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If you’re spending time and money putting together an email marketing campaign you want to be sure that your messages are being delivered to their recipients. Unfortunately, bulk emails can look like spam to an email client, in which case they’ll be blocked or filtered out. Here are a couple of guidelines to follow if you want to avoid the spam filter:

1. Make sure you send emails only to people who really want them. Do not purchase email addresses. Each person on your mailing list should have specifically requested to receive your email through an opt-in method of subscription. In fact, it’s better to have a double opt-in process where subscribers are sent an email asking them to click to confirm their opt-in. Periodically send confirmation messages to users to make sure they still want to receive your email.

It would also help to show subscribers an example of the email they will be receiving as well as let them know the frequency with which you are going to be sending them emails. Make sure you stick to this. If you told your recipients that you’re going to send them a monthly email and then start sending them weekly, your mail is going to be marked as spam.

2. Make it easy to unsubscribe from your email. Put an obvious, clearly visible unsubscribe link in the body of the email that will take the user to a page confirming his or her intention to unsubscribe. Alternatively make it so that the user can unsubscribe by replying to your email with an unsubscribe request. When you get an unsubscribe request, respond to it immediately. Another way to ensure your messages aren’t flagged as spam is to unsubscribe users whose addresses bounce multiple pieces of mail.

3. Use email authentication to sign your emails. By authenticating your email, you are ensuring that the recipient’s email provider will be able to recognize the sender of the incoming message. It helps the email provider identify that the email is legitimately from you so it won’t classify your email as spam. There are three major authentication standards. They are Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Sender ID, and DomainKey Identified Mail (DKIM).

4. Always send bulk email from the same address. It helps the email provider as well as the recipients to distinguish your email from spam. If the emails look like they’re coming from different IP addresses then mail servers will start to assume that addresses are being spoofed and those emails will start to be flagged as spam. A static ‘From:’ address also helps users who have set up filters to route messages to a specific folder. Ask your subscribers to add this e-mail address to their address book. If the ‘From:’ address is listed in the user’s contacts list, it is more likely to arrive in their inbox and not in the junk box.

5. Separate your IP addresses according to function. Don’t send bulk promotional mail from the same address that you send transactional mail. The reason for doing that is because the email provider stores reputation data about each email address you send from. By segmenting the mail stream you’ll make it more likely that the transactional mail will land up in your client’s inbox. If you don’t know how to do this, ask the team at Mail Blaze and we’ll sort it out for you.
6. Brand your marketing email so that recipients can quickly identify who it’s from and won’t mistake it as spam. Your email address should clearly identify your company. The subject line should include your company’s name too and should make explicit the content of the message.

Before you begin building an email newsletter, you need to do some planning. Consider who you are sending emails to, how frequently you are going to send them, what kind of content you are going to include, and what sort of visual design you want. Most importantly, you need to ask yourself why you are sending out these emails.

If you’re trying to drive sales, your newsletter will probably offer a promotion for your store. This kind of email would focus more on graphics and buttons and a strong call-to-action. On the other hand, if you want to send emails to build a following for your content, your email will be text heavy with a magazine style layout and structure.

Once you’ve decided on the purpose of your email, you can set measurable goals for your email marketing campaign. What results do you want your newsletter to achieve specifically? Maybe it’s your goal to get people to click through to a certain page on your website, or to get a certain number of new subscribers each month. Keeping this goal in mind will help you design your newsletter. You’ll be able to decide what content to keep in and what to keep out.

With the planning out of the way, you can turn your attention to design and technical factors. Building an HTML email newsletter (as opposed to a plain text email) presents unique challenges to designers. It’s difficult to design an email that renders well across all the various email clients. Unlike web browsers, email clients are not built to a set of standards.

So how do you go about building a newsletter that displays well in most email software? Experienced developers recommend that you keep your email design simple and use primitive code. The more complicated a design is, the less likely it is to display properly in an older email client. Here are a few guidelines to follow when coding for an email environment.

First of all, you should use tables to control layout instead of DIVs and CSS. There are more than a dozen email clients out there and their ability to render CSS and HTML varies. As a result, you need to use structural tables to position your design elements if you want them to display consistently across different readers. Although CSS support is poor with mail clients, you should still use inline CSS to store all your style information, such as background colours and fonts, once your nested table layout is in place.

