The Whitelist

Advanced Email Marketing Techniques: Upping Your Email Ante

You’re ready. It’s time. You’ve mastered the key points of email marketing basics, and now it’s time to to hone your email marketing skills even further. Integrating some or all of the following techniques into your email marketing best practices toolbox will set your email marketing campaign apart from the majority of email marketing messages out there, and that means more interest, increased subscriber numbers, higher level of open rates and engagement, which all translates into increased ROI for your bottom line.

It might seem intimidating to adopt some of the more advanced email marketing techniques available, but it doesn’t have to be. In the latest issue of the ClickMail Marketer we take you step-by-step through some of the most common and most effective advanced email marketing techniques, including automated emails, integration, and trigger-based messaging.

Here’s a quick and dirty summary on how to ante-up your email marketing strategy:

Automate your emails with a CRM and/or API: Automating will save you time and money while increasing your ability to be relevant and targeted.

Create quality content: Make sure your content is varied, interesting, and useful. Don’t make all of your messages sales pitches, coupons, or “exclusive offers.” Change up your message types for increased interest!

Tailor messages: Create relevant and interesting content that includes specific messages based on purchases, transaction confirmations, browsing behavior, and other things like demographics and birthday information. Automating messages is one way to actually increase the specificity of your email messages, and trigger-based messaging is another.

Track and mine your data: Track the preferences of your prospects and customers when they subscribe to your newsletters, fill out forms, open emails, click through links, visit your site and buy products. Use this data to further refine your email marketing campaign strategies.

If you’d like more details on these and other super-effective and easy-to-use (once they’re implemented) advanced email marketing techniques, check out the November issue of the ClickMail Marketer. And if you’d like CRM or API-integration assistance, or would like further information on any of these implementations, give ClickMail a call. Taking some time now to learn about and implement some advanced email marketing techniques will benefit your bottom line later. Find out how to get started in the November ClickMail Marketer.

When "Exclusive" Really Matters

How often do you see the word “exclusive” pop up in email marketing? Unfortunately, enough to render the word pretty meaningless. If an “exclusive” offer comes around every month, or worse, every week, your email subscribers will be trained not to pay for anything more than whatever your next offer is. And if they missed your latest “exclusive,” oh well, another one is bound to roll around soon enough. We tackled the tricky subject of the ubiquitous “exclusive” email marketing message here a few months ago.  But the overuse of the term doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hold value; on the contrary, if your email marketing best practices include offering truly unique opportunities, and specials that only email subscribers have access to, make sure to emphasize it.

And the best place to do this? The welcome email. A welcome email is easy and powerful, it starts building your relationship with your subscriber and gives you a chance to up-sell or cross-sell. Do you include a welcome email as part of your email marketing best practices toolbox? If not, you should! And what better way than to start with making your subscribers feel as though they are gaining access to something really special? Think exclusive, invitation only, insiders club: make them not only want to see your email. Make them look forward to it.

Consider the following examples:

“Now that you’ve joined, you will have exclusive access to members-only free downloads, invitations to events, and previews.” Free and members-only? A perfect way to reward your subscribers for joining. And receiving invitations to members-only events? This creates a feeling of belonging to an exclusive club, that generates excitement around your entire email marketing campaign.

“As our newest member, you are on our guest list for our next exclusive night-out event. Guests in selected cities will be invited to special events featuring live music, signature cocktails… and more.” Sounds sexy, doesn’t it? And not all cities are represented (are they)? As a subscriber, realizing that your city is one of the selected automatically raises the excitement level of wanting to be a part of whatever these special events are.

Email marketing campaigns containing the word “exclusive” are ubiquitious. Don’t kill the meaning of the word by using it too frequently. Make your subscribers sit up and pay attention when they see such special, once-in-a-blue-moon opportunities come from you. Trust us, by parsing out your “exclusive offers” and “selected invitations,” you’ll gain more subscribers, and keep the ones you have on the edge of their seats. This is an email marketing best practice that you can always keep in mind and follow…once in a while.

