Blog - Archive for April, 2011

Murphy’s Law dictates that when using images in email there will almost always be one browser that doesn’t render the images correctly, despite your meticulous testing. For this reason, many marketers choose not to include them in their emails, a perfectly valid reason given the work that goes into getting it right (sometimes). This, together with other obstacles such as images disabled by default and companies blocking images to save bandwidth, it’s easy to see why some people don’t bother with them. When done correctly however, images add to the overall effect of an email, making it more visually appealing, interactive and engaging. With this in mind we hope to clear the air and look at a few ways that you can use optimize images in your emails.

1. Firstly, it’s important that you become a “known sender”, which means asking your subscriber to add your email address to their contacts. Not only will this help ensure that your email passes through any spam filters straight to their inbox, but it also means that images will automatically be displayed. Therefore, encourage them with a message along the lines of: “add this email address to your contacts so you always receive our emails” and explain the reasoning behind it.
2. Any images you include need to be relevant to the content and enhance the message, not distract from it. Stick to between one and three small, compressed images that add value to your email and are quick to download (test this before you hit send). The more images your email has the longer it takes to download and there’s always the chance that it won’t render correctly when it does open.
3. It might be stating the obvious, but be sure to include ALT text. This way if the image is blocked the user can still read a description of it and decided from there if they want/need to download it. Also remember to include captions, especially for images that are contextually important for your email message.
4. Try to avoid using images for important content such as headlines, links and calls to action. If the image doesn’t automatically download and if your subscriber doesn’t download it then you could lose an important conversion.
5. Finally, email newsletters and campaigns require constant testing and even more so if you have included images, therefore you need to cover all bases. How does it look in a preview pane, on a full screen and with images turned ON and OFF? Once you’re happy with this then you can start sending.

HTML and the use of images in emails has certainly come a long way in terms of setting standards and making it easier to produce content of this kind, but we aren’t out of the woods yet and we need to take every opportunity we can to follow ‘best practices’ and maximise the effectiveness of what we are currently able to achieve. Good luck!

Drip email campaigns are by no means a new marketing strategy, but they are still one of the most popular tactics when it comes to nurturing leads. Not quite sure what it is? A drip campaign involves sending or ‘dripping’ a series of regular promotional pieces over a period of time. Although each individual email serves a different function, it also builds on previous emails in the campaign. The goal behind a drip campaign is to encourage a certain action from the lead (or customer), such as a sign up, or purchase. An effective drip campaign aims to keep your readers informed and aware of your products, which is especially necessary in the beginning stages of an online relationship, when you are establishing brand awareness with your leads and arming them with the right information to help them make the right purchasing decision.

Drip campaigns take their name from the agricultural term ‘drip irrigation’, whereby crops or plants are given small amounts of water consistently over a long period of time, thereby making it more resource efficient. This (and this is where the email marketing analogy comes in) is because with drip irrigation the ground is given consistent moisture as opposed to just being soaked and then left alone before it is drenched again (think email spray and pray tactics).

No doubt, drip campaigns need to be thought out carefully and planned strategically, so we’ve looked at four important questions you need to consider before you put yours into action.

1. What’s your aim?

What is your end goal and what exact action do you want/need your customers to take in order to reach it? You need to determine the key messages for each email and optimize them individually so that you can work towards reaching this goal.

2. Do you have your content lined up?

It’s been said a thousand times before, but it’s true. Content is king and well-written, informative content will keep your customers and leads interested. With drip campaigns, the content needs to be enticing, clever and even a bit teasing, especially if you are aiming to build up anticipation over the course of your campaign.

3. Are you able to segment your campaigns?

If you’ve only just started out, then you might not have much data with which to segment your campaigns, however even if you have basic information, such as whether they are male or female, it can be used to target your customers with more relevant content. Think about it, there is little worse than receiving an email that is promoting men’s underwear at half price, and you’re a woman. Customer engagement, I think not. As your campaigns and relationships develop, you’ll find out more about your subscribers, such as what their interests are, what they would like to see more or less off, their buying behaviour etc. all of which will help ensure you deliver interesting campaigns that hold value.

4. What’s your layout going to look like?

Think carefully about the layout and design. More than likely you’re going to keep the same template for the duration of the drip campaign, so while it might be nice to get a bright, funky, busy email once in a while, if you’re sending it once a day then the novelty will wear off quickly. Keep it simple, with short and concise copy, one or two relevant images and the necessary links. Remember, you want to keep the focus on getting your readers to perform a specific action with each email you send and you don’t want them to get distracted along the way.

While these steps are by no means the only questions that you need to consider, they are some of the most important ones. A drip email campaign can be one of the best decisions you make or a complete flop, so make sure you’ve planned and thought through each one meticulously before you hit the send button.

Email list churn is very nearly considered one of the few ‘givens’ in life (next to death and taxes that is). No? Ok fine, maybe it’s not that dramatic but it is something that most marketers have to deal with and likely on a regular basis. List churn refers to the number of subscribers who are ‘lost’ to your list over a given period and it’s measured by the number of hard bounces, unsubscribes, or spam complaints you receive. Other factors that add to list churn include email content relevance, frequency of the campaigns, inactive subscribers (though this can be hard to measure) and ineffective opt-in processes, all of which in turn affect deliverability and your bottom line. On average a marketer will experience 20-30% list churn every year, but you can work out your rate by following this simple equation:

Tally up your hard bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints for the time period you’re interested in (usually a month or year) and divide this total number of ‘lost’ subscribers by your current list size and presto, you have your churn rate. A basic example looks like this:

• 3,000 (‘lost’ subscribers) / 10,000 (current list size) = 0.3 x 100 = 30% list churn rate.

