Email is the most used service on the Internet and, doubtless, most useful. Many people use the Internet only for checking their emails. Email marketing can be useful only if done right. Otherwise, it can get you more harm that benefits. However, there are things you can do in order to ensure that your email marketing campaign is going to be successful. In this article we provide you with 7 email marketing best practices.
Deliverability
Deliverability is probably the most important issue in todays email marketing business. There are many spam emails and many legitimate emails are flagged as spam so they are not delivered. They are not getting thru ISP spam filters. Good deliverability ratio is the first step in successful email campaign because if your emails arent delivered then you dont even have an email campaign!
In order to ensure that your emails will have good deliverability you have to choose your email marketing vendors wisely. You have to check if they are on Blacklist or Whitelist. There are different organizations like Spamhaus project and SpamAssasin that have their own lists which are used by ISP. If your email service provider is blacklisted your emails wont be delivered! Also, you have to ensure that your domain name isnt blacklisted. In order to maximize your deliverability it is recommended that your email service provider offers Habeas Sender Warranty Email Header.
CAN-SPAM Compliance
Your email newsletter should be CAN-SPAM Compliant. It is recommended that you require double opt-in subscription so that your subscribers have to confirm their request to be part of your email newsletter. Dont add your subscribers without their permission and you should avoid adding them manually even if you have their permission. It is good that they do it using double opt-in method. Also, avoid using pre-checked subscription boxes.
It is essential that you provide your subscribers with an easy way to unsubscribe from your email newsletter at any time, when they want. It is good that you offer one-click unsubscription process with an unique address. This way there will be much less requests from your subscribers that you remove them.
CAN-SPAM Law also requires from email publishers that they include their physical postal address so you should include it, too. Your have to show your subscribers that you are legitimate company which have a presence in offline world, too.
HTML and plain-text versions
It is essential to offer your visitors to choose if they want to receive your email newsletter in HTML or plain-text format. It means that you should regularly send both types. Sending HTML newsletters have more benefits than plain-text email newsletters. You can use email tracking only in HTML newsletter with image embedding, HTML newsletters have better click-thru ratio because they look like the real web sites. You can hide long URLs so that they will look professional.
However, some people prefer plain-text versions and reasons are different. They use email clients that dont support HTML emails. Another thing is that HTML newsletter types are larger than plain-text newsletters. Also, one of the reasons why some people dont receive HTML emails is security. In HTML newsletters some people can embed malicious scripts or use them for phishing (when they pretend that they are representatives of one company and when people click on a certain link they are taken to their web site that is designed almost identically like original). It is mostly used in financial fraud attempts.
From and Subject fields
Your From and Subject fields are very important for getting better open ratio and therefore to have successful email campaign. You have to remember several simple rules.
It is important that your From field be consistent. You have to choose one name, whether it will be a company name or personal name and use it constantly. Once you change your From field it is most likely that your open rates will decline.
Speaking about Subject field, it has to be short and catchy, to grab attention of your subscribers. Your email has to stand out in usually overloaded inboxes. It is important that you dont shout so instead of
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH
use
Exclusive Interview with
It is very good that you make your subject field standardized and that the title be something related from the content of that current issue.
For example, if you have a newsletter called Email Articles your subject line can be something like this:
[Email Articles] How to Improve Your Open Rates, Issue #10, August 29th, 2005
If your email newsletter has a longer title, for example, Email Marketing Articles you can use this:
[EMA] How to Improve Your Open Rates, Issue #10, August 29th, 2005
Personalization & Segmentation
Personalization is connected with Subject fields, too. Some people like to include first names of their subscribers in subject lines in order to have better open ratio.Personalization is also very effective when it is used in editors welcome message or in articles.
For example,
Dear !*First_Name*!, welcome to the 10th issue of Email Marketing Articles.
Segmentation is the most important part in marketing. What am I selling and to whom It is not the same to sell your software to novice users (newbies) or to seasoned users (knowbies). Also, it is not the same to market your software to small business companies and corporation. It is good that you make a good segmentation of your email newsletter. Best way to do that is to include several additional fields at sign-up process. Of course this doesnt mean that you have to ask 15 questions from your new subscriber because many people leave when they see that there are many fields to fill. After that, you will make several email newsletters for each membership type.
