April 25th, 2008 by Megan Ouellet
We all know that email marketing works. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s inexpensive, and most importantly, your customers respond to it. Email works for nearly any marketing endeavor – whether you want to introduce and sell a new product, invite customers to an online seminar, inform your contacts on corporate events, or use it for branding purposes, emails work. The question is, are they working as well as they can?
It’s easy to find out by doing a quick and simple self-evaluation over your overall marketing strategies, goals, and procedures. Here’s a list of questions you can ask yourself that help to identify areas where improvements can be made that will help increase your deliverability, relevancy, and response rates.
- Are you capturing the right data during the opt-in process? The more you know about your subscribers, the more targeted your email messages can be. Over time, it is easy to gather the data you need using the features listed above. However, when new subscribers join your list, you don’t know much about them. You can’t ask for too much information up front, so you just have to ask for the information that is most important to you. Pick your top two or three profiling attributes and ask for that information on the front end. While it might be tempting to collect the “usual” contact information from your subscribers, such as address and title, if you don’t segment your list by location or offer items for specific job functions, don’t waste your subscribers’ time by having them fill out this information on the front end. Instead, just ask for the information you need.
- Are you collecting data across multiple customer touch points? Don’t rely just on the data gathered during the opt-in process. You can get much more detailed data on your subscribers using dynamic profiling, web analytics, and integration with other customer databases like CRM. My last blog covered this topic in more detail.
- Are you maintaining a clean list? Nothing ruins your reputation faster than mailing to invalid email addresses over and over again. That’s why it is so important for you to follow email marketing best practices for list management, such as monitoring your hard and soft bounces regularly, using the double opt-in confirmation process, performing list hygiene to correct misspellings, and using a third party service for appending, change of address, validation, etc. These procedures will help you maintain a list of interested subscribers and accurate email addresses, and will help ISPs determine that you are a legitimate sender and not a spammer.
- Are you targeting specific groups of subscribers with each email send? The days of the one-size-fits-all email campaign are over. If you are still sending out one generic email to everyone on your list, you’re missing a huge opportunity to increase your response rate and ROI. Listrak performed a dynamic content case study and published the results showing a 41 percent increase in click-through rates for a targeted campaign compared to a non-targeted email sent to the entire list. There are a number of ways to segment your lists and you should also segment your lists not only by product preference, but by delivery time preference as well.
- Are your emails focused on a specific call-to-action? Before you begin a new email campaign, you should know what goal you want to accomplish, and yes, that is goal – singular – not goals, plural. Very few recipients are going to take the time to read your entire message word for word, most people just scan the message to be sure it applies to them and then click on the call-to-action button if interested. If your message isn’t focused on a singular goal, it becomes distracting and you will lose your readers’ interests.
- Are you following email marketing best practices for design? How your emails look is just as important as what they say. If your messages contain broken links, missing graphics, or if the layout doesn’t render correctly, no one is going to waste time trying to decipher the message. It’s important to remember to test your emails in different email clients and different browsers prior to sending it to your list. In most cases, you can set up an email address for free, and it only takes a few extra minutes to email the message to the different accounts to see how it looks. It’s a small, quick step, but it can save your entire campaign as you’ll be able to fix any problems before the email is deployed to your subscribers.
- Do you have a mobile email marketing strategy in place? Just as important as sending a well designed HTML email is including a text message. More and more people are picking up emails on mobile devices and if you don’t offer a text only version, you are losing a lot of readers right from the beginning. I posted a blog on this topic as well, which you may read here.
- Are you sending emails out at the right time? Frequency rules are changing as more and more email marketers are using advanced features like dynamic content to increase the relevancy of their campaigns. Rules, such as “never mail to a subscriber twice within 72 hours” are no longer in place as it doesn’t matter how often you’re sending mail, it only matters how relevant the emails are. If the recipients want and need the information you’re sending to them, they’ll read your messages. We just published a white paper on this topic, which may be downloaded here.