Recently, I came across a blog headline: “5 ways to guarantee you’ll NEVER be successful” and, as a typically ambitious American, I have to admit I clicked on it faster than I mass delete the emails in my SPAM folder. The catchy fear-inducing word “never” captured my curiosity, as in: “One: am I doing any of these things? and two: I want to learn what these things are so I’ll never do them!”

But then I ran across a very similar article on email marketing written by Danny Iny on the AWeber blog entitled: “Can ‘Bad News’ Lift Response Rates?”. Because I clicked on a blog that I’ve never bothered to read before due to a “bad news” title in the very same day, my interest was once again piqued. Given my recent experience, my thinking was, “Why yes, a “bad news” subject line WOULD increase email marketing response rates, and therefore, ROI.”

Typically, “bad news” email subject lines increase response rates initially because they:

• Prompt a question, rather than giving an answer
• Highlight a problem, rather than outlining a solution
• Evoke curiosity

These are three “musts” for a killer subject line that guarantee a high email open rate. While these kind of bad news subject lines do traditionally increase open rates initially, due to a feeling of panic and anxiety: “People read the email because they want to make sure they aren’t going to be negatively affected,” Iny writes, the overall results fall downhill from there. A negative-themed subject line can backfire over the long term because:

Your subscriber might not care about your bad news. If someone you actually know emails you with bad news, your stomach may drop a little bit and you feel your anxiety levels rising with concern. But “bad news” from an email marketer may result in disinterest, suspicion, or worse:

Your subscriber may lose trust in you. Many “bad news” subject lines open to messages that don’t actually contain bad news, and much like the fable of crying wolf, your subscribers might feel manipulated, or worse, deceived. “If your audience ends up feeling like you were employing cheap tactics to get them to buy from you,” says Iny, “then it will likely backfire.”

And a lack of trust means increased unsubscribes, possible spam reporting, and a drop in email deliverability. So if you’re considering implementing a “bad news” subject line email marketing strategy to increase response rates, think carefully and use them sparingly: if an initial boost in open rates ends up costing you subscribers in the end, you’re facing an email subject line strategy that will cost you big time.

Avoid Making These Scary Email Marketing Mistakes

On the spooktacular Halloween day, we thought we’d revisit some of the scariest email marketing mistakes we’ve seen over the years, in the hopes that you won’t let these haunt YOUR email marketing messages…!

In one of our early posts for the Email Experience Council (EEC) we talked about 9 common real-world email marketing mistakes that you can avoid, and I’m sorry to say, two years later, I’m still seeing some of these  email marketing mishaps haunt my inbox.

Some of the freakiest?

1) Corpse-Like Copy: otherwise known as boring, dull, repetitive, irrelevant or otherwise nonsensical copy. I don’t need to see dead content molding up my email inbox, and neither does anyone else. If you adopt: “content is king” as your mantra, and continue to craft interesting, engaging, and highly relevant copy, your subscribers will perk right up and listen. And what interested subscribers equals for you are higher open rates, more click throughs, and more conversions!

2) Zombie-fied Coding: Make sure you’re setting your pixel width to be accommodated not just by computer screens, but also smartphones and tablets. Also be careful with HTML-only emails, since not all email clients render these effectively. Always offer a text-only version of your email, and include a link to a web-version of the email that can be easily viewed online.

3) Blood-Sucking Subject Lines: Otherwise known as ineffective teasers, these can suck the life right out of your email; meaning, they’ll never be seen if the subject lines cause the email to be flagged as spam. Some of the most common spam-flags are subject lines that are too long, screaming (all caps), contain too many spaces, exclamation points, or repeated characters.

4) Ghostly Images: Many ESPs and email clients suppress images, not to mention the rendering difficulty encountered with mobile email clients. Also consider using some simple techniques to compensate for image blocking, like including descriptive alt tags beneath the images, using non-image copy for display type, and to be on the safe side, utilize a View Online feature so they have another way to see images if they are suppressed.

Granted, none of these email marketing mistakes are as frightening, as say, seeing a zombie making a beeline for your front door, but in the real world, the former are much more common, and very preventable. When you consider how much of an effect they can have on your email deliverability and how easily they can be avoided through use of your email marketing best practices, you might reconsider just how scary they are.

