Email Marketing Nuts and Bolts

Stefanie is currently an Account Manager and an Implementation Consultant at ListEngage, she manages some of ListEngage’s larger accounts, providing guidance and assistance from start to finish, including email creation, edits to the HTML, subscriber data implementation plans, deployment of campaigns, and analytics of each campaign.

Prior to ListEngage Stefanie held an event coordinator position at Mathworks, the leading developer of mathematical computing software for engineers and scientists. She grew up in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, and attended the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. She graduated with dual degrees in both marketing and management. She is an active alumni member in the national business fraternity of Beta Gamma Sigma and is also an alumni of the USF collegiate chapter of the American Marketing Association.

In this day and age, most people check their email on their iPads, cellphones, and smartphones - because of this all of our clients want to know what they can do to make their emails mobile friendly. We work with each client to taylor their email campaigns to look fantastic across all email platforms, including mobile devices. In lieu of a personal consultation with an email marketing agency, check out some basic tips to help make your emails more mobile friendly. 

Via WebTraffic ROI: E-mail marketing, with 92% of the U.S. internet users sending and reading e-mail, according to Pew Internet and American Life Project, it’s a no brainer.

Right? Yes and no. E-mail marketing no longer reaches your audience the way it used to. People used to sit at their Gateway desktops every night, dial into their Netscape and check e-mails while watching Family Matters.

The story is now a bit different. One in five marketing e-mails is opened on a smart phone. This changes a few things for your e-mail marketing campaign. Though you may have to modify a bit, you can and should make it work in your favor.

Give Your Newsletter a Mobile Lift

More than ever, it’s now important that you design your newsletter in a way that can be read easily on a smart phone.

As more people get into smart phones, studies show it has become the predominant way to check e-mail. Comscore said that 70.1 million U.S. users check their e-mail via smart phone every year.

Luckily for you, as smart phone technology grows, so does the phone’s ability to properly display a regular e-mail. Simply changing the coding and creating a narrower design may be enough.

Provide Interesting Snippets

There is a certain amount of scan and move on that happens when the e-mail immediately pops into someone’s inbox. People are most likely to read your business newsletters while they wait to get their hair cut or meet with someone. Thus, by getting your most important information into the intro clip, you can avoid the immediate deletion.

Then later, while they are watching TV on the couch, or sitting in traffic, they’ll take the time to click through the full article.

Offer Discounts, Coupons, Etc

Now that you know you’re readers are often out and about while checking e-mail, take this opportunity to get them shopping. Offering coupons that can be used right off the smart phone will make their decision to buy your product much easier.

This in turn gives them more incentive to buy. Scoutmob, a growing mobile application, offers their deals directly off the smart phone, giving users easy access to the coupons. I once went to a restaurant simply because Scoutmob offered a deal I couldn’t pass up. With easy access I was in and out.

Make it Convenient to Complete Online Transactions Later

When someone is lazily reading through your e-mail before a meeting, it isn’t likely that they’ll make a purchase from their phone. Online purchasing holds a large spot in the e-commerce world, 80% of people in their early thirties to mid forties make frequent online purchases, according to FifthGear.

However, this has yet to take hold on the mobile platform. On the newsletter, provide your customer care phone number in a click to call manner, give them access to their “shopping cart” to buy later, or allow a sharing feature to make it easy for them to share products.

E-mail marketing still holds an important spot in every company’s business marketing plan, as it should. We are seeing, though, that it’s time to shift the model a bit.

As with everything, technology is changing the way your customers function, which means you must make a slight shift as well.

To read the article on their website - please click here

Every year you take part in plenty of annual events to ensure your health and well-being: you go for your yearly check-up, you participate in yearly performance reviews at work, and maybe you even recharge your life with some New Year’s Resolutions in January.

If you think about it, a lot of your annual routines are about assessment and renewal – so when was the last time you stopped to assess your email marketing initiatives? Maybe it’s time to mark the start of summer as your annual “Email Marketing Check-Up”… a lot can change in just one year, after all.

Some things to consider when assessing your current email marketing plans:

1. Does your email marketing platform offer you exactly what you are looking for? Not just batch and blast capabilities but dynamic content, triggered emails, advanced marketing automation capabilities.

2. What is your current CPM rate, and could it be better? This alone can save you thousands of dollars annually.

3. Does your best of breed email marketing platform integrate with your CRM software or are you still operating in silos?

4. Does your email marketing system tie into social; or is this just another missing link?

The only problem with considering these questions and others is that the answers aren’t always that straightforward – and sometimes you need an email expert in the first place just to decode the jargon that you’re looking at.

Well guess what, we are email experts and we would love to help you! Go ahead and call us: run your current email marketing program by us, and we’ll offer unbiased insight into what you could be doing better, or where you could possibly improve sales, automated interactions, or strategy. We know that not everyone needs dramatic changes to their programs, or that maybe now might not be the best time for a change – but we’ll certainly share our years of industry expertise and knowledge on specific steps your company can take to improve your e-marketing initiatives and eventually your bottom-line. Just reply here, and let’s plan a time to talk.

Who hasn’t heard the phrase “Test, test and test again” when it comes to email marketing? Smart marketers have always understood the power of A/B testing their campaigns but the process has been cumbersome, and time consuming. Checking to see which emails perform best when, or with different subject lines and offers has always been a challenge that emarketers have had to take on manually.

Send one email at 10:03 am and one at 2:07pm with separate subject lines and then spend the next 3 days poring through the data, analyzing the results trying to incorporate the findings into your next campaign.

