The Whitelist

Does Your Email Marketing Campaign Have the Right BITS?

When it comes to a successful email marketing campaign, it will pay off in the long run if you adhere to the right BITS in your email marketing best practices. And yes, you’ve probably guessed it: BITS is an acronym to help you remember four key factors that will ensure the success of your email marketing strategy:

Brevity
Interactivity
Trackability
Subscriber Preferences

Brevity: If email marketing isn’t a format that is made for “short and sweet” I’m not sure what is. In fact, in the world of email marketing, a better expression might be, “short IS sweet.” People want to get through their email quickly and are increasingly using preview panes and subject-line scans  to decide whether or not to read further, open the email, or simply delete without another thought. So as an email marketer, this means meeting an additional challenge in order to get your emails opened to achieve maximum ROI from your email marketing campaign. It’s essential that your email messages get straight to the point AND create intrigue and interest, which will lead to higher email open and click-through rates! Short and snappy subject lines are the first way to make your emails stand out and ensure ease of preview pane readability. Well-written and relevant subject lines also illustrate the main point of your email message. See our post on how to create compelling subject lines for more.

Interactivity: The number one goal of your email marketing campaign is engagement. Because engagement leads to increased subscriber interest, loyalty, and ultimately, for you, increased ROI. And nothing engages the recipient like the opportunity to do something. Give them clickable links that lead to your website or product offering. Tease your subscribers with a little info to start (which satisfies BITS rule #1 – BREVITY), and then provide a link to the full story for increased click-through rates. Provide one-question polls or surveys that they can answer and participate in. Engage your subscribers and lead them into taking an action. If there’s interaction at the inbox level, you’re off to a great start. Inbox interaction tells the ISP your email was welcomed by the recipient, and you’ll continue to be allowed into that inbox. And there’s a ripple effect: If enough people don’t engage, that can reflect universally on the entire domain, and can lead to decreased email deliverability.

Trackability: One of the increasingly important features of email marketing is the ability to track and mine the data that you receive from your subscribers. Who are your subscribers? Where do they live? What are their buying habits? What devices do they use to read their email? What browsers are most popular? When do they open and click through your emails? Gathering, and most importantly, using this data in segmenting your lists and specifically targeting email marketing campaigns to different groups of users will increase the overall relevance and interest in your messages.

Subscriber Preferences: Here at ClickMail Marketing, we talk often about the importance of using preference centers to allow the subscriber to set the guidelines of your communication with them via email. When you allow subscribers to self select, segmenting themselves and giving them control over how often they hear from you and with what content, they are more receptive to your emails because your emails are more relevant. Relevance, and therefore engagement, has always been important for email marketing effectiveness. And overall, this will affect your email deliverability too.

Keep it simple – all you have to do is remember the four BITS of a successful email marketing campaign going forward for increased relevance, increased email deliverability, and ultimately, increased ROI.

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.

Keep Your Content Current

As an email marketer, you know how important relevance is to your email marketing campaign strategy. But relevance doesn’t always equal current. Content relevance can refer to anything from information of specific interest to your subscribers, to regional specificity to, of course, specific and relevant information about the product, services, or information you are providing. Current content takes your relevant content to the next level.

How?

Because current content is the difference between connecting with your subscribers’ interests in the NOW. Whether it’s the upcoming elections, or the unseasonably early cold blast freezing the whole country or even the extra hour we’ve all gained by “Falling Back” to standard time (and early darkness) this past weekend, whatever is “current” is whatever your subscribers are probably talking about or otherwise impacted by.

By focusing on whatever your subscribers are focused on right now shows that you’re connecting with them, on a very immediate level. The solution you’re offering in your email marketing campaign is right for their needs, because you understand – you’re right there with them, experiencing whatever these times hold.

A recent post on AWeber’s blog displays specific examples from actual email marketing campaigns that integrated current events successfully into their content strategies.

Some of the effective examples highlighted include:

• Using events in the news as a launching pad for a related promotion or opportunity to provide relevant and connected information.
• Hosting an event that is similar in theme to a nationally-occurring event: e.g., “Vote on your favorite product!” mini-election to coincide with Election Day.
• Weather-related promotions. There’s a reason we all fall back on talking about the weather when conversation stalls: we all experience it. We’re all affected by it. And it’s always changing. Taking a cue from water-cooler small talk, some very successful email marketing campaigns have been launched entirely around major weather events that have affected significant population centers in the U.S. And if you’ve successfully segmented your list by region or location, even better: you could set specific weather-related email marketing campaigns to target only those in affected areas.
• Holidays. Well, of course. This is the one “current event” that every email marketer falls back on. But when considering how to construct your next Holiday-themed email marketing campaign, think about what makes THIS year’s holidays special or different.