Timing is everything
Another very important thing in creating successful email campaign is timing. In almost every email marketing statistics you will find information about when to email your subscribers. So studies show that the best time for sending email campaigns are days from Tuesday to Thursday. However, it doesnt mean that someone cant have successful email campaign sent on Sunday. If you send your emails in days that are not prime time you can have a chance to avoid competition that will mail their campaign in prime time. Tuesday-Thursday are generally best days for mailing because, as you probably know yourself, too, not many people like Monday (remember that song). After a good weekend, Monday is usually reserved for some consultation with the management about weekly plans and task. Friday is, on the contrary, favourite day for many people, because they are planning their weekend. People often come home earlier on Friday so your email can be buried in their inbox until Monday. And in Monday, to be deleted with many others (we have already wrote about Monday). On the weekend people usually dont work but many will still check their emails.
Also, you have to decide how often you want to send your email newsletters. It will depend on your content. If your email newsletter about latest industry news you can send your newsletter once a month, because then it wont be latest news anymore. If you send a corporate email newsletter with news about company and useful articles from your area of expertise, monthly frequency is usually the best one.
You have to make several email campaigns and see which ones get you best results.
And when we talk about best results the next logical step is tracking.
Tracking
How do you know if your email marketing campaign was successful You have to know how many people opened your emails, what was your click-thru ratio, your subscribers behaviour on your web site after they had clicked and finally how many subscribers purchased your product.
With user-friendly you will be able to do that and also to make polls to get even better view of your email campaign.
Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta. Infacta is email messaging services company providing powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning Group Mail, software for sending highly-personalized email messages and Group Metrics, software for email tracking. For more information visit:
Now that weve explored the importance of sending permission-based email, lets take a closer look at some of the techniques and practices that the most experienced email marketers use. These best practices can make the difference between rapidly growing your list through word of mouth, increasing your sales, and building strong relationships and losing subscribers to list attrition, aggravating customers, and getting your messages blocked before they even reach your recipients.
From Names & Subject Lines
For most people, a majority of emails received are junk email. As a result, each of us has developed a little ritual we follow when checking our email. Initially, most people looked first at the subject lines to determine whether to read a message. Today, however, studies have shown that recipients glance at the From field to see if they recognize the senders name or email address. Then, only if they recognize the From Name do they look at the Subject field to see if its of interest to them. This is why we recommend using a From Name that is either your organizations name or a well-known person within your organizationand to keep that name consistent with every mailing.
Regarding subject lines, we have found a good strategy to be having one part of the subject line be consistent, and the other be variable. This way recipients can recognize your newsletter when it comes in as well as get a small taste as to what type of information might be featured for that issue.
Some examples of bad subject lines are:
The Permission-Based Email Marketing Monthly for September, 1 2005 from IntelliContact Pro
This subject line is simply too long. We recommend keeping subject lines between 20 and 50 characters whenever possible. This 80 character subject line is likely to get cut off in most email clients and could cause the message to have a higher chance of being blocked by a content-based spam filter.
[FNAME]S ENTREPRENEURS CHRONICLE FOR SEPTEMBER
This subject line is in all caps, which will increase the change the message will get blocked by content-based spam filters.
Garden Tips
This subject line doesnt provide any information as to what the message is about. We would recommend adding at least what month the message is for.
Oxy-Powder Special Save $10 Today Only Buy Now!!!!
This subject line includes both a dollar sign and multiple exclamation points. Both of these things would cause the message to have a higher chance of being blocked by a content-based spam filter.
Heres is a revised version of each of these subject lines:
1. Permission-Based Email Marketing Monthly for September
2. [fname]s Entrepreneuers Chronicle for March
3. Garden Tips Monthly Are Year Round Orchids Possible
4. Oxy-Powder Special: 15% Off
By following these tips on From Names and Subject Lines you can maximize the chance of your message being opened by your end recipients.
HTML or Plain Text, or Both
In the early days of the Internet, say 1998 and before, when most surfers were using Internet Service Providers such as Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe, all email messages that were sent were plain text emails.
Then, with AOL 5.0 came the ability to send Rich Text messages that allowed you to bold or italicize text, insert pictures, and add links. Still, however, most email clients (the software tools that allow you to view your email, such as Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, Hotmail, etc.) did not have the ability to display full HTML messages.
Today, almost all email clients have the ability to display HTML messages. While some organizations still send their emails as plain text, there are a number of advantages of sending your message as an HTML message, especially with the easy to use WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) HTML editors that are available. The difficulty is, even today around 5% of email recipients either are unable to view HTML messages or have turned this feature off within their clients. To solve this problem, almost all marketers today send in a format called Multi-Part MIME. Multi-part MIME is a method by which one can send both an HTML message and a text message within the same document. When using Multi-Part MIME, you simply create your regular newsletter, announcement, or promotion as an HTML message and then create a separate text version. Then, when your message is sent, all the persons who can see HTML, will see your regular HTML message, and the 5% or so that cannot will receive the text version of the newsletter. Todays email clients can automatically detect a Multi-Part MIME message and display the proper message.
