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With this post I'm going to start a new series called "e-mail analysis case studies". As the name suggests, from time to time I will analyze several aspects of real marketing emails or newsletters I receive that have interesting points or lessons to learn, in the right or in the wrong way. That means that we are going to see several good samples of good email pieces and several samples that reveal bad practices and things to avoid when sending email. I hope that you will find it interesting and hopefully all of us can learn something.
In this first post I'm going to talk about an email I received a few days ago in my GMail account. It was a marketing e-mail from HTC, the mobile device maker, which invited me to take a free test of their new online mail push service called HTCmail.
In the following picture you can see the contents of this email rendered in GMail with images enabled (sorry, the text is in Spanish, but that's not the point here):
Click image to enlarge
Not too bad. But, what happens when you not allow images to be displayed (which is the default case). Let's take a look:
Click image to enlarge
This reveals a good design done by the HTC marketing team. As you can appreciate, you still can read the whole contents perfectly, and the whole original message gets delivered to the recipient even though images are not displayed. Even the text in the header image is correctly displayed here. The "trick" in this particular case is that they have included the same text that is in the image inside the ALT tag of the <img> HTML label. In this way, when the image is not displayed this alternative text gests displayed instead in some e-mail clients like GMail (take a look at this article from Campaign Monitor for a list of email client behavior regarding the ALT tag).
However they have included the height of the header graphic in the <img> label too, which is not a good idea because it's a quite tall one. If the email client doesn't display the ALT tag, this leads to a 250 pixel-height blank area in the vast majority of the email clients in the market, and moves the main message almost below the fold, so a lot of people will not see it and maybe delete it immediately. In GMail that doesn't happen because it strips out totally the images when they are not allowed, and upon that it supports the ALT tag, that is the best of the situations for this particular content (not so good in other circumstances as we are going to see in the future).
The rest of the email is well distributed and with clean HTML (using tables not divs, a good practice in HTML email design) so that the message is displayed even in the less capable of the email clients. The only small thing to notice is that they forgot to translate the ALT tag for the sidebar image that reads "Aspectos destacados" in the Spanish graphic but is displayed as "Key features" (in English) in the no-images version. This is very usual in companies that make international marketing, and it's something that you must be careful about.
The rest of the email is apparently well displayed: it shows a few graphics and a shadowed border in the features sidebar with rounded corners too. However the small "arrows" you can see in the corners of the main content area reveal that something is not totally good here. And the dark gray "powered by" rectangle and the strange discontinued green bar in the left of the features are clues about something not working there.
Let's take a look to the original HTML contents displayed in a fully fledged Internet browser:
Click image to enlarge
As we expected there were problems with the correct displaying of the e-mail in GMail. First there is the lack of a grey background when displayed. The problem here is that they have used the "background" tag in the <body> HTML label:
<body bgcolor="#6a6a6a"...
This affects the lower part of the content and is the reason that the "powered by" graphic is quite like hanging there, with an ugly effect. In fact they were lucky here because they used a slightly lighter grey for the text that is even visible with the default white background. If they had used a white text in order to contrast more with the dark background the effect will have been that no text will be shown.
What they should have done is to have set the background in a external 1x1 table that contained the rest of the content. Generally the <body> tag and everything outside it is stripped by the email client before displaying the contents, so the background color is lost. In this case they included several embedded CSS styles in the header of the HTML page which were stripped out too and are not generally accepted or displayed by many of the email clients.
Analyzing the raw contents of the e-mail they included the whole HTML code between the <html> and </html> tags, which is not generally a good idea. They also included a text version of the email in order to render it on mobile devices (this is a good practice).
Summing up: the email structure and HTML are well designed and fairly well implemented, although they have failed in a couple of basic points that led to a not optimal behavior of the contents.
My score for this e-mail will be 7 out of 10 :-)
SMS is a good way to keep in touch with friends in western countries, but when it comes to making business e-mail is the preferred way to go according to a the study "ExactTarget 2008 Channel Preference Survey".
 The survey reveals that nearly two out of three of Internet users prefers e-mail in order to write to colleagues, SMS hanging far behind.
Morgan Stewart, director of research and strategy at ExactTarget, said in a statement that "there is a clear trend within younger demographics toward communication via text messaging and social networks, but those preferred personal communication channels were not necessarily also preferred channels for marketing".
Asked to judge the acceptability of various channels for marketing purposes on a scale of 1 to 5, respondents gave direct mail an average score of 3.9, followed by e-mail at 3.7. All other channels averaged under 3. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they had made a purchase because of a marketing message received through e-mail.
The ExactTarget results agreed with a recent survey of Internet users in North America by Habeas and Ipsos. About two-thirds of respondents to that survey said they preferred e-mail when dealing with businesses, and about as many said they expected to continue to prefer e-mail in five years.
Read an interesting summary of the study at eMarketer.com.
We can not ignore the role that social networks have taken as a professional marketing tool.
Social networks allow organizations to work quickly and efficiently between them. These applications make easy the interaction between professionals who share subjects of common interest. You can use the advantages of traditional communication with the communication of Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis…).
