability in your email marketing programs.  While newsletters and other continuity programs provide trust, regularity and predictability, they should be supplemented with increases or decreases in the frequency of supplemental communications related to a specific topic.  The best email marketing programs have a mix of steady, reliable messaging and seasonally-relevant but changing cadence.

Tease, tell and remind

In case you haven’t heard, free shipping for arrival by Christmas ends in a day or two.  Really, you didn’t know?  ‘Guess you haven’t received one of the untold reminder emails flooding in-boxes this month!  I’m being sarcastic, but the point is a valid one.  As the tried-and-true axiom of good communication goes, you have to “tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, then tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you told ‘em”.  Whatever your pointed call to action is, whatever your offer – whether date-specific, deadline-or event-driven, or limited in inventory or availability – use your email to communicate it before it begins, as it is active, and while it is waning.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Are you using alerts and reminder emails, or using them as much as you can?  It’s easy to remind after the fact, but what about tipping off your best customers to what’s coming with sneak previews, advance notices and teasers beforehand?  I encourage you to think about any email marketing campaign offer from three points in time: before, during and after, then craft a sequence of messages that fits into a time-line that covers all three periods in sequence.

‘Tis the season to be human, and personal

Although an increase in retail marketing can be one of the downsides of the holidays to some people, one of the nicest things about the season are the novel and often interactive holiday greetings companies and big brands send their customers.  Check out these great electronic holiday greetings I received from Delta and American airlines (each accessible through an HTML email invite linking to these pages).  I particularly like the fact that Delta offers a free gift that’s truly useful and engaging at this time of year.

Not to be outdone by consumer brands, here’s a B-to-B holiday greeting from email marketing services provider (ESP) Bronto that is sure to enhance your water cooler chat. You must, must listen to a few of the songs, all of which are written, sung and produced by Bronto’s own employees – what a talented team!

Take a tip from big brands like these and don’t be the friend who only calls when you need something.  Use the cultural context relevant to your target audience to acknowledge major holidays, gift-giving occasions, and opportunities for gratitude (The Thanksgiving holidays in the US and Canada are obvious ones).

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Thank-you’s and loyalty acknowledgments/rewards should be a regular part of your email marketing program.  Think about these and other communications that give back to your customers rather than ask more from them, and sprinkle them into your email mix throughout the year.  (Hint: are you acknowledging customer birthdays? anniversaries of doing business with you?).  Like Bronto, it’s okay to relate things back to what you do, but keep it fun, personal and human.

Takeaway

It may seem paradoxical, but one of the fastest ways to get new ideas for your business is to look at what companies from a totally different industry are doing. Whether you’re in banking, or insurance, or consulting or publishing or health care – don’t just study the competition.  Think outside the envelope (or in this case, your own in-box!) and take a lesson from retail marketers and others in unrelated sectors to see the marketing strategies they’re using that you can apply to your world.

Last minute example you can learn from.
Click here for the online version

Wishing you safe, peaceful and joyous holidays. Watch this blog in the next few days for my own holiday greeting to you where you’ll see me sing and dance as never before, I promise!

6 things you can do to make your email look awesome!

Wish your emails looked better? You don’t need to be a designer to have beautifully designed emails – you just need to start improving your emails bit by bit. This blog post is aimed at helping you get started by sharing some very simple and easy to implement design tips.

1. Pick your colours wisely

So you’ve got a logo and maybe a corporate colour or two but how do you decide which colours go with them?

Check out this free online ‘colour picker’ from Adobe’s Kuler it allows you to enter the colours you have in your logo and suggests colour schemes that will complement them.

2. Organise your colours

Now that you have picked a colour palette it is time to decide how you are going to use these colours. Start by playing around with your email and decide what colour each element should be. Once you have a good looking template write down where you are going to use various colours and be consistent. Your list should look something like this:

• Headers: Dark Purple #6F1168
• Background: Light Grey #EFEFEF
• Component background: White: #FFFFFF
• Text: Black #000000
• Links: Orange: #f27123

3. Pick your fonts

In my opinion – 2 is enough! Do you have a special corporate font? Chances are it won’t render correctly in emails so if you really want to use it do your headings in Photoshop or a free image editor and make sure that the ‘alt text’ for the image is the same as the words in the heading.

Then pick one of these ‘web-friendly’ fonts for the rest of your email: Times New Roman, Arial, Comic Sans, Courier, Trebuchet, Verdana, Helvetica, Century Gothic, Impact and Tahoma.

4. Organise your fonts

Fonts are very important for scan ability so make sure you consider how you can use fonts to tell people what is important. Now you don’t want to go crazy and make each line a different size but it is a very useful tool if used consistently as are colour, bold, italics and other font settings. Decide how you are going to use these things! As an example, I suggest:

• bold (and maybe underlined colour) for calls to action,
• italics for quotations,
• colour for headings and
• underlined colour for in-text links.

5. Find balance

A picture tells a thousand words however when designing an email remember there is a chance people will not see your picture unless they read the words and click that magic little ‘display images button’ so you need to include both.

