The Whitelist

Three Common Email Marketing Challenges and How to Tackle Them

In our last blog post we wrote about the upcoming can’t-miss Email Marketing Summit 2012 from Marketing Sherpa. If you attended last year’s summit, you know how valuable it is, and this year’s is shaping up to be the best yet.  One of the most important insights from last year’s summit was a roundup of the most common email marketing challenges to plague email marketers, and how to handle them. These are just a few of the challenges that were discussed, and the solutions that came out in the email marketing summit last year:

1. How do you increase engagement if you have a limited list?

Even though you may have a small email list, there are a number of ways in which email marketers can increase engagement, and ultimately, ROI. For example, you could start by expanding your company’s web presence and visibility. One great way to do this is by guest blogging for online industry publications. By getting your name out there as an expert in your industry, you’ll attract more followers and grow your list while increasing conversation and engagement. Also consider integrating social media into your email marketing program: a strong social media program will not only help grow your reach, but also show your followers that you are posting great updates (and thus encourage them to sign up for an email newsletter). Finally, consider offering incentives to your email subscribers to share your offers with others, which could be another way to integrate sharing, engagement, and social networking.

2. How can effective results be achieved through an email marketing program without being repetitive?

As we always say at ClickMail Marketing, the best way to address this challenge is to be consistently creating excellent, specific, and relevant content. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time; you simply need to get creative about repurposing your key messages in ways that draw prospects in and keeps current customers engaged. If you’re feeling stale or need inspiration, you can always develop creative content and new ideas based on customer surveys, industry trends and other insights. Be open to feedback and take suggestions from your audience. Often, your customers ask the same questions your prospects are silently wondering.
3. How are maximum results attained through optimal frequency and timing of email marketing messages?

If you’re struggling with this question, don’t worry: you’re not alone. Most email marketers wonder about the best timing and frequency to send out email marketing messages, and we’ve written about this question recently ourselves. Even though HubSpot’s social media scientist, Dan Zarrella, discovered that Tuesday at 11am is one of the worst possible times to send out email campaigns, this day and time may not apply to your audience and their behavior patterns. The best way to find out the most optimal frequency and timing for YOUR specific email campaigns is to engage in testing, another email marketing best practice we regularly espouse. In order to determine your ideal email frequency, the best thing to measure is your total open and click rates under different email frequency conditions. Consider running an A/B split test with different email frequencies and comparing the results.

For even more takeaways from the 2011 Email Marketing Summit, see Marketing Sherpa’s roundup!

What are some of the email marketing challenges you’ve encountered as an email marketer? Share them with us and we’ll try to address them in future blog posts!

First Impressions: How Typography Helps (or Hurts) Your Email Marketing Campaign

We all know it’s inner beauty that really counts, but unfortunately, we form a first impression in less than two seconds, based entirely on superficial appearance and presentation. And, like it or not, first impressions influence our beliefs and ultimate receptivity to the whole.

Wait, you didn’t think we were talking about people, did you? While the power of first impressions upon meeting others is undeniable, the same principle applies to email campaigns.

You might have the most interesting, relevant, sexy, or innovative content in the world but your audience isn’t going to read it if your typography and design overwhelms it (in a bad way). Ensuring your email design and typography is clean and easy to read will eliminate any unnecessary communication barriers to your effective email marketing campaign.

A bit of consideration to formatting and clean typography will go a long way to getting your emails read, which leads to improved email deliverability, open rates, and click-through rates. In your email marketing campaigns, be sure to:

• Simplify colors! No one needs a rainbow in their email. Keep a simple color palette of no more than 2 or 3 colors (at the most). Ensure your headlines are strong and easy to read, and use a secondary highlight color for any call to actions. Contrasting colors help define hierarchy, allowing readers to scan and easily parse out the most relevant information. Pastels and lighter colors are definitely to be avoided!
• Minimize the number of typefaces, sizes, styles and weights. Don’t confuse your readers with a hodgepodge of fonts, sizes, and weights. As with colors, keep the typeface simple and clean.
• Be consistent! Consistency is the key to effective presentation and responsiveness from your readers; after all, familiarity breeds comfort! When they become familiar with your clean and eye-catching emails, as long as your content is good your readers will look forward to scanning your emails for useful and relevant information. To ensure consistency in every email, spend some time crafting a good template of headers, subheads, colors, and so on.
• Kill clutter. Maximize white space and ensure ease of skimming and reading by breaking up your content into small and digestible chunks. Use visual elements like bullet points, line spacing, and indentations to help distinguish points in your message and improve scannability.

Remember, email marketing best practices are not the same as novel writing best practices! People don’t curl up with their email, they get through them as quickly as possible – click, scan, delete. Combined with good content, design simplicity will ensure more email opens, increased email click through numbers, and higher email deliverability rates.

Webinar: 2011 Email Marketing Trends and Truths

Clear your calendar for an hour this Thursday, August 25, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. EDT and you’ll thank me later! Why?

Because you’ll be attending an hour-long webinar sponsored by Lyris covering the latest research on trends in email marketing.  To continue to stay ahead of the email marketing best practices curve, you need to stay on top of email marketing trends…and this hour promises to surprise and teach you some of the most useful things learned in 2011 about email marketing best practices.