 The key is the agility. Social networks allow more open relationships between the different business areas. So organizations should take advantage of these characteristics quickly to react changes in their environment.
This new reality is completely integrated into the market. Corporate communication should not ignore this model of interaction that promises a great future for business.
Do not forget this point when you offer your customers services with more added value. Think in the ability of collaboration that has been opened through social networks.
Two out of three Internet users in the US has purchased products that they have been recommended through snail mail. Email is very popular too as a purchase recommendation tool.
That is one of the conclusions that arise from a recent study by eMarketer.
Among all the direct marketing channels email is the most accepted one among users only surpased by postal traditional mail. Un a 1 to 5 valoration scale, surveyed users give email 3.7 points. The rest of marketing channels, such as phone or instant messaging, get less than 3 points in teh survey.
News sent through social networks are not very effective. Just a mere 6% of the purchases were generated through this kind of communcation.
About a month ago I wrote a post about buying lists in the Internet and why this was a bad idea.
 Today I received a question from one of our customers about renting a list and the convenience of doing this.
Rented lists are different from selling lists in that, in the first case, you don't get access to the data in the list but the provider sends your email on your behalf to its own list of recipients. You must trust a lot the provider or otherwise you can not be sure that the list has a good quality and the recipients have given permission for receiving this kind of e-mails.
Companies that grow lists for renting generally get their recipients from vertical portals or from some specific websites. Probably this people give permission to these portals to send them e-mail from them or their customers and partners, but think about the consequences of the owners of the list sending an e-mail on your behalf: The recipients will not know you and probably get annoyed and click the “report spam” button. And most important: they didn’t give you explicit permission to send them any e-mail.
Sounds this familiar to you? Yes, it's the definition of spam: unsolicited e-mail.
Does this mean that this against the law? Not necessarily, but the point here, as always, is not only if it’s against the law (that’s supposed to be), but if it is against your own interests.
You will probably pay a good bunch of bucks for using the list, and you are surely getting a real low response for the emailing, and therefore a small ROI from the investment. And worse, your brand could be damaged if people think you’re a spammer. You don’t have a clue if the list is heavily used and consequently people in the list are angry about receiving your e-mail.
So the conclusion in (again) that you must not rent lists for emailing.
If you really need to grow your subscriptions’ list fast you can try to advertise in a vertical portal newsletter, co-brand it or make co-registration. But renting or buying a list is always a bad thing to do.
As always, I recommend that you grow your own in-house permission list (some tips here and here). It’s slow and painful, but it’s the only way to get results. In e-mail marketing always think in quality, not in quantity (more is less), and don’t forget that the most important asset you have is your brand and reputation, so don’t get a chance to drive it to a dead end.
In case you don’t want to hear my advice please review this interesting article by Jeanne Jennings: “Renting E-Mail Lists: What to Ask Before the Send”, and the ten rules of thumb for rented lists of Marketing Sherpa.
Frequently, unexperienced customers or prospects ask us about the possibility of sending mailing containing big attachments.
 This is the kind of task that seems trivial when sending just a couple of e-mails, but that immediately reveals as a not-such-a-sensible-idea when viewed from the point of view of someone that sends thousands of e-mails.
First of all let's consider how long it will take to send out such a campaign. For example, we need to send 5,000 e-mails with a 5 MB attached .doc file. Let's do the numbers.
Attachments are encoded using Base64 (for sending binaries as text). This in average leads to an increase of 37% in the size of the attachment, so considering a total size of 5 MB (we consider content size as irrelevant here), the size when the email is sent will be:
5 x 1.37 = 6.85 MB
Now, we have 5,000 e-mails to send, so the total size of the information we need to transfer is:
5,000 x 6.85 MB = 34,250 MB --> 34.25 GB
This is equivalent to transferring 49 CD-ROMs through the wire!! (and we're not considering some extra synchronization traffic that is needed for the sake of simplicity).
If our server is placed in an advanced datacenter and has, for example, a 6 Mbps symmetric connection to the Internet (which is very good and is quite expensive), which is equivalent to 750 KB/sec (or 0,75 MB/sec), this implies a sending time of:
34,250 MB / 0.75 MB/sec = 45,666.67 seconds --> 12 hours, 41 minutes, 7 seconds
A regular 5.000 e-mailing will take around 4 minutes or less. Bufff!
Other important thing to consider is deliverability to the destination servers. If you send an e-mail with a big attachment to, let's say, a couple of accounts at hotmail.com, you probably will not have any problems. But, how many recipients can you have in your list with a hotmail e-mail account? 20%, 30%?. Probably more. Say hotmail, say yahoo, say one of your big customers in a B2B list. The point is that when a server sees a lot of big e-mails coming from the same IP, they usually block the sender because she is eating up a lot of their bandwidth. A lot of ISPs don’t have bandwidth enough to support getting a large number of emails with big attachments. So you probably will get a lot of deliverability problems if you do this.
Some recipients will have limited account storage, even in these times of almost unlimited account space. A lot of corporate servers limit the size of the incoming e-mails for their employees, so you get a chance or not getting them delivered and receive a lot of soft bounces (with more bandwidth usage in your server, by the way).