Growing a significant email list doesn’t just happen instantly: email marketers know better than anyone else that it takes time and energy. But all that effort goes to waste if your email marketing campaigns don’t continually engage and interest your hard-won subscribers. Ensuring that you maintain your focus on creating interesting and relevant copy not only keeps subscribers interested in what you have to say, it also helps your email deliverability rates.

To keep your subscribers opening, reading, clicking through, and converting make sure you listen to their preferences as they stated them in the preference center they used to sign up. You use a preference center, right? Okay, just making sure. We’ve talked time and again about the importance of email preference centers to your email deliverability rate and overall reputation, and how using an email preference center should be one of your email deliverability tools!

But once they’ve signed up and told you what they’d like to hear from you, make sure that you honor your end of the bargain by doing the following:

Tell them what to expect. By using an email preference center and confirmation messages to provide an overview of your program, subscribers will understand when to expect your emails, and what to expect from them (discounts, newsletters, or helpful tips).

Fulfill their expectations. If they signed up for bi-weekly messages, make sure that you have that system in place and stick to it. No more, no less! Your subscribers will feel respected when their expectations are met, and they won’t, if they aren’t.

Send relevant content. We’ve also talked a good amount about the email deliverability benefits to segmenting your lists. Once you have relevant data, you can send increasingly targeted and relevant content to your subscribers. And the more targeted your content, the more engaged your subscribers.

Test Those Subject Lines!

In our last post, we talked about the importance of testing your email schedule for deliverability to mobile devices, given the prevalence of mobile devices on bedside tables and the increase in email engagement in the “wee hours” of the morning and weekends. This is a new trend that is only happening due to the surge in popularity of smartphone and email-enabled mobile devices. And once we get started talking about testing for email deliverability, it’s hard for us to stop!

After all, we encourage testing all the time. As a smart email marketer, you should choose something to test every time you create and send an email. It could be anything from your From name to when you send out your emails, to subject line variations. Constant testing falls into the category of email deliverability best practices for several reasons. First, anything you can do to improve your email deliverability rate is a good thing. And testing is the surest way to know how to increase your deliverability rate!  Second, once you’ve gotten into the inbox, anything you can do to improve interaction with your recipient is going to improve your email marketing ROI. And what is your number one way to guarantee increased email open rate? A successful subject line. Your email subject line is equivalent to the headline of a news article. A subject line is a teaser that either provokes interest or removes any possibility of it.

But how do you know if your subject lines are working? Why, testing them of course! And now that we’re focused on testing as an email deliverability best practice, the recent Email Marketing Reports article on subject line testing is very timely!

Three main lessons?

1) In subject lines, there are no absolutes. Even industry standards like “All subject lines should be short” have some caveats.

2) Find out what works best FOR YOU (really: your customers) by a simple A/B test.

3) Make sure you’re measuring what’s important to you. Is it open rate or click-through rate?

For five more lessons with additional detail on how to avoid problems in testing and interpreting, make sure to make it one of your email deliverability best practices to read the full article…today!

Clean up Your Email List for Improved Email Deliverability

Summer’s officially over, and with the waning warmth we’ve traded our swimsuits and outdoor grills for briefcases, renewed time with our computers, and fresh new notebooks. Yes, there’s just something about fall that means it’s time to say goodbye to vacation memories and get back to work. And what better time to jump into work than with a good hard look at your in-house email list? Just as fall and spring are excellent times to clean house (literally), it’s also an ideal time to clean out your email list. It might not sound fun, but it is smart. Every list, no matter how good the processes behind building it, will need a scrubbing every once in a while to keep deliverability high and spam complaints low.

It might seem like a big undertaking to scrub your list but it doesn’t have to be. In the latest issue of the ClickMail Marketer we list the steps you should take clean up your list, including removing duplicate email addresses, fake or spam addresses, and inactive accounts, among other things. Ensuring your list is clean and up to date ensures your subscribers are real and interested in your emails, which means a better sender reputation for you! And having a good sender reputation leads to increased email deliverability, more email opens, higher click-through rates, enhanced customer loyalty, decreased unsubscribes, and increased sales. In other words, everything you want out of your email marketing campaigns.