- Are you testing your entire campaign, or just your subject lines? A lot has been written on the importance of an email’s subject line. It is the gate keeper, the first thing recipients see that lets them know who the message is from and why they should open it. I’m not disagreeing on how the subject line can make or break a campaign. However, the landscape has changed. Inboxes aren’t as crowded as they once were as spam blocks have gotten tougher and as more and more people are constantly picking up email on iPhones and Blackberries. And with these advances, your email subject lines must evolve, too. It’s important for you to test your new subject lines to see what works with your audience, but you shouldn’t stop there. You must also test images, offers, layout, and other campaign aspects to see what works the best. Sure, it’s a few extra steps, but if you can increase conversion rate by 10 percent or more, isn’t it worth it?
- Are your emails branded correctly? Brent Shroyer included this tip in his blog 50 Tips, Tricks, and Hidden Features, and goes into more detail in his webinar of the same name. (It’s #2 on the list) Branding affects the deliverability of your messages as well as the tracking links, and if your messages aren’t set up correctly, you run the risk of damaging your reputation.
- Are you tracking the right metrics? Are your measurements accurate? The email industry still lacks standardization in this area. You must do your due diligence to find out how your ESP calculates delivery, open, read, and click-through rates; otherwise the numbers could be skewed to mask problem areas, especially regarding deliverability. It is also important that you build your own benchmarks and that you only measure similar campaigns against each other as this will give you the most accurate look at how your emails are performing. Finally, you should use a web analytics tool, like Google Analytics, so you can look at campaign performance beyond the click-through rate. While it is important to know what links your subscribers are clicking on, it’s also important to know if those subscribers are converting to a sale or completing your goal. We have several white papers on this subject posted in our resource center.
To learn more, contact one of our email marketing experts today.
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April 7th, 2008 by Megan Ouellet
Customer data is the key to email campaign success. The more data you have, the more targeted and relevant your campaigns will be. And relevant emails generate more click-throughs and conversions and fewer complaints than a general message sent to your entire customer base. Many email marketers are using dynamic profiling and Google Analytics to help capture additional profiling information not obtained during the opt-in process. And more and more email marketers are using APIs (application programming interface) to integrate e-commerce, CRM, sales force automation, customer support, and other customer-facing software applications into their email marketing strategy. Doing so unifies systems and automates process to provide an even greater insight into customers’ interests, needs, and buying habits.
While APIs make it relatively easy to integrate systems, the process can be a lengthy one. In order to minimize time, marketers must begin by clearly defining their goals and communicating them to the developers responsible for the integration. It isn’t enough to simply tell them that you want the two software packages to work together. You must specify the exact tasks you wish to accomplish and define your business requirements. Instead of telling the developers you want to access data in the CRM system, tell them you want to use dynamic content to send targeted emails to customers eight days after a purchase is made to upsell them with a complementary product. Knowing specific details will help the developers build a roadmap of deliverables outlining which application is responsible for each task.
Remember, no detail is insignificant! The more details you provide on the front end, the less back and forth you will need with the developers and the faster the integration will be completed! For more information, read Listrak’s white paper “Email Marketing Best Practices: Integration Tactics that Work“ or contact us today to learn more.
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March 27th, 2008 by Megan Ouellet
The lack of standardization in the email marketing industry continues to confuse and in many cases mislead marketers into thinking that their campaigns are performing better than they actually are. While it is nice to see high percentage stats, isn’t it better to know what the real results are? That way, you have the opportunity to fix any issues so you reach more of your subscribers with each mailing.The first major problem in calculating results is the fact that some ESPs use the number of sent messages to determine the total number of messages while others use the number of messages delivered to recipients’ inboxes, which is a much more accurate approach. However, problems still arise as some ESPs count a message as being delivered once it reaches the ISP even if the ISP blocks it, while others also count messages delivered to the junk mail folder. In order to get the most accurate results as possible, ask your ESP how they determine this metric as every other metric depends on it.