Secondly, don’t rely on images. They may not be visible to subscribers. Most email programs do not allow images to load by default. Keep that in mind when you design your email so that no important content is suppressed by image blocking. Whilst the use of images can lead to very creative layouts, if images don’t load, then the email is worthless. If you still want to use an all-image email then make sure your email has HTML text as well as plain text. Test your design with images turned off before sending to see how it affects layout.

However, if you use Mail Blaze for bulk emailing, you can rest assured that your images will always be visible to your subscribers. Mail Blaze is one of the very few companies that embeds images in body of your email campaign. There will be no need to ‘click to download’ images if you use our service.

Finally, check that your newsletter displays well across a variety of email clients by sending it to a range of test email accounts. In fact, you should test your designs regularly as there has been continual change in some clients, especially the web-based providers like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo!

If creating your own HTML newsletter seems a bit daunting, you can always get the team at Mail Blaze to manage creation, sending and tracking of your email campaigns. You tell us your requirements, and we’ll create a custom designed newsletter template for you that’s easy to edit and add content to. Bulk email marketing has never been easier!

If you’re a business owner and you want to market your product or service, the first thing you’ll ask yourself is how to reach your target audience. On the top of your list should be email marketing. In essence, email marketing is the sending of promotional messages via email. It’s the oldest digital marketing strategy around, yet it delivers one of the highest ROIs. Here’s what you need to know about email marketing so that you can use this powerful tool to help grow your business:

Email marketing is used to build brand awareness and has two main purposes. In the first instance, you would send emails to prospective customers with the intention of acquiring new business or encouraging people to buy something. The email might include an announcement or special offer enticing the user to take immediate action.

In the second instance, emails are used for retention purposes – to maintain relationships with existing customers and encourage repeat business. This type of regular email usually takes the form of an email newsletter. It should include valuable, interesting content for your customers to read, not just a promotional message.

In advertising lingo, email marketing falls under the umbrella of direct marketing. This means it is a form of advertising geared towards a target audience in a way that can be measured. For example, if you’re sending out bulk emails, how many people clicked on a link, made a phone call, or bought a product online after reading your mail? This is called the “response rate” and it’s a valuable metric used to measure the success of your marketing campaign.
Email marketing is akin to sending people direct mail in the post, sending a print newsletter, or placing an advertisement in a subscription magazine or newspaper. There is one important difference however, and that is the issue of permission.

Permission marketing is another term you’ll hear mentioned in connection with email marketing. This form of advertising requires that the prospective customer has given explicit permission for the business to contact them. For example, a customer has subscribed to receive an email newsletter. It differs from traditional advertising that interrupts whatever you’re doing to capture your attention, like a TV commercial. In the permission model, a customer has volunteered their attention by agreeing to learn more about a company and its products.

So these are the two pillars which make email marketing so successful. One, the fact that you can measure the results of your campaign, and two, the fact that you can target your message at a group of consumers who are interested in your product. This means that your budget is used more efficiently because offers are only sent to people that are actually interested in the product.

We’ve said it before; email marking is the good old trusty steed of online marketing, time and again delivering consistently good results and a high ROI. Although email has been declared ‘dead’ countless times over the past decade, it always makes a solid industry come-back. Each time, bringing with it better tools, greater functionality, bolder designs, new ways to get around spam filters and increased opportunities to engage with customers and subscribers on their terms (like via  their preferred social platforms and mobile devices.) I think by now, everyone can (if they haven’t already), accept that email marketing isn’t going anywhere soon.

This doesn’t mean we should be sitting back on our laurels though, far from it. Instead we should be constantly looking ahead and working pro-actively to ensure that we’re maximizing our email marketing ROI.

With this in mind, we look at a few steps that, if done on a regular basis, could help you to improve your email marketing results.

