The Whitelist

Email Marketing Best Practices: Make Your Email Newsletter More Personal?

A thought for 2011: Make your email newsletter more real.

The world is increasingly social and connected. I predict we’re starting to expect that we’ll only hear from real people and buy from businesses we can associate with names and faces.

It’s only a prediction, mind you. Most websites I visit and email newsletters I receive remain generic. Only blogs are typically personal, meaning you see a name and a photo of a real person. Websites and email newsletters, on the other hand, often lack names, faces…any real people at all.

What if you changed that? Changing your website is a big deal, I realize. But changing your email newsletter? What if you made the From address a real person? (With some kind of branding, of course, so the recipient would know whom it was from. For example, an email newsletter from ClickMail might be From: Marco Marini, ClickMail Marketing, instead of simply from Marco Marini. Your subscriber will know the ClickMail name but not necessarily your CEO’s name.

And what if you added a photo of that person? And included a welcome letter written more like it was from a single person, not a marketing department?

The bulk of your email newsletter content would stay the same. But it would be in a much friendlier, more “social” context. You might just improve email deliverability as a result, as your subscribers are more receptive to an email newsletter perceived as more personal than a corporate one!

Just something to think about! Or test!

Don't Gamble on Your Email Deliverability: See ClickMail in Las Vegas at the Email Summit '11

Have you registered yet for Email Summit ’11 in Las Vegas later this month? If not, do it now, and save $700 courtesy of ClickMail, one of the email marketing vendors participating in the event.

Meet with ClickMail’s email marketing best practices and email delivery problems experts to discuss your organization’s email reputation, rendering, deliverability and layout with our FREE Email Health Check.

Join us in Las Vegas on January 24-26, and you’ll learn plenty to help you overcome email delivery problems. And you’ll learn even more when you get the free Email Health Check from ClickMail Marketing.

And the Email Health Check is only one of two really big reasons to get yourself to Las Vegas for the Email Summit ’11. The other? The $700 you’ll save as a reader of this email marketing blog.

We will be one of the ‘Best of the Best’ email marketing vendors on the Expo Floor so stop by booth #19 to ask about any email marketing best practices or email delivery problems you might have.

Don’t gamble on your email marketing ROI this year. Get a free Email Health Check from ClickMail at Email Summit ’11 in Las Vegas. And save $700 too!

It Takes More Than an ESP to Improve Email Deliverability

It does seem as though there’s some confusion about how to improve email deliverability and the role of the email service provider (ESP) for email deliverability. Sometimes marketers seem to think that switching ESPs will make the difference. But your ESP choice is not the only way to improve email deliverability.

At email marketing conferences like the MarketingSherpa Email Summits where we run email deliverability assessment consultation workshops, we meet with marketers using some of the low cost, entry-level ESPs that have pretty good deliverability to the inbox. At the same time, we meet with many that were using top-tier ESPs that have lousy deliverability. And we’ve seen the opposite too, where the marketer using the entry-level ESP has the email deliverability problems and the marketer using the top-tier ESP has great email deliverability rates.

The takeaway is that your ESP choice alone does not improve email deliverability. No ESP can guarantee you results on email deliverability, because it is a result of many pieces, not just your ESP choice. Your email deliverability rate is the result of your list hygiene, your data collection processes and your sending policies too. Virtually every ESP can provide great deliverability for a marketer, or they wouldn’t be in business.

That said, there are some ESPs that will perform better for some companies, which is why ClickMail is vendor agnostic and resells over a dozen ESPs: to make sure we can find the best fit for you. But even finding the ESP that gives you the highest email deliverability rate doesn’t mean your other email marketing pieces can be lax. All of the factors that will improve email deliverability must be put to use.

Could you use an email deliverability assessment to see where your problems might lie? Just ask.

You have no choice. You must take email delivery problems seriously. Very seriously.

Why? Because every percentage point of improvement in your email deliverability is a potential improvement in your email marketing ROI. You might think there’s no real difference between an 81.5% email delivery rate and an 82% email delivery rate. Not really, you say, that’s such an insignificant number. But if half a percentage point equals 1,000 more inboxes, and you have a conversion rate of say, 2%, that’s 20 customers you’ll never ever reach. Simply because you didn’t improve email deliverability.
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Improve Email Deliverability With a Preference Center: Here’s How

Did you know a Preference Center can improve email deliverability by reducing your unsubscribes and spam complaints? (Which in turn hurt your reputation and can, as a result, lower your email deliverability rate.)

The key to happy subscribers lies in giving the subscribers some control. And adding a Preference Center to your website does just that. My latest contribution to the Email Experience Council’s industry blog explains the five steps to building a Preference Center, so you can keep your subscribers happy and your email deliverability—and email marketing ROI—as high as can be. The steps are simple:
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Improve Email Deliverability by Spotting and Acting on Trends

Don’t be caught by surprise when you suddenly realize you need to improve email deliverability. Now. Instead, watch for trends over time. By trend I mean a movement either going up or going down, and in the email marketing world, like in most others, it’s either a change for better or worse.

The latest issue of the ClickMail Marketer tackles trends and teaches you how to use them to improve email deliverability, by spotting and acting upon them. Check out this email marketing article for tips on trending the following to watch out for signs of trouble:
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You don't have to compare email marketing services when you start with ClickMail.

Only one more day until the DMA and email marketing vendor ClickMail team up to present “Email Deliverability and Monitoring Best Practices for Retail” starring Footwear Etc.

Footwear Etc. is a recognized leader in retail email marketing. Yet they didn’t have the email best practices in place to regularly assess their email deliverability and monitor their online sending reputation. They couldn’t be sure their innovative emails were making it to the inbox as a result. Then they discovered their emails were getting blocked by a major ISP.

While Footwear Etc.’s email marketing application provided email deliverability statistics, those stats didn’t tell the whole story. ClickMail helped them resolve the immediate problem and went the extra step to implement the best practices to improve deliverability and monitoring moving forward. We tapped into our own email deliverability expertise, plus the tools and expertise of Pivotal Veracity and Goodmail, to provide an in-depth assessment of and reporting on Footwear’s real-life deliverability – both what they’re doing right and where there was room to improve. Here’s what you’ll learn to improve email deliverability:

• Best practices in email deliverability
• How to recognize a problem exists…
• …and what to do about it
• About Pivotal Veracity’s assessment tools
• Critical changes in ISP email handling that will impact your email deliverability
• How Goodmail improves your email deliverability even more

Speakers:

• Mike Baranov, Footwear Etc.
• Mark DiMaio, ClickMail Marketing
• Bryan Klech, Pivotal Veracity
• Daniel T. Dreymann, Goodmail

Want to improve email deliverability? Sign up now!