The next major issue in calculating results is whether your ESP only counts the total number of opens and clicks or if they report on the number of unique recipients that opened or clicked on a message. While this might seem like a small inconsistency, it can greatly skew results. For example, if a message that was delivered to 100 recipients generated a 75 opens and 50 clicks, the sender would see a 75% open rate and 50% click through rate. However, on closer inspection, if the message was opened and clicked on 20 times by the same recipient, those results would be incorrect – that is why you should only look at the number of unique recipients that are responding to your message. If the message was delivered to 100 people and was opened 75 times but only 30 of those opens were from unique recipients, your open rate drops from 75% to 30% And if that message was clicked on 50 times, but only 12 of those clicks were unique recipients, your click rate drops from 50% to 12%. Instead of believing that half of your list is interested in your messaging when only 12 of the 100 people clicked on a link, you have a much more accurate account of how your subscribers are responding to your email messages. And that’s what really matters.
While it is important to know that one recipient clicked on several links in a message, that information should be used to target the subscriber with information that is relevant to them. It should not be used as on overall account of how your emails are performing.
We have published several white papers on the topic, including Email Marketing Metrics: Looking Beyond Open and Read Rates and Email Marketing Metrics: Optimizing your Goals, Benchmarks, and Statistics. Our experts are available to help you. Contact us today to learn more.
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March 17th, 2008 by Megan Ouellet
Email marketers know the value of customer data. The more data they capture and store, the more targeted and relevant their email messages can be. Savvy marketers are looking beyond the information captured during the opt-in process, such as the subscriber’s title or location, and are now including data obtained during the reporting process, such as the links that each subscriber clicked on or the time the emails were opened. Knowing this information helps you build even greater profiles on your subscribers so you can target them with messages that arrive at the right time and contain the right information.
Listrak offers a Dynamic Profiling feature so you may capture this information and update profiles automatically. The information allows you to gain intimate knowledge on each contact to learn what information is the most relevant to him or her in an unobtrusive way. It also eliminates the need to update each profile manually, so you save time.
Our experts are available to help you plan your mobile email marketing strategy. Contact us today to learn more, or you may read more about Listrak’s Dynamic Profiling feature by following the link.
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March 4th, 2008 by Megan Ouellet
More and more people are reading emails on Blackberries, iPhones, and other mobile devices. In fact, it has been estimated that nearly 65% of decision makers read emails more often on mobile devices than on a computer. Some users are still only picking up urgent messages on their mobile devices and are leaving the other messages to read later on their computers. However, email marketers need to plan a strategy for mobile email marketing as the numbers of mobile users continues to grow.Here are a few quick tips to keep in mind when creating your email campaigns:
- During the opt-in process, ask the subscribers if they plan on reading your messages on a mobile device.
- Design a mobile version of your message that is concise, urgent, and individualized.
- Send messages in multipart MIME format. This means that you should include both a text-only version of the message and the HTML formatted version in a single message send. Doing so allows the subscribers’ email clients to select the right format for viewing and helps ensure that the message renders correctly.
- Continue to follow email marketing best practices for relevancy and preferences.
- If using images, keep them to a minimum.
- Test the campaigns prior to sending the messages so you know what they look like on the different devices.
Our experts are available to help you plan your mobile email marketing strategy. Contact us today to learn more.
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January 31st, 2008 by Megan Ouellet
One of the major factors ISPs use to determine your reputation is your bounce rate. Emails that generate an excessive number of bounces look like spam messages to ISPs, and, therefore, the messages may be filtered or blocked. If you do not carefully maintain the hygiene and integrity of your list and monitor your bounces, you could be killing your deliverability.
Messages bounce for a number of reasons. A soft bounce occurs when the recipient’s mailbox is temporarily unavailable due to a server that is down or the inbox is full and cannot receive any more messages until space is made available. These issues are usually fixed within a short time frame, so it is okay to resend the messages to these recipients as the message will usually be received on the second delivery attempt. A hard bounce is a permanent delivery error due to an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address. As the cause of these bounces cannot be corrected, continuing to resend messages to these addresses is a big mistake as it increases the number of bounces your messages generate and it drives up your bounce percentage. You must remove these addresses from your lists as quickly as you can.
Listrak has several automated features that help you solve these issues. With Listrak, invalid email addresses are automatically removed from your list so there is no danger of inadvertently resending messages to these subscribers. Listrak also allows you to resend messages automatically to soft bounces. You can set the number of times the system will attempt to send the messages, and you may also set the number of times the messages can bounce before the system automatically removes them from the list. These features will protect your reputations with ISPs and will help ensure your emails are delivered to your contacts’ inboxes.