1. A/B Split Testing

Here are some interesting stats for you. Did you know that according to findings from the Marketing Sherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, 61% of marketers do not routinely test email campaigns to optimize performance. In a 2009 report by Forrester Research, results showed that marketers who test well and consistently earn up to 20 % more than those who don’t. Whilst the first stat is worrying to say the least, the latter should be motivation enough to get back on track with testing your campaigns before you send them. A/B Split testing allows you to test two different variables at the same time. Subject line, call to action, body content, landing pages, images, background colours and time of day can all be tested against each other. Winning combinations are then tested against new variables on an on-going basis, which is then known as champion/challenger testing. This ensures that you always have most effective combination at any given time. Yes, it might initially be time consuming, but if you want significant results then this is part of what you have to do.

2. Segmenting

It’s highly unlikely that your entire data base is homogenous. The broader your target audience, the more diluted your email newsletter results are going to be.  However, if you segment (and target) effectively, you have a much better chance of maintaining concentrated results. The beauty behind segmenting is that it can be as done as simply or advanced as you want or need it to be. Gender, age and location might be effective enough for what you want to achieve, but some email marketers take it much further and start segmenting according  to industry, income bracket (if this is disclosed in a preference centre), purchase history, buyer behaviour and customer loyalty.

3. Triggered Emails

Triggered emails are relatively simple to set up and can be used for a number of different purposes. Some of the most common uses include: abandoned cart messages, email newsletter sign up confirmations, event registration and confirmation details, transactional messages, subscribers birthdays, updated user profiles and surveys and friendly reminder (‘remember us?’) emails. Triggered emails keep your subscribers up to date with information they need to know and also gives you the opportunity to engage with them and show them how much you appreciate their loyalty.

4. Aligning content, subject lines and landing pages

It might seem simple enough to achieve this, but it doesn’t mean that everyone gets it right all the time. Your subject line needs to clearly (and honestly) state exactly what your subscriber can expect to find in the body of the email message. You certainly won’t win any friends (or new subscribers for that matter) by having an enticing subject line and then a completely unrelated or misleading offer in the content. Follow through on your promises. The same applies to your landing pages. If your button says: ‘Sign Up Here’, then make sure the link takes them to the sign up form on your website. ‘Buy now’ should equally take them to the purchase/checkout page. You get the idea, double check your links to make sure they’re taking your visitors to the right places. Giving your subscribers misleading information will only ensure that in the future they ignore or distrust any other emails you send.

5. Email List Cleansing

When was the last time you went through your email database and removed any inactive or invalid email addresses? It’s time to get tough. Firstly, remove (but don’t delete) any subscribers who haven’t clicked on or opened any of your email messages in the last 3 or 6 months, depending on how often you send emails. Next, go through your list and check for any typo’s that might be affecting your bounce rate. Commas instead of full stops are one of the most common errors and are easily corrected. You should also remove any role accounts from your list, on which your efforts are surely wasted. These include addresses such as admin@companyname.com, accounts@companyname.com. You might be pleasantly surprised to find that these simple steps make a significance difference to your overall bounce rate.

Really what it comes down to is that you should be focused on bettering your email marketing all the time. For sure, it’s an on-going and sometimes frustrating process having to test campaigns, monitor your subscribers and scrub your database lists, but there is no doubt that these steps will help you to better understand and target your customers, which is of course, the ultimate goal.

In previous posts we’ve looked at html vs. plain text emails and also shown you ways to optimize your plain text campaigns. The question of which converts better is an on-going debate and the fact is most email marketers have had success from using both types in their email newsletters. OK, maybe it’s not so much a debate.  After all, neither party can really bash the other’s preferred method if it’s getting desirable results, right?

However, does one actually out-perform the other in terms of converting? Unfortunately there isn’t a straight answer. Yes, plain text emails have an easier time of slipping through spam filters, but it also depends on your target market, segmentation and what message it is that you are trying to convey.