Not only can you be current with your email marketing strategy, being current by definition requires being creative. And creative content is always a good thing. Make sure to add this “Keep It Current” strategy to your email marketing best practices toolbox and let us know your results!

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.

Marco Marini interviewed on Sales Lead Management Association Radio

Marco Marini, CEO of ClickMail Marketing, was recently interviewed on the international Sales Lead Management Association radio program about the email marketing landscape.

If you’ve ever wanted answers directly from an expert, this is your opportunity to get them! We’ve written a lot recently about automated email marketing campaigns, so if you’ve wondered if email marketing automation is right for you, Marco discusses why it may or may not be.  He also addresses how successful email marketing can be implemented for a range of companies, from small start-ups to well-established Fortune 500 companies.

Some of the other questions that Marco addresses in this radio interview include:

·  What should someone be able to expect from a well-designed and monitored email campaign?
·  How has the email marketing landscape changed?
· How can you use email most effectively to nurture and grow the relationship with your customer?
· How can email marketing fit within the traditional model of sales lead generation?
· Is a truly successful email marketing campaign accessible only to large companies?
· How a company of any size can benefit from the services that ClickMail provides?

ClickMail has a wide variety of email marketing solutions that enables us to specifically match up your needs with an ESP that best fits your needs. Since we understand the minute differences between all of the various tools on the market, we can narrow down what’s the right tool for you based on your integration needs and the goals you’d like to accomplish.

Marco Marini is an acknowledged expert in e-marketing with over a decade and half’s-worth of experience in the field. Before taking over as CEO, he was ClickMail Marketing’s VP of Marketing & Operations. Marini has also held key marketing positions with CyberSource, eHealthInsurance, DoveBid and IBM Canada.

For more information on the changing email marketing landscape, and how you can best navigate it with the help of ClickMail, listen to Marco’s interview now!

Email Marketing Remains ROI King

A recent article by Ken Magill confirms what we at ClickMail Marketing have been preaching (ah, sweet confirmation): that is, that email marketing is “returning vastly more for every dollar spent on it this year than every other marketing channel,” according to the Direct Marketing Association’s just-released Power of Direct economic impact study.

Specifically, email marketing is bringing in $40.56 for every dollar spent on it this year, according to the DMA. When compared to other marketing channels, the ROI of email marketing is unsurpassed. Direct mail catalogs have a ROI of just $7.30, while internet channels see quite a bit more, but not as much as email: internet search has a return of $22.24, Internet display advertising sees a return of $19.72 and mobile returns just a bit more than direct mail: $10.51.

For those of us in email marketing, it’s not a surprise to read the DMA’s report that internet marketing will greatly surpass direct mail in 2016, by over $250 billion of conversions. It’s predicted that internet marketing will result in $970.3 billion of sales in 2016 compared to direct mail’s $724.1 billion.

Even though some portend the downfall of email, largely due to a decrease from its ROI high in 2006, an estimated $52.23 for every dollar, it’s still a very viable marketing channel, especially when email’s reach is expanded to include mobile.  As more users convert to smartphones and tablets, and utilize corresponding mobile applications to check email and perform transactions, mobile ROI is only going to climb.

As we see the rise in mobile marketing, it’s important to get a jump on the trend and ensure that your emails are optimized for the mobile landscape. For even more information on how to “mobilize” your emails, see our recent blog post on making your emails mobile.

How to Build Your List

As an email marketer, you’re always looking to add more names to your email list. But as with many things in life, we sometimes get too focused on quantity over quality.

Which doesn’t sound like a problem in the world of email marketing, until you realize a list based on quantity will decrease your email marketing ROI and even negatively impact your email deliverability rate.

In our last post, we wrote about the benefits to culling your list for more email marketing ROI. But let’s get back to basics and talk about list building.

For a list that will yield valuable email marketing ROI, you have to focus on a quality list (which doesn’t always correlate to quantity).

Do:

• Have something of value to offer in exchange for their email address. Think of it as a quid pro quo exchange. Everyone wins, if you do it right.
• Sell your email signups: Make the reason to sign up for your emails compelling. Don’t just ask for an email address without specifying why.
• Ask people to sign up in multiple locations: Where do you have a web presence besides your website? Make sure an email sign-up link or box is available and visible everywhere.
• Offer great content that people will share. This will lead to more sign-ups (and keep your current subscribers)!

On the other hand,

Don’t:

• Add everyone your company comes into contact with to your database.
• Use sweepstakes that get you plenty of names from people who want to win…but who never want to hear from you again.
• Use third-party or co-registration techniques.

It might not be the fastest way to a massive list, but the list you’ll end up with will be full of subscribers who want to hear from you.

Make sure you remember that behind every email address is a person. Who values their privacy, and guards their information fiercely. Maintain their trust by delivering what you promised, and thank them for subscribing to your emails!