Our experts are available to help with all of your deliverability needs. Contact us today to learn more.
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January 21st, 2008 by Megan Ouellet
The rules to email marketing are changing. Email marketers were once limited by strict frequency guidelines that dictated how often they could send mail to subscribers. Rules such as “no less than once per month but no more than twice per month” were put in place in order to keep complaints low and content fresh.
However, subscriber feedback tells us that frequency rarely plays a part in why subscribers unsubscribe or complain. As long as you are delivering relevant content to your subscribers, they will read and respond to the messages. There are a number of advanced tools, such as dynamic content and event triggered messaging, that marketers can use to ensure that they are sending the right content to the right subscribers at the right time. Messages that are individualized and personalized may be mailed more frequently than untargeted messages because subscribers identify the value in the content as something that they want to read.
The best way to know how your subscribers will respond is to test the frequency of your targeted campaigns. Be sure to monitor unsubscribes and complaints closely, but as long as you’re sending relevant content you won’t see spikes in these numbers.
Our email experts are available to help you set up dynamic content campaigns and A/B split tests. Contact us today to learn more.
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January 7th, 2008 by Megan Ouellet
As you plan your 2008 email marketing strategy it is very important to review last year’s campaign performance. That way, you’ll be able to identify areas that can be revamped and improved so you gain even greater results this year. Tracking accurate results isn’t as easy as it should be. With the lack of standardization and the confusing terminology, it is very easy to draw false conclusions even if you are using an ESP. To ensure accuracy you must first learn how your ESP measures results. For example, does the delivery rate subtract both hard and soft bounces, or just soft bounces? Does it account for emails that were delivered to the recipients’ junk mail folders or emails that were blocked by ISPs, or do you need an additional delivery monitoring service to find out these statistics? Every other metric is measured against the number of delivered messages, so if this number isn’t accurate, none of your other numbers will be, either.Another area of confusion is subscriber activity. Do you gauge activity based on whether or not a subscriber opens a message or if they read it or click on it? If you base activity on the open rate, do you know how your ESP counts a message as being opened? Does it include emails that were viewed in the preview pane? If so, is that an accurate measure of someone that is actively responding to your messages? Studies have shown that removing inactive subscribers will help you avoid being mislabeled as spam by those subscribers that have lost interest in your messages but have not taken the time to unsubscribe from your list. To accurately manage subscribers you must look at the numbers over a period of time, but also the causes of inactivity. For example, if you aren’t segmenting your list to send targeted, relevant emails, or if you are sending too many messages, your subscribers’ response rate will significantly drop. Before you remove a subscriber, try a targeted reengagement campaign and carefully track the subscribers that read or click on the message. This will give you the most accurate impression of which subscribers to remove from your list.
Segmenting your list will also help you pinpoint problem areas that you might not catch if you are simply looking at overall averages in open and click through rates. Dividing your list into segments will help you quickly identify issues. For example, you might notice that subscribers at a particular ISP are not responding, which would tell you that your emails could be blocked or are being delivered to the junk mail folder at that ISP. Or, if you send one group a link to a particular landing page and none of them convert, there could be a problem with the link and the subscribers aren’t reaching the page, or the information might not be specific enough to entice the customers to make a purchase. Quickly identifying problems will help you make adjustments in a timely manner so other users are not affected.
Finally, the metric that matters the most is the number of conversions. Listrak is integrated with Google Analytics so it is easy for our users to track web traffic back to specific email campaigns. Knowing that a subscriber clicked through an email is valuable. Knowing that they clicked through the message and made an online purchase, or visited your website but did not convert is even more important. Listrak has published a white paper on the Google Analytics integration, and it may be viewed and downloaded here.
The only way to build targeted and relevant email campaigns is to know as much information on your subscribers as possible so you deliver the information that they want and need. Our experts are here to help you analysis your past campaign performance and build new campaigns that generate even better results. Contact us today to learn more.