Perhaps first of all we need to determine what ‘conversion’ means for you. Your call to action could be:

• Clicking through to the desired landing page
• Downloading a report or white paper
• Subscribing to a newsletter
• Completing a survey
• Making an enquiry
• Ordering or purchasing a product or service or
• Requesting further information

Your specific call-to-action might determine the type of email message you send. Does your message rely heavily on visuals or images, or can you achieve similar results by directing subscribers to an external URL through a link in your plain text email message? Image heavy emails are considerably more difficult to get through to your subscribers. Spam filters zone in on them, they are often blocked by default, they can turn your once beautiful design into a something that looks like a two year child has drawn (read: messy and nonsensical) and the message can be lost completely if you haven’t bothered to include alt text.  If you’re going to go the image heavy route though, don’t embed them. This way, subscribers can at least decide whether they want to download them or not.

With the increasing difficulty that email marketers face in reaching their subscribers inbox, many find that plain text emails make it easier to slip through the spam filters. While they might not provide as much eye-candy as their html counterparts, if they’re getting through, it means you have a greater chance of engaging with your subscribers the way you intend. And if you’re engaging, you’re probably converting too.

Another thing we need to take into consideration is the increasing number of people who access their email on a mobile device. You might be surprised to find a significant percentage of your subscribers do this (if you haven’t already, you should do a short survey to find out which of them do, or add the option to your email preference centre and segment accordingly). Right now, there are still a few problems with html email rendering on mobiles. No doubt it’s gotten easier but for now, quite a few marketers prefer to still use plain text emails for their mobile subscribers. There’s less risk and it increases the chances of their messages being read and acted on. Plain text emails generally load faster (or seem to because they are image ‘free’) and if you’ve optimized your copy, they should be easier to read on the screen. If however, you’re intent on using html then stick to a single call-to-action image and make sure the message you want to get through is absolutely clear.

Because html and plain text conversion can depend on your target audience and segmentation you should experiment (sorry, I mean test) each version against each other. Be sure to also test different variables, notably subject line, calls-to-action, body content and landing pages, all of which can be changed in both plain text and html emails. This way, you can see for yourself which version converts better for each type of message and decide from there whether html or plain text is best for you.

When it comes down to it, there is no denying that a beautifully designed html email that renders correctly, has a clear call-to-action, links to all the right places and has the necessary bells and whistles sticks in people’s minds. However, if you’re still in the learning stages of creating email campaigns, then take your foot off the heavy html pedal and stick to content and a layout that you know will reach your subscribers. Don’t worry, email marketing is a long term ‘relationship’ and there’s plenty of time to impress them at a later stage with your awesome design skills.

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!

In short, an email preference centre is much like a membership page on your website that allows your subscribers to manage their subscriptions. After signing up and when they login, they’re given the opportunity to update their profile and also specify what information they’d like to receive from you and how often. This works best and is necessary if you have a variety of email campaigns that you send out, such as newsletters, sales alerts, product information, industry updates and more. In the preference centre, your subscriber can opt in for as many of the campaigns as they wish, and subsequently make changes whenever they want. They should also be able to specify how often they receive correspondence from you, the format of the emails (html or text versions) and whether they want to subscribe to RSS, mobile or SMS updates.

If you supply products such as books, music, DVD’s or clothes then you should definitely look at incorporating an email preference centre to manage your subscriptions effectively. If however, you only offer a single product or service it’s not necessary.

The real value of a preference centre is that it gives subscribers complete control over what lands in their inbox, and this helps build trust and loyalty, which is one of the main objectives of email marketing. By giving them what they want when they want and honouring their preferences, they’ll have less reason to unsubscribe from your email campaigns.

Keep in mind that customers are voluntarily offering private information about themselves at a time and pace that suites them. Therefore, it’s important that your preference centre is friendly and welcoming and the questions aren’t overly complex, in depth or personal. You want them to feel like they can come back at any time to make changes and when they do, it’s a painless process.

Contrary to popular belief, an email preference centre is pretty easy to implement and to begin with many people simply store data on their email platform or CRM, which is perfectly acceptable.

Although progressive profiling is not a new concept, it is a ‘practice’ that many marketers seem to have side-lined of late. This is evident with the number of otherwise great websites that bombard would-be subscribers with a 15 field sign up form, all for the privilege of receiving a newsletter. Needless to say it can (and quite possibly does) hinder ones sign up and conversion rates.

Registering for something or requesting a download should be a quick and painless experience that needn’t require handing over too much private information. So, when a visitor is confronted with a stream of increasingly personal questions with no explanation behind them, they are likely to abandon the process, permanently.