It is for this reason that one should always create a text version of every newsletter that is sent out. Without a text version, the message will either show up blank or show up as garbled HTML code for the percentage of recipients who cannot view HTML messages. On a final note, you can go about creating your text message one of two ways. The first option is to recreate the message in the text-only section by copying and pasting the text from the HTML message. If you choose this method, be sure to type out the URLs of each link). The second option is to upload your HTML message to your web site and then send a message like the one below:
Dear [fname];
Your September edition of the Gardening Tips Monthly Newsletter is now available. You can read it online at http://www.gardentips.com/newsletters/septnews.html.Regards,
Betty Sampson, Editor
Gardening Tips Monthly
http://www.gardentips.com
When to Email
In marketing timing is everything, but with email marketing it can make the difference between emails being read and being trashed. Naturally every person has his or her own preferential time to deal with email, but there are a few general rules of thumb for when it is best to send email messages.
If youre mailing to business recipients its best to sent email Tuesday thru Thursday, between 9:30 am and 3 pm. Studies found that Mondays are generally reserved for meetings, organizing, and catching up on all the tasks left over from the week prior and emails sent Friday afternoons are often ignored or show up at the bottom of the list when downloaded on Monday morning.
If you are emailing consumers directly, emailing between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. is generally more successful than other times of the day. Friday thru Sunday emails are the most effective, generally because consumers are more likely to be online over the weekend and have more leisure time to ponder your offer.
These mentioned times may change based on which time zone you are in and which time zone most of your customers are in. For example, if you are based in San Francisco but most of your clients are on the East Coast of the United States, you may wish to adjust the sending windows by three hours. In some cases, we have seen some international clients segment their list by geographic location to be able to more easily send messages during the most optimal time window.
Email Sending Frequency
As with all marketing, balancing the frequency of your messages is extremely important. If you dont send enough messages, it is difficult remain in the forefront of your customers mind and be considered when they are ready to buy. If you send too many, you may annoy your recipient and cause them to unsubscribe.
We have generally found that either a bi-weekly or monthly sending schedule produces the best results. This may vary, however, based on your type of newsletter and subscriber that you have. One strategy could be to create a signup form that allows your subscribers to specify what mailing frequency they prefer. Then you could tailor how much material you send to each specific subscriber preference. Make sure, however, that each message you send has something of value to the end recipient. Weve found that it is better to send a high quality monthly newsletter than a medium-quality weekly newsletter.
Personalization
Email marketing tools like IntelliContact Pro generally have a powerful method of improving open rates and response rates. This method is personalization. Message personalization can be done by inserting what is known as mail-merge fields into your message. For example, if you wanted to insert the first name of a subscriber into a message subject or body in IntelliContact Pro you would just type in [fname]. Take a look at the two below messages and see the difference inserting mail-merge personalization fields can have.
Message 1 No Mail-Merge Personalization Fields
Dear Subscriber,Thank you for purchasing one of our products in the past. Today we have launched a new online catalog that may help you in your future purchases. You can find this catalog at http://www.autobodycorp.com/catalog/.
We appreciate your business. Please know I am always here if you have any questions about your past purchases.
My warmest regards,
Frank Desean, President
Autobody Products Corp.
http://www.autobodycorp.com
Message 2 Using Mail-Merge Personalization Fields
Dear [fname],Thank you for purchasing [productname] on [purchasedate]. Today we have launched a new online catalog that may help you in your future purchases of [productcategory] products. You can find this catalog at http://www.autobodycorp.com/catalog/.
We appreciate having the business of [businessname]. Please know I am always here if you have any questions about your purchase of [productname] or any [productcategory] purchases that you may make in the future.
My warmest regards,
Frank Desean, President
Autobody Products Corp.
http://www.autobodycorp.com
As you can imagine, message #2, using mail-merge personalization fields, is a much more personal communications and would likely lead to a greater message response rate.
List Segmentation
There is no doubt that specifically targeted emails with valuable and relevant content work the best. By dividing your database either by interest or demographic, you will be able to appeal to the needs and wants of your consumer and improve your sales results. An effective segmentation strategy, however, begins with the sign up form. Make sure you are collecting the information during the initial signup that you will want to segment by later. IntelliContact Pro includes a list segmentation feature that makes it easy to segment your lists by any field in your subscriber database.
Ryan Allis is a nationally recognized expert on email marketing. Ryan is the CEO of Broadwick Corp, providers of the email marketing software IntelliContact Pro. For additional information on email marketing software, visit