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.

 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.

Before you dismiss this as just another conference, consider the two factors make this conference stand out, with information that goes beyond theoretical to practical:

1) Practical Case Studies: MarketingSherpa has over 900 case studies on what works – and doesn’t work – in marketing. Each workshop session will include proven samples, results, and how-tos.

2) Primary Research: MarketingExperiments has conducted over $10 million in experiments and tests with real businesses and organizations. You’ll learn the principles and methodologies that have been proven to work.

The cost for the event is $499, but as a reader of this email marketing blog, you’ll sign up for only $399…a savings of $100! 

Plus you have three dates and cities to choose from:

• San Francisco on May 13
• Boston on June 9
• Toronto on June 10

See the agenda, register and save $100 today.

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.

As an email marketing vendor that represents a multitude of email service providers, ClickMail Marketing is in the unique and objective position to help you take a critical look at the over 100 ESPs out there, ensuring you find the one that’s the best fit for your company. We do that by covering the 20 factors you need to consider, and helping you determine which factors matter the most for your company to improve its email marketing results. We’ll teach you how to evaluate the ESPs and even provide you with a scoring sheet.

Find out more by clicking here. Especially if a new ESP is on your to-do list for the coming year!

You can also download the email marketing whitepaper either before or after the webinar at our email marketing library: click here.

As an email marketing company with 10 years experience in what works, and what doesn’t, we’ve pulled together some surprisingly simple tips you can follow to help people feel more comfortable about giving you data.

Follow these tips and you’ll help people overcome both the friction they face and the anxiety they feel.

See the latest email marketing newsletter from ClickMail by clicking here.

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!

In a ClickZ blog post by Bill McCloskey titled “Is Your E-Mail Getting Delivered on Prime or Subprime IP Addresses?”, ClickMail Marketing’s newest email marketing whitepaper is held out as a useful tool for improving deliverability. In his blog, Bill points out the importance of email deliverability calling out a few key points from our whitepaper, but also the importance of IP reputation to deliverability.

Read the ClickZ blog post about our newest email marketing whitepaper. And download the whitepaper, complete with a useful checklist for comparing the 20 critical factors among differing email service providers.

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.

It’s one more way for this email solutions provider to provide useful, practical content to help you maximize your email marketing ROI!

See the EEC email marketing blog by clicking here.

“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.”

Tim is absolutely correct. It’s a matter of perception. For some psychological reason, consumers guard their inboxes, but willingly give out their email addresses in exchange for something, like the chance to win a car. Maybe they just haven’t made the connection yet. And that means we as responsible email marketers have to make the connection for them.
Again and again we see our email marketing clients overly concerned with the quantity of their lists, i.e. getting more names, and not concerned with the quality. And part of what makes a list quality oriented is being considerate of the subscribers, and making sure you’re building trust with them, not breaking it down.

It’s already a struggle to get email into the inbox, why risk a low open rate or being reported as spam because you weren’t careful in your list building? If people don’t remember signing up for your email and they get email marketing from you, you’re building ill will, not good will. And ill will won’t get you any click throughs or conversions, only headaches (see above statement about being reported as spam!).

Heed Tim’s advice the best you can: Make sure you stay cognizant of just how you collected that email address in the first place, then help your subscriber stay aware too.