Of course ultimately you want to find out as much information about your subscribers as you can, but if you want to do it right, you need to do it subtly. Enter progressive profiling. What this clever little feature allows you to do is ask for information incrementally rather than all at once, thereby engaging with your subscribers in a slow and steady manner.

How it works is like this:

1. When a visitor first lands on your site and wants to sign up for your newsletter, only ask for their name, surname and email address. This is all you need to start building a basic profile of them.
2. The next time they return to the website, prompt a few more questions such as their industry and job title. On their following visit, ask them the name of their company, city and or country. Subsequent questions to this could be what their interests are and what they would like to receive from you. What’s key here is that because you are only asking two or three questions at a time your abandon rate is low.

Remember to reconfirm your privacy policy each time a subscriber converts, and reassure them that any data you gather is used to make sure your email campaigns remain relevant to them.

One of the great benefits of this tactic is that with each new interaction you find out valuable information about your subscriber. At the same time, they don’t feel uncomfortable with an intimidating sign up form because the process is handled over a number of stages, at their own pace. The result, everyone’s happy. You get the information you need and the subscriber gets their newsletter (or whatever it happens to be).

Naturally, to keep your subscribers coming back for more and happy to give out personal details at each interaction, you need to be offering truly unique and relevant content from the start.  You can read more about keeping (newsletter) content relevant here and great ideas for content here.

The process of setting up progressive profiling questions might involve a little bit more PT, but there is no doubt that it allows you to develop a strong online relationship with your customer, even if it is over a longer period of time.

You’d be forgiven for believing that the size of your email list carries more weight than the quality of the email addresses it contains. Truth is, sending campaigns to inactive or worse still; invalid email addresses can cause nightmarish problems for your online and sender reputation. A dirty list sends a message to the ISP’s that you don’t really know about your customers or about following industry standards. Now more than ever, thorough email list hygiene is a vital good habit that any email marketer needs to adopt if they want to stay ahead of the game, and certainly the ISP’s.

It might seem like a hassle to scrub up your list, but here are 5 quick and easy ways you can help to keep it shiny and clean. Remember the more often you do it, the more effective it is.

1. If someone goes through the process of unsubscribing then honour it and remove them as soon as possible from your mailing list. Forget all the nonsense about having a certain amount of time to do this, it’s not complicated and it’s better for both you and the subscriber at the end of the day. You won’t be wasting your money sending emails to people who aren’t interested and they get to bow out gracefully, hopefully before they get really irritated and report you for spam.

2. Any bounces (hard and soft) need to be addressed immediately. If it’s a hard bounce it’s likely that the email address is invalid or non-existent in which case you can easily get it verified. It’s a simple process and sites such as verify-email.org and email-unlimited.com offer free email verification. The format of the email is tested as well as the validity of the domain and user. It’s important that you keep an eye on soft bounces too, anything that hasn’t been opened by a subscriber in 6 months or more needs to be removed (not deleted) from your list. Keep all inactive email addresses together so that you can approach them at a later stage with a specially targeted reactivation campaign. You can read more about re-engaging with your inactive subscribers here.

3. If your email list is small enough, you can manually go through it and check for simple data entry mistakes such as misspelled domains (hotmale.com and alo.com for example). Once they’ve been corrected then make a point of running them through the email verification tool again. If they come back with an error after this then discard them.

4. Make use of data validation on your subscription forms. By validating each field you can ensure that any information entered is formatted correctly before it is accepted into your list. It also ensures visitors correct their mistakes immediately, which saves you the trouble of having to do this later.

5. Often you’ll find distribution accounts, such as “sales” or “all” @company.com on your email list, especially if it’s a bought or rented list. It’s good practice to remove any that you find and this can easily be done by including common email addresses such as “all” and “sale” to your suppression list. It’s important to note that ISP’s often target invalid and non-existent email addresses in these accounts for spam traps (honey pots). Once they’ve tracked you they’ll place a temporary (if you are lucky) or permanent (if you are not so lucky) block on any messages to that email. A temporary block is normally lifted once the offending address is removed from the list, so the sooner you do this the better.