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December 17th, 2007 by Megan Ouellet
It’s that time of year again where budgets are at the forefront of everyone’s minds, so I wanted to post a few quick tips on how to build an accurate budget for your email marketing campaign strategies. We have also posted a white paper on the topic earlier this year, and you may download it at “Planning your Budget and Getting Approval.”
As you plan your strategy, you must first decide if you are going to design and format the emails yourself of if you will have to outsource the process. It’s important to remember that HTML emails require different programming than web pages, so you simply cannot rely on your web designer to know the correct way to format emails. If you are unsure, ask. That way, you will know in advance whether or not you will have to outsource the process. The cost of outsourcing depends on the type of project – the cost to develop a single template is minimal compared to the cost of segmenting lists and building dynamic content campaigns. For an accurate budget, you should decide in advance the type of campaigns you want to send so you can plan accordingly.
For accuracy, you must also decide on the number of emails you will send per month. Most ESPs include a certain number of emails in the monthly fees, but if you go over that amount, you will be charged so much per email. While the charges are generally pretty small, it can really add up if you are sending a large number of messages, and your budget can get out of control pretty fast if you do not account for these overages.
You should also budget for new services and technology that will enhance your campaigns – such as accreditation. Some of these costs can be substantial, so it is better to plan ahead for these extra costs.
If you are unsure of how to plan a budget and strategy, the experts here at Listrak are available to help you. We want your email campaigns to succeed, and careful planning and budgeting is the first step to success. You can contact us at http://www.listrak.com/contact-expert.asp for help on these matters.
Also, Marketing Today has a handy email marketing ROI calendar available at
http://www.marketingtoday.com/tools/roi_calculator.htm. This will help you determine your target conversion rates in advance.
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December 10th, 2007 by Megan Ouellet
The main reputation metric is user-generated complaints. When your subscribers click the “Report Spam” button, they are notifying their ISP that your message was unsolicited and unwanted, which tarnishes your good reputation. ISPs have very low thresholds for spam complaints, and once those thresholds are met, your emails will be filtered or blocked. While this measure helps end users protect their inboxes from spam messages that somehow make it through the filters, it also wreaks havoc on legitimate email messages as users may complain even if they subscribed to a list and requested to receive the information. Currently, there is no way for ISPs to determine which complaints are justifiable and which ones are unwarranted. That is why you must work to build trust and loyalty with each and every one of your subscribers so they recognize and respond to your messages.Following is a list of best practices that will help you build trust with your subscribers:
- Set expectations upfront. Before subscribers opt-in, offer them samples of the type of message you will send to them along with the delivery schedule, and be sure to stick to the guidelines you set. Doing so will prove to subscribers that they can trust you to deliver the right information at the right time.
- Offer subscribers a choice. Allowing subscribers to set their own preferences and opt-in to specific lists helps you send targeted, relevant email messages. And offering them access to your preference center so they can manage their own account puts them in charge of the messages you send them and proves that they can trust you to follow the rules that they set.
- Make the opt-in process memorable. Using tactics such as unchecked subscription boxes and closed-loop opt-in add additional steps to your opt-in process. While these steps are quick and easy, they help subscribers remember the process, and, therefore, they will recognize your emails as coming from a trusted source.
- Brand your messages correctly. You must tell your subscribers up front that you sent the message by including your company’s name in the From line and, if possible, the subject line, too. If the sender of the message is unknown, subscribers will report your messages as spam. However, if they can easily identify that the message is from a trusted source, you have a much better chance of your message being opened and responded to.
- Personalize your messages. Adding personal information, such as names and purchase history, to your emails proves to subscribers that you know them and it helps identify you as a legitimate sender.
- Include an easy way for recipients to unsubscribe and honor requests immediately. If your users have to search for the unsubscribe button, there is a good chance that they’ll just report your email as spam instead of taking them time to unsubscribe properly. Also, if you continue to email subscribers after they requested to unsubscribe, you are giving them the ammo they need to report your messages as spam. However, if you offer an easy way to unsubscribe from your lists, and if you honor those requests immediately, you will be showing your subscribers that you value them and it will prove to them that you can be trusted.
For more information, read Listrak’s white paper “Outlook for 2008: Essential Email Marketing Deliverability Guide.”
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