And remember, the more you’re adhering to email marketing best practices in your signups, the less house cleaning your list should need. So next on your list might be taking another look at your signup processes!

But if you’re not sure how to get started with your list cleanup strategy or implementation, check out the October issue of the ClickMail Marketer. And if it still sounds difficult (or if you’d rather not take it on yourself), let ClickMail help. List scrubbing is an investment now that will definitely pay off later. Find out how to get started in the October ClickMail Marketer.

For Email Deliverability, Sometimes Less (on your Lists) Means More

So, you’ve crossed all your email marketing t’s and dotted all your email marketing best practices i’s with a targeted, relevant offer sent only to subscribers who opted in to your campaigns.

Then you learn a major ISP has blocked your IP address due to spam complaints. Before you know it, your email deliverability is plummeting and you can’t get an accurate sense for how effective your email marketing campaign was.

How could this be? Your subscribers opted-in, after all!

Well, the reasons are multiple-fold. Sometimes, an email subscriber will forget opting in and rather than clicking “Unsubscribe,” they may just opt to hit that pesky “report spam” button, without an awareness that your beautifully crafted email marketing message is indeed a message they chose to receive. The reasons behind this have a lot to do with failing to obey email marketing best practices (and listening to your subscribers’ preferences) in the first place. (But that’s another blog post). In the meantime, your email deliverability starts to suffer.

The best thing to do now is to take a good hard look at your email list, take a deep breath, and start cutting. It’s hard. You don’t want to voluntarily trim the increasingly large (and growing) subscriber list you’ve worked so hard to cultivate with all of your email marketing genius. Oftentimes, making a cut can yield higher email deliverability rates. In the case of email deliverability, it’s not always quantity that matters. Consider focusing certain ad campaigns only on subscribers who have made a purchase. In other similar case studies, this strategy has consistently yielded close to 100% inbox delivery. If you need help with list segmentation, you’re in luck! We covered it in detail in our September issue of the ClickMail Marketer!

Emailing to fewer, but more engaged, subscribers can be the difference between $0 and generating a return on investment from the subscribers who really are interested in your email marketing messages. Because the other alternative is that your valuable customers may never see your email due to failed email deliverability.

In navigating today’s world of email marketing and email deliverability, be prepared to face the choice between reaching some valuable customers, or reaching no customers at all.

5 Reasons Behind the Unsubscribe

Just as it’s hard not to take personally the sit-down conversation over a glass of wine that often begins with: “we need to talk” and ends with: “it’s not you, it’s me,” seeing a former subscriber go strikes a very familiar emotion-cocktail of confused/hurt/angry/dumbstruck feelings. But as with breakups, each goodbye offers an opportunity to learn from the experience and make improvements.

These are the most common reasons your subscribers may choose to opt-out of your email marketing campaign (and how you can learn from them to either win your subscribers back, and/or move on to new and other subscriber-fish in the sea)!

1. An out-of-control inbox. When subscribers feel overwhelmed by their overloaded inbox, they may enact a slash-and-burn approach to cleaning out their email. Much like the spring clean that leaves closets nearly bare and drawers unstuffed, these users may unsubscribe “en masse.”

The solution? Win them back. Many times these subscribers choose to enact a “start fresh” approach, re-subscribing to those newsletters and email marketing campaigns they miss. This is a perfect opportunity for cross-channel marketing. If you’ve lost an email subscriber, chances are they are still a direct mail customer, Facebook fan and/or Twitter follower. Now is the time to tap into the power of your social channel marketing efforts to bring them back into the welcome arms of your email list by cross-promoting specials, coupons, information, or other promotions only available via email.

2. Your relationship has changed. Consumers cut their spending; customers cancel services; move into new industries or new locations. Simply put, your email marketing messages might no longer address their needs. Just like #1, this reason is pure and simple: “it’s not you, it’s me.”

The solution? Just like that amicable breakup, there’s not too much you can do about this goodbye. And that’s okay. There are more fish in the sea, and they’ll find you!