By making a point of regularly sifting through your email list every 6 months or so (depending on how fast it grows), you can rest assured that it’ll remain clear of any spam-trap luring email addresses, and of course you’ll also save yourself quite a bit of money (and trouble!) in the long run.

There may come a time in your email marketing career when you realise that the campaigns that you have been working so hard on are starting to fall on blind eyes. Some of your subscribers, you now realise, haven’t opened or clicked through your emails in quite a long time. They have essentially become ‘inactive’.  You might think that your opt-in list has been thoroughly researched and compiled but the reality is that an estimated 25-33% of your list can be deemed ‘inactive’, according to a preliminary email marketing analysis.

Before flat panic sets in and you send off a barrage of ‘why don’t you love me anymore?’ emails you need to try and work out why they have become inactive. From there, you can then take steps to woo them back to your side of the court.

First you need to decide on the level of your subscriber’s inactivity, which can be roughly separated into two categories. The first, rather obviously is the group that are just not interested anymore in what you have to offer. The second are those that are simply too busy or preoccupied to take the time to read your email.

You will, at this stage, start to question why your subscribers are no longer interested. So, what we have done for you is identify the top reasons for this, which may help identify what’s gone wrong for you.

1.  Your subject line is badly planned

It can’t be emphasised enough, if your subject line doesn’t grab your reader’s attention immediately it isn’t going to get opened. It’s that simple. Make sure that your subject line is personalised, states clearly what’s on offer, creates a sense of urgency and gets put to the test before you send out your campaign.

2.   Frequency/Relevancy of your campaign

This can go a long way towards a person not bothering to open your email or simply ignoring it. Do you bombard their inbox every day with reminders, offers and updates? Do you send exotic travel package deals to people who have zero interest in travel and have not in fact ventured beyond the borders of their state? Do your homework. Reduce the number of emails you send out by consolidating the information into one campaign that gets sent out once a week. Investigate your target market and your subscriber list and ensure that what you do send out is relevant to that group.

3.  Changed interests/financial changes

This is always a sensitive subject. Perhaps your reader no longer has an interest in the products and services you offer. People change and you need to accept this fact and delete them from your list. The recession has meant that subscribers are also less likely to click on products or services directly from your campaign. People might simply not be able to afford the luxury anymore and their priorities change. They might be waiting for their situation to change or improve before they start buying from you again.

4.  Dormant Email Address

These days’ people often have 2 or 3 private email addresses. The problem is that although they are essentially active, they are rarely all used. There is a good chance that some of the addresses on your list fall into this category, in which case you need to attempt to get the email address that your subscriber checks every day.

5.  The dreaded Spam Filters

Are you sure every recipient received your email? Did you check the spam rating of your campaign before you sent it off? No? This is a vital step in the creation of your campaign and will mean the difference between your email landing in the inbox or it getting relegated to the spam/bulk folder. Your email marketing service should allow and in fact prompt you to run your campaign through a comprehensive spam check and make any changes if necessary. It is a prerequisite and will save you time and money in the long run.

6.   They only signed up for the competition / incentive

…and aren’t actually interested in your product. Most people have done this at some point in their lives. You see a competition to win something grand, fill in the obligatory details and promptly forget about it, until you start getting emails offering products or services you have no intention of buying. You can’t be bothered to unsubscribe and the emails start getting ignored. Why though, has no one taken the time to see if you are in fact interested in receiving their emails? It’s an easy enough process that will erase any uncertainty the marketer might have.

So there you go, these are some of the most common reasons for subscribers becoming inactive. It is important that you identify the reasons behind your subscribers’ inactivity so that you can custom- design a reactivation campaign that is personal, direct and relevant to them.

In our previous post we wrote about how important it is to keep your content relevant, but we know it’s not always easy to continuously come up with fresh and interesting ideas for your campaigns. So, what we’ve done for you is put together a few ideas (especially helpful if you are an email marketing ‘newbie’), to help you get the ball rolling.

First off, you should create a content folder on your computer which you can add ideas to as and when they come. Remember that everything you see, hear and read is a potential interesting topic for your next newsletter so be sure to keep that in mind at all times. It also wouldn’t hurt to have a regular notebook on hand, so you can jot things down while you are on the go.