A/B testing has been inefficient to say the least—and most importantly, marketers have really only been able to view their insights in the rearview mirror in the past… but not anymore. Now, leading ESPs like ExactTarget have made A/B testing easy for marketers providing real-time emails, real-time testing and real-time results. Now email marketers can send 2 versions of a campaign simultaneously, measure open rates in real-time, pause sends and decide which campaign to launch to their “master list”.

What does real-time A/B Testing mean for email marketers then? Less guesswork and more results.

A/B split testing allows you to put your best campaign forward in Real-Time by monitoring various versions of the same email, and determining which is performing best. Users are then capable of evaluating test results and sending the “winning message” to subscribers.

The way that is works is simple:

1. A user can go into the system and choose a campaign to set up in A/B Testing.
2. The user can then set up their test variables, like:
   
   • From Name
   • Subject Line
   • Send Date/Time
3. Users then decide their “test audience” say, 20% of their master list
4. Once the test has been sent, users can then evaluate the test results and…
5. Voila! Send the most successful campaign to the remainder of their subscribers on that particular list/campaign.

At ListEngage we’re helping our client get the most from their campaigns with features like A/B testing which in turn helps clients implement these new features for better overall email marketing campaigns and ROI. Email us today and let us show you what A/B testing can do for your overall marketing plan. Now, let’s starting testing… or should we say A/B testing?



image:
http://viralogy.com/blog/ecommerce/ab-testing-your-ecommerce-site/

Ok, let’s talk turkey: this holiday season, if it gets to be December 24th and you’re two steps away from sending your 55th email of the season to “All Subscribers” you certainly may have gotten every message you wanted across, but you also might not have any subscribers left!

The holidays are a tough balance for email marketers: consumers want deals and email marketers want to send them every deal they have on the planet, but most subscribers don’t want their inbox stuffed fuller than a Thanksgiving turkey from November through to New Years!

Here are 5 suggestions for Engaging (and Saving) Subscribers During the Holidays:

Analyze recent campaigns and see what’s working –If you take some time to look through your tracking results and see, for example, that your open rates are better with “exclusive” subject lines or your click-through rates are higher in more graphic-rich emails then design the rest of your emails with these elements in mind.

Keep an eye on increased holiday sends -“Every fatigued subscriber who opts out in December is someone who won’t see your emails at all next year,” warns email marketing expert Suzanne Norman. If you immediately started mailing 5x a day on Black Friday, then keep tabs on your unsubscribe rates, and tone it down a notch if rates start to spike.

Make your emails as colorful and assorted as your Thanksgiving plate! – Make your subscribers want to open your emails. Whether you use dynamic content to populate each email for your subscriber’s preferences; offer new and exciting reasons to open your emails; or send them flash sales or contests, the more variety in the campaign the more your subscribers will want to engage.

Use your sign-up page to promote exclusive holiday offers only subscribers receive. With the right incentives, you might build your list and be able to reach out to a whole new customer base throughout 2011.

Make it easy for everyone to spread your holiday cheer! Add a “ShareThis” button, or highlight the “Forward to a Friend” feature. With people relying heavily on social networks for shopping ideas and advice, having your content in this space puts you a step ahead of the competition.

Are you ever overwhelmed by the amount of email you receive in your personal email account? Well Google, the smarty-pants makers of Gmail, claim that they have “cracked the code” on determining whether an email coming into your inbox will be of value to you, or a waste of time. It’s called “Priority Inbox” and it’s scaring legitimate email marketers and irritating spammers alike.

The details of Priority Inbox are in the video below, but the real question is – what does this mean for your business’ email marketing efforts? And will your content ever reach another inbox again?

Check out the Video Below & Stay Tuned for Part II: How to make your Opt-In emails Gmail’s Highest Priority

A poem for My Love on Valentine’s Day:

Shall I compare thee to a great email list-growth strategy?
You bet!

The two of you “art” fairly similar, I must say.
Our love and my list both started out small, like the darling buds of May.

Then over time, as our love organically grew,
So did my lists-in quality and quantity too!

Like a good little prospect, I subscribed to your love,
And just like the email capture on my website, it fit like a glove.

So on the horizon, what do I see?
Well, more chances to grow us all social-ly,
We can take dance classes, or have dinner with friends,
While my lists will use Twitter as a means to an ends.

Remember my love, thy eternal beauty doth brightly gleam.
And like my list growth strategies, the ROI on your love is Supreme.

Ok, so maybe you’d get backhanded if you actually delivered this sonnet to your True Love this Valentine’s Day– but after you read  ”Why Growing Great Lists is just like Growing Great Love” you might actually agree that the two share some pretty stark  similarities. Could it be that growing any good relationship–whether it’s two people “feeling sparks fly” for the first time or a web visitor signing up for a newsletter for the first time-always begins with a few simple steps?

Growing Great Lists is just like Growing Great Love – Top 5 Rules for Both

Rule #1   Let it happen naturally:

Love and lists both grow best naturally: sure, you never meant to meet Mr./Mrs. Right at the deli counter but it happened far more naturally than your failed attempts to pick up your soulmate with pick up lines like, “Excuse me, but I happened to have lost my phone number, can I borrow yours?”.  Provide the ambience and the correct ingredients whether it’s a physical setting or your internet presence and let it happen naturally.

Rule #2   Define the relationship. Get permission:

Sometimes the best way to get what you want is to be honest, whether it’s a kiss or an email address.  Be straightforward,  let them know what to expect and leave “an (opt) out” in case they’re not interested. And before you “make the first move” make sure you’ve got their approval (opt-in)!

– Read The Rest of the Article Here –


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