This coming Thursday afternoon join the Vice President and Principal Analyst of Forrester Research, Inc., Shar VanBoskirk, and Senior Vice President, Marketing of Lyris, Inc., Tina Stewart for a webinar on 2011 Email Marketing Trends and Truths.

Join these two master email marketers as they discuss the results of a recent survey conducted of over 250 interactive U.S. email marketers about how they currently use email marketing. Some of the results may surprise you: For example, many email marketers only use email best practices moderately, yet they still expect the results of their email marketing campaigns to increase!

Don’t be one of these! You’ll learn insider insights and details gleaned from the survey, as well as email marketing best practice recommendations that are easy to implement.

Attend this free online session and you’ll learn how to get the most from your email campaigns through:
• Welcome programs
• List cleansing
• Preference centers
• Creating relevant content
• Leveraging analytics
• Supporting mobility

And more!

Don’t delay – it’s tomorrow and the registration is filling up: Register now.

Email Marketing Tools for Email Marketing Best Practices

It’s all well and good to tell you it’s time to move beyond relevance to engagement, right? But what kind of an email marketing vendor would we be if we didn’t give you a little of the how as well? Below are just two of the new kinds of email marketing tools you can put to use to help you engage your subscribers. They should give you an indication of the kinds of powerful tools you could be putting to work as part of your email marketing best practices working towards deeper engagement and better ROI.

1) Now you can virtually set the send time per subscriber! One new email marketing tool analyzes the behavior of your subscribers on an ongoing basis. That data enables the software to predict when someone will be interacting with their email, to deliver an email to that particular subscriber at a very precise and opportune time.

2) Another new technology to be aware of is intelligent content. This is content that renders when an email is opened rather than when it was sent. That means your email messages can have live offers that are tied to your inventory. For example, if an item sold out or the first 250 respondents have already converted, an alternate offer is presented. That keeps your email relevant, and therefore is more likely to engage. And the more subscribers engage with your emails, the less likely you are to have email delivery problems.

There are plenty of other email marketing tools to put to use and more on the horizon. I’m sure by the time 2012 is starting out, we’ll be even more capable of being hyper-targeted and relevant. But I hope this brief introduction to these two email marketing tools gets you thinking.

For more about the email marketing best practices and tools you could—and possibly should—be using, contact email marketing vendor ClickMail Marketing.

As an email marketing vendor, we’re constantly on the lookout for ways to help you improve your email marketing ROI. Now more than ever, that ROI is impacted by your online marketing strategy. So here’s a workshop to prepare you to excel online.

 The Online Marketing ROI Tour is the first-ever collaborative workshop between MarketingSherpa and sister companies MarketingExperiments and InTouch. This workshop focuses on helping your company get more from your online marketing spend. Topics include social media, conversion optimization and marketing/sales alignment.
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If you haven’t yet downloaded our email marketing whitepaper on choosing an email service provider (ESP), or even if you have, be sure to listen in on September 16th as we partner with the Email Experience Council to bring you “You Don’t Need ESP to Choose an Email Service Provider.”

Marco Marini, our CEO, and Michael Kelly, our Director of Strategic Alliances, will present the in-depth and groundbreaking information released earlier this year in our email marketing whitepaper “Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP.” Presented Wednesday, September 16 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, the webinar is useful whether you’re shopping for a new email service provider or want to compare your current ESP to other email vendors.
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The newest ClickMail Marketer hit inboxes this week. And it’s a gem, definitely required reading for anyone in email marketing. That’s because it tackles an issue at the root of email marketing ROI: You have to have good data, and plenty of it, to do the kind of targeted, relevant email marketing that gets results. But how do you get reluctant people to hand over personal information to you?
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“If you build it, they will come.” That famous line from the movie “Field of Dreams” seems to hold true for great whitepapers too, with a little variation: If you write it, they will notice.

Since releasing our newest whitepaper this month, “Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP,” hundreds of email marketers have downloaded it from our Web site, and wiped us out of our hard copies at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit. Now we’re getting recognition from noted email marketing experts too!
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What do you get when you cross email marketing expertise with a leading email marketing council? A blog worth reading. And now ClickMail Marketing has been recognized for our role as an email solutions provider by becoming the EEC’s newest blogger.

Starting this week, ClickMail CEO Marco Marini is blogging semimonthly for the Email Experience Council’s (EEC’s) blog, joining other leaders of the email marketing industry as one of the voices of email. Look for slightly longer content here from us in the EEC blog, as we delve a little into email marketing tools and best practices than we do in our own email marketing blog.
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We had a great response to our blog post on sharing unusual ideas for growing your in-house email list from Tim who wrote:

“It still amazes me that a family will go to the mall, fill out to win a free car (including giving up the email address), and yet they constantly complain of spam. I think that email lead generation is the next best thing since sliced bread, but you must make it clear in your email how your prospects address was collected. I know that this can be hard if you have several campaigns to collect email addresses, but the comfort level of your prospect is in direct relation to their conversion rate. It is always a balancing act. Thanks for the great article.”
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