While list churn is inevitable to a certain extent, there are steps you can take to reduce it and although they aren’t necessarily ‘quick fixes’ (if there is there such a thing in email marketing?!), if you make a concerted effort to employ these tactics you should start to see positive results.

1. Tell your subscribers everything they need to know

If you don’t have a preference centre where subscribers can decide which newsletters they receive and how often, then tell them what they can expect from you when they first sign up, and stick to this. Email marketing is all about developing a long term online relationship with your subscriber, and this is where it starts. This would also be a good time to lay out your privacy policy, in layman’s terms. No need to go into 5 pages of indecipherable text, just let your subscribers know that you aren’t going to sell, rent or disclose any of their details to anyone else. It’s really that simple.

2. Learn from your mistakes

If someone unsubscribes, politely ask for feedback or comments about why they’re opting out and what you could do better, and then do what you can to implement those suggestions into your campaign. It all helps with customer engagement and while you might have lost this particular subscriber, the constructive criticism can be used to adapt your strategy and help ensure you meet the expectations of the next customer who signs up.

3. Make things easy for your subscribers

Quick and simple opt-in and unsubscribe processes along with reliable contact details are what your subscribers are initially looking for, so get off to a good start and make sure these aspects of your campaign are optimized for ease of use. It’s also a good idea to offer a simple preference centre so your subscribers can easily update their profile or change their preferences in terms of what their interests are, which newsletters they’re interested in, how often they want to receive them etc. Not only is this a good way of engaging with them, but the data is hugely beneficial to you too, because you can use it to segment your audience and target them more effectively.

4. Re-engage inactive subscribers

The term ‘inactive’ is open to interpretation, but generally if a subscriber hasn’t clicked on any of your emails in the past 6 months (based on say 1-2 campaigns a month), then you could assume that they now fall into the ‘inactive’ category. It’s not a train smash, rather see it as an opportunity to re-engage with them and get them interested again in what you had to offer. They obviously liked something you did otherwise they wouldn’t have signed up in the first place, so work off of this. Assuming these subscribers are perhaps bored with your current email offerings, your reactivation campaign needs to jump out at them and offer something truly irresistible that’s going to guarantee a high open rate. This would also be a good time to find out if they are still interested in receiving your emails or if they’d prefer to reduce their subscription or unsubscribe completely.

All marketers enjoy and appreciate a thoroughly planned and well-executed HTML email campaign and if you think about it, there’s certainly a lot to like about them. Quite simply, HTML emails have the potential to pack a solid punch. Let’s have a quick look at some of their endearing features:

• Greater control over formatting, layout, colour, fonts, graphics and branding – meaning you can unleash your inner designer and be as creative as you like.
• The result is a beautifully designed email that visually appealing (if you’ve done your testing)
• Interactive functionality
• You can include images that enhance your copy and corporate branding that helps establish brand awareness (make sure these are embedded properly and not just copy/pasted)
• You can include links to: websites, landing pages, videos, sign up forms, etc. (basically anywhere you want to)
• You can track the open rate and click through rate

Before we get carried away with this, it should be noted that although HTML emails are a hugely popular choice for email marketers, plain text emails are not without benefits and in fact many subscribers prefer to receive them over the HTML version. This is because they are:

• Straight forward and easy to read
• Don’t require images to be downloaded
• Always render correctly no matter the ESP or the type of mobile device it’s viewed on

Also, from an email marketer’s point of view they’re easy to produce and don’t require hours or days of testing. HTML versions on the other hand may very well have you pulling out your hair at 2am in the morning because for some reason it ‘looks a bit funny’ when you test it in such and such a browser or email client. Which is why marketers almost always include a plain text option alongside the HTML version, so that those who can’t or don’t like to open HTML emails don’t miss out.

Of course each version also has its share of downsides. With HTML:

• Emails invariably take much longer to open and download, especially if they’re image heavy.
• If you’ve downloaded the email to view it later offline the images won’t display and links will appear to be broken
• Someone, somewhere will undoubtedly have a problem with it rendering incorrectly when they open it
• A busy design and too many images and/or links can be very distracting, which ultimately affects your click through and conversion rates
• If you’re an email marketing newbie, creating an HTML email might be a bit mind boggling, although most good ESPs (such as Mail Blaze) have pre-build templates which do all the hard work for you.

And with plain text:

• Text can’t be hyperlinked
• Any link that is included has to be typed out completely (e.g. http://www.mailblaze.com)
• You can’t include any images or graphics
• You can’t format the font at all

At the end of the day, when it comes down to it both formats have proven to work very well in terms of open rates and conversion rates, so the best thing that you can do is to create both an HTML and a plain text version of your campaign and give your subscribers the option to open either. That way you cater effectively to all your subscribers and it helps ensure your message gets across to as many of them as possible. In short, cover all your bases.