Have a selection of back up articles that you can use in an emergency. While you don’t want to get lazy and rely on these all the time, they are certainly handy to have at short notice or when you simply can’t think of something to write about. You will need to make sure that the topics are general, so their relevance doesn’t expire. What you want, for example is something along the lines of “why e-marketing is successful”, as opposed to one titled “latest e- marketing trends.”

It’s also really important to follow what your competitors are doing. What are they writing about that is popular with their readers? What questions are being posted that are leading to further discussions? You can adapt and direct some of these ideas to your own needs.

There are many ways that you can fill the spaces and pages of your campaign and we have summed up 9 of the best content ideas, which can be used to create short or long copy. Here they are;

1. Event Listings – Inform people about special events that you will be running in the coming months, or point them to other relevant events that are happening. These might include webinars, conferences, workshops etc. If you don’t like the idea of promoting someone else’s event, bear in mind your reader’s interests. What might they benefit from and find interesting? Ultimately, they will be thankful for the information and you will gain their loyalty quickly.
2. Trivia, History and Interesting Facts – This often makes for thought provoking discussion and feedback. Be sure to keep these points in line with your subject matter and don’t be scared to add a refreshing or even humorous touch.
3. Lists – People love them because they are quick and easy to read and you’ll love them because the options available for topics are endless. The best/worst; most/ least popular; biggest /smallest; types of; ways to. You get the idea.
4. How-To’s – These are very popular and today you can find an online ‘how-to’ guide for just about any problem, product or service you encounter.
5. Question / Answer – Set up a forum on your website where visitors can post queries or problems. You can publish the answers online and also include them in your newsletter if you feel it is a topic that would appeal to others.
6. Trends and Predictions – What’s the latest news in your industry? Recent developments, products and services, trend forecasting etc. all make for an interesting read. You can extend this down the line by writing about what has happened since or if any trend forecasts have come true.
7. Conduct a survey and track the feedback. You can use the data and information you gather for future topics. Even better, ask your visitors directly what they would be interested in reading and learning more about.
8. Product Reviews – These are very helpful for someone trying to make a decision on something and you can help them. Try to make your review as unbiased as possible though, you want to give a fair report without sounding like you are actually selling the product. On the other hand, if it really is rubbish then you need to inform people of that too.
9. Guest Author Contributions – Invite guest experts and well known people in your industry to contribute a blog posting once a month and see what the feedback is like. The exposure and association would benefit both of you.

So there you have it. You’ll soon find that you only need a few really good topics up your sleeve at any given time simply because the better your subject matter, the more discussion it generates and the more you can develop it.

Fact: your website content is one of the main reasons why people keep coming back to your site and remain subscribed to your email campaigns. A recent stat from Jupiter Research reported that 51% of people surveyed will unsubscribe if content is not interesting. It certainly isn’t a stat you want to hear but definitely one you need to hear. People place high value on what emails they allow through to their inbox. Added to that, most people have a short attention/time span and skim through their emails, only stopping to read something further if it grabs them immediately. Keep them entertained and informed from the outset and you stand a good chance of getting your entire email read.

It’s however, not always easy coming up with fresh ideas for each new campaign, and it gets even harder the higher the frequency of your emails. So how do you go about creating content that will rivet your readers? If you think about it, content has to adapt, otherwise, like most things in life, it will become stagnant, irrelevant and boring. Products, services, data and pricing structures can become out-dated quickly. If you spend all your time and energy getting visitors to your site only for their search to end in old information, they won’t give it a second chance. There are, however, a few things you can do to ensure that your content stays relevant and up to date, which will go a long way to ensuring that your visitors become repeat visitors. Here’s what you need to consider:

1. Is the content the same as what’s stated in the teaser / heading?

When a person clicks on an article titled ‘E-Marketing Basics’, they expect to read about that topic. If they open it and discover it’s about advanced e-marketing strategies they aren’t going to be impressed. Even though the subject is the same, it’s not the information they are after. Follow through and make sure that what you are stating in your header is exactly what people can expect to find in the rest of the article.