Balance is also about top to bottom and left to right. Look at your email and think about it as a physical object – if you put it on your desk would it fall over?

6. De-clutter

Look at your email and think about what people really need to see upfront? Magazines don’t put everything on the cover and nor should you. Create space between articles and topics. Use landing pages for more detailed content and rather than shrinking that huge image just cut a bit of it out and link it to the whole image.

There is also this great thing called ‘padding’ or ‘paragraph settings’ depending on the software you use, which many people seem to forget about. You can put a bit of space around your text or image or section of the email. It’s really easy, just find the ‘padding’ settings and experiment – you’ll love it.

My next blog post 6 more things you can do to make your email look awesome! Will explore how you can continue to improve your emails.

OK its fair for you to be asking yourself what the heck I’m going on about since Santa doesn’t do email marketing. Indeed, but considering I wrote
10 things Sesame Street can teach us about email marketing
and
5 things The Flintstones can teach us about email & social marketing, well, what do you expect?

Here’s some wisdom for email marketers from the jolly old elf himself!

7 things Santa can teach us about email marketing

Segment
Santa has been segmenting his list since day one. He’s got the naughty list and the nice list. And he checks it at least twice!

Permission
Excluding over enthusiastic parents, Santa’s list is 100 percent opt-in.

Relevancy
Santa’s clients (as every parent knows) are always convinced they will get what they expect from him.

Spam
Spammers are all on the naughty list.

List Hygiene
It’s vital because the naughty and nice lists need constant updating.

Subject lines are important
Can anyone top “Dear Santa” for a subject line?

A strong call to action
“Be good!” Beat that.

Today’s 1 to 1 Marketing Strategy is All about Integration by Kenny Van Beeck

Digital communication is getting a bigger piece of the marketing strategy pie every year. Strong relationships with your customers become more important every day.

Integration between four essential marketing elements is crucial to manage and increase the efficiency and productivity of your online customer contact, and offers a lot of opportunities. Email, CRM, web analytics and social all have specific advantages, combining these four offers even more added value.

Email
A high quality email marketing system allows you to interact on a personalized and timely base, with targeted, relevant messages.

CRM
A CRM system allows you to capture and track customer information like sales data, behavioral data, preferences, etc, in a centralized digital location. This data is extremely valuable in a customer-centric society, allowing you to discover the real needs and wants of your customer or prospect.

Web analytics
Web analytics programs help you to monitor and measure website traffic, visitor behavior and preferences on your personal website. Many web analytics are available for free on the web, so it is easy to integrate a web analytics reporting tool on your site and certainly don’t forget social media monitoring.

Social media
Social media have a high market penetration and are easily adopted. If used well it can bring you a lot of traffic and create a real brand experience.
Don’t get fooled, it’s not because they are free that it is costless. You will have to invest in time, strategy and coordination.

What makes this really interesting in a 1 to 1 Marketing strategy?
Many web tools allow you to integrate different elements of email, CRM, web analytics and social in one package.

Let’s focus on email
If we focus on email marketing, you need a very efficient email platform allowing you to build up an effective email lifecycle with your customers. Also include several operational CRM features in your database structure with the possibility to connect with external CRM systems using an API.

Social media functions such as a share or a like are not more than normal for each good email marketing platform.

Finally it is very easy to add personal web analytics code in your email message to measure all customer steps from receiving the email until the online purchase.

The importance of the address fold

The address fold holds 4 main components:
• The from address
• The from name
• The reply address
• The subject line

Each of these 4 components has a particular impact on the success of your email marketing campaign.

The from address
• The from address is a brand builder
• Using the same from address in every campaign will have an impact on the reputation of your IP. People will have the ability to white list you according to the from address.
• Using a personalized from address can have a positive impact on how people perceive your brand. This is mainly true for B2C campaigns.

The from name
• The from name is even more of a brand builder. It mostly carries the name of the company.
• If possible, personalize the from name as if it is coming from a real person. This will have a positive impact on the brand perception.

The reply address
• It is important to use a valid reply address instead of the well-known no-reply one. People can react via this tool (and you certainly do not want to lose that).
• In the case of a malfunctioning of, e.g. the unsubscribe mechanism, having a reply address is crucial. It is common practice to ask for an unsubscribe via a simple reply. A no-reply function will only motivate the receiver to hit the spam button. Which is an important factor on measuring the reputation of your IP.

The subject line
• The subject line is the most important component of your address fold.
• Include a clear call to action in your subject line.
• Using values, discounts, urgency or exclusive deals will increase the effectiveness of your subject line.
• Try to limit the number of characters to a maximum of 50, including spaces.
Some email clients won’t show more than that and on PDA’s and smartphones this is a maximum in general.
• Consider the subject line as a Twitter post. It has to be short, effective and teasing.
• The subject line is what makes you open the email and start reading it.

Measuring the effectiveness of the address fold.
To measure the effectiveness of your address fold you will have to look at the unique opened ratio of your email marketing campaign. The easiest way is to take the number of sent emails, substract the bounces, and finally measure the number of opened emails on the remaining number of emails.