3. Your emails don’t render on their email platform or device. If you offer RSS, for instance, don’t be surprised if recipients unsubscribe from your email marketing campaigns. Or, if you offer HTML-only emails that don’t read properly on their email platform or mobile device, your user may become frustrated with unreadable messages and say “adieu!”

The solution? Okay, it may not technically be you; maybe it’s tech. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t shrug your shoulders and give up on these subscribers. Adhering to email marketing best practices means that it’s up to you to change with the times and stay up-to-date on technology trends and options. For example, are your emails “mobilized,” or otherwise optimized for viewing on a mobile platform? They should be. For more on why (and how), check our recent blog post on the topic.

4. You send too many—or too few—messages. Don’t contribute to an overflowing inbox by sending too many unwanted messages. Even the most compelling messages can go unread if there are too many of them. In this case, quantity trumps quality (in a bad way). You don’t want your emails to go unopened, which is a slippery slope to unsubscription, or worse: being marked as spam: the surest route to decreased rates of email deliverability. The converse holds true too: if you hardly ever touch base with customers, they may wonder why—or if—they ever opted in, in the first place.

The solution? Use email preference centers both at opt-in and opt-out points. Putting the control in the hands of your subscribers will ultimately work to enhance your overall email marketing best practices. And by giving them the option to change the frequency of emails before confirming an unsubscribe, they might choose to reduce the frequency of emails and stick around a bit longer! For even more on how unsubscribe link options could actually keep your subscribers from unsubscribing, check out the ClickMail Marketer from August.

5. They’re bored. The classic “it’s not you, it’s me” double message that really means: “I’ve moved on.” In email marketing, this means boring, repetitive, generalized, or otherwise unfocused content. Everyone wants to feel special and known, and that holds true for your email subscribers. If they feel as though the content you’re sending is no longer relevant to who they are or what they need or want, they’re out the door and onto new pastures.

The solution? Increase the relevancy of your content. Target your email marketing messages to the different and unique subscribers who are interested in you. Make your subscribers feel like they’re number one. How to do this? The easiest way in the long run is to implement a list-segmentation program. For more on how to get started segmenting your lists, check out our latest blog post about it.

Mobilizing your Emails via a Mobile Mentality

As email marketers, we know you strategize your content across a variety of platforms, and you mobilize your resources to do the most with what you have. But today, though we’re talking about mobilizing, we don’t mean “to assemble or organize, to prepare, as for readiness,” which is our current dictionary’s definition of the term. Trust us, in five years, there will be another entry in Miriam-Webster’s, or at least the email marketing bible. And it will read something like the following:

Mobilize: To create a streamlined or otherwise mobile-friendly version of your email, website, or other internet content, so that your smartphone-users can see your content the way it’s meant to be viewed.

If you haven’t thought about making your content mobile yet, now is the time. If your emails don’t render effectively on a smartphone, you run the risk of not only having a bad user experience and ignored email, but damaging your brand as well.

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, a tablet device (e.g., an iPad or Android tablet) or smartphone.

In addition to general appearance, you also should think about what you’re asking from your customers in your email marketing messages. Many emails promote or require a clickthrough to a landing page. This leads to yet another call for mobilization: in this case, landing pages optimized for mobile devices. But to take a step back, maybe it means rethinking your email call to action: Should it change to be effective for a mobile audience? Maybe an effective mobilized email campaign shouldn’t involve complicated clickthroughs or multiple links.

Another way to start thinking about mobile integration with your email campaign is to use SMS to gain subscribers. People are texting more than ever: it’s quick, simple, short, and on-the-go in a way that email and even social sharing isn’t. Allowing subscribers to opt-in to receive text updates from you and to subscribe to email updates using SMS is yet another way to make your email marketing campaign visible and available to prospects. Just be sure to set expectations on the maximum number of texts they’ll receive from you per week or month, since many people still don’t have unlimited text plans, and too many texts will quickly become unwelcome. With that in mind, use your text message marketing strategy judiciously.

Giving your customers more, as well as easy ways to sign up, will allow for more email opt-ins. For more on making your emails mobile, see the June 2011 edition of the ClickMail Marketer. It covers why ignoring the appearance of mobile email is bad for your brand, and considers the effect mobile viewing has on conversion rates.