2. Keep your content concise and to the point.

Avoid a long winded thesis on any subject matter that requires a university degree to fully comprehend what you have written. People skim read at the best of times and lose interest very quickly if: a) the information isn’t relevant to their search, b) if it doesn’t state clearly and quickly what the information is about and c) if it’s boring. At the same time you need to keep the content fairly straight forward and simple. The brain can only process so much at any given time, so don’t cram it all in at once.

3. Highlight key words.

You know you only have a very limited time to grab and retain a person’s interest so you need to use it wisely. It can help to highlight certain points in your content, which automatically draws their attention, hopefully long enough for them to want to read more.

4. Keep it interesting.

Yes, it is easier said than done, but try this out. Follow your readers in forums and groups. What are they commenting on? What do they have questions or frustrations about? You can then use the information you gather to create new content for your next campaign, thereby keeping it entirely relevant, up to date and interesting (simply because you are addressing topics that your readers were wondering about.)

5. Create links to other relevant content/articles.

Any link to information that can re- confirm or even further develop your idea is good for your credibility.

The general rule of thumb is to update your website content annually. This will ensure that everything from programmes, products and services to pricing schedules are kept up to date and therefore relevant for most searches conducted.

You have 2 seconds and less than 50 characters to grab your reader’s attention with the subject line of your email marketing campaign, so it is absolutely vital that you optimise this space. You might be tempted to go for CAPS, exclamation marks and cheesy phrases but contrary to popular belief this is the complete opposite of what you should do.

Good subject lines are straightforward, clear and describe the subject of your email, go figure. It’s simple advice and yet many people don’t take heed. You need to say what the email contains, why your reader should open it and what benefit or reward they’ll get if they do. Have a look at stats online and you will find that the most effective subject lines are almost ‘boring’. Conversely, the ones that have some of the lowest results are generally the ones that look and sound like creative advertising, which recipients automatically think is spam and delete accordingly.

Your subject line directly influences your open rate, get it wrong and it’s time and money wasted, get it right and you can realistically expect very impressive open rates.  So how do you go about creating the ultimate content for it? We have come up with a number of ways to help you maximise this small yet equally important component of your campaign.

First off, you need to clearly state your offer and the contents of the email. Whether it’s a newsletter, promotion, special deal or sale you should aim to use that word in your subject line. According to a recent study by Return Path, 55.2% of recipients opened the email because the subject line clearly stated the offer.

Use your company name as the first word in your subject line. This has shown time again that it achieves high open rates and it’s a tactic well worth employing. Of course this might use up a considerable amount of valuable characters so remember that you can always put the company name in the ‘from’ line.

Personalisation and using your recipient’s first name, such as ‘Hi Bob – check out our latest offer’, will generally grab that person’s attention. This is especially the case if he is skimming through emails, and it can lead to a higher open rate.

Creating a sense of urgency, without going overboard, will have the same desired effect. ‘24-hour sale’,’ today/this week only’, ‘limited supplies’, ‘offer expires in 30 minutes’ tends to play on a reader’s subconscious, and who likes to miss out anyway?

A/B testing is one of the most cost and time effective ways to improve your subject line and campaign. You know what they say about assumption? Well it rings true here too. Don’t assume that the content of your subject line will definitely garner the results you desire. Put it to the test. Keeping your copy the same, you only need to change the wording or angle of the subject line in your email. Send both options of the campaign to a select (not random) number of recipients and track them using your analytics. Which produces the desired results as far as click through or conversion rates?  You can then use that subject line when sending out that particular campaign. If neither option produces a satisfactory result then you need to go back to the drawing board.

Make sure that whatever you write in your subject line follows through in your email. Misleading people and failing to deliver on your promise of discounts, sales and once in a lifetime offers can get you reported as spam, which can ruin your reputation before you realise you even had one.

It’s not easy creating a winning subject line and it will take a certain amount of trial and error to get it right. You might have the most award winning copy for your campaign, but if no-one opens your emails then what’s the point? To sum it up, you should state clearly; personalise; create a sense of urgency and put your subject line to the test to help ensure that your email doesn’t get deleted or ignored.