Even if you get to your recipient's inbox, if they don't know you well, you probably will get a lot of spam complaints or very low open rates for fear of getting a computer virus. Besides this, nobody likes to receive big e-mail attachments without being warned in advance.
There is an added benefit or not sending attachments: you can put files in your web server and add a direct link in your email to these files. This way you avoid the problems stated above and, as a plus, you get detailed information about which recipients clicked on it, getting very useful data that you cannot obtain from attached files.
We can allow you to send attached files in MAILCast, but we don't recommend it. Drop us a line to get a quote if you need this kind of service :-)
 Very often we attach too many files in our emails without asking us if it was really necessary. In many occasions, the same information could be included in the message body or some other way shared by sender and receiver by clicking on a link inserted in the statement.
Although the possibility to attach a document in the email means a great advantage as a vehicle of information, also have a distinct disadvantage: their poor vision in a PDA, introducing virus into computers, making the e-mail as spam in server destination…
If it is really necessary to add an attachment, it is desirable to warn the recipient in the subject or in the body of the message about what is sent, so he decides whether or not opens the email
Recently the Communications Technologies National Institute (INTECO) has presented a study about Internet usage in connected homes in Spain.
This study reveals that the most used Internet service is e-mail, despite spam and other annoyances. It almost doubles P2P downloads, and on-line gaming.
Curious enough, Internet search has decreased 2.2% in the last 12 months. Participation in forums increases, and e-commerce and on-line payment maintain the same level.
For me it's very interesting to see how Skype, Videoconference and other means of get poeple connected have not been massively adopted.
And this study comes to confirm a fact we already knwo: e-mail continues to be the Killer-app of the Internet :-)
Read the full study (Spanish)
A recent study by Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa (read in Marketing Charts) reveals how the meaning of the term “spam” has lately changed for users, in a way with high impact for us as marketers.
The survey sought to determine consumers’ perceptions of what spam is, why they report emails as spam and what they think happens when the “report spam” button is clicked.
The main conclusion is that now spam means “unwanted e-mail”, in contrast with the traditional “unsolicited commercial e-mail”.
That’s a huge difference for us. This means that, now more than ever, your content must be relevant. You must engage with your recipients or will have a big chance to be blacklisted by the most important ISPs, such as Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail.
The reason is that, according to the study, people misunderstand the implications of hitting the “Report spam” button omnipresent in all mayor webmail apps. Take a look at these figures and start to tremble:
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43% of consumers, miss advertiser-supplied unsubscribe links in email and simply use the ISP’s “report spam” button to unsubscribe from an advertiser’s list - regardless of whether the email fits the consumer’s definition of spam.
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21% use the “report spam” button to unsubscribe from email that they specifically do not consider spam.
“What this survey uncovered is a major disconnect in consumers’ understanding and use of the ‘report spam’ button, as well as consumers’ definition of spam from ‘I didn’t sign up for it’ to ‘I don’t like it’—all of which signal that the current system of email spam filtering is a broken process” said Matt Wise, president and chief executive officer of Q Interactive.
Q Interactive suggests that ISPs’ “report spam” button be replaced with those that more clearly indicate consumers’ intentions, such as an “unsubscribe” button and an “undesired” button.
And that means a lot more of effort for marketers too: much more targeted and relevant content. It has been the better way to go in the past and, naturally, it has become the only way to go now.
Read the full review at Maketing Charts.
 Last week, in an e-mail marketing training I taught, I was talking about permission e-mail marketing and what it implies, that's grow your own home list. One of the main concerns people had is that going this way it's going to take ages to grow a good list. And that's true: it is a hard and long-time task that deserves all your attention and care.
The first temptation everyone experiments is to google a little bit in order to find a way to buy a list from someone else. That's a very bad idea.
There are a lot of reasons for not doing that, but the main is that - ethics and law apart- for the same reason you can buy it, anyone else can buy it too. So, there is no control over who can send mail to the list and how many times. Does it sound familiar to you? Yes, that's plain spam.
One typical list has an obsolescence rate that ranges from 15 to 30% in a year. That means that if the list you buy is one year old and it has 100.000 e-mails in it, you will probably get some 20.000 or more bounced mails when you use it. And probably it will be older and unusable.
Besides, these lists are normally made by e-mail spiders. These are special applications that sniff web pages in search of e-mail addresses. A lot of web pages have "honey pot" addresses. They are in the HTML code of the page, but they're not visible for the visitors, only to the e-mail spiders. When someone sends an e-mail to this "honey pots" the sender is added to a black list and is considered a spammer, because the only way that you may know this address is by using an illegal e-mail collector. So, if you use a list that, no doubt, will have several of this "honey pot" addresses you'll end up in a lot of black lists out there, damaging forever your reputation and your deliverability.
So the moral is: Grow your own permission list. It's hard and it takes time, but is a guarantee of quality, legitimacy and good practices. In this case less is more. Never ever buy or download an e-mail list. And if you do, please don't use MAILCast for your e-mailings :-(
One barrier that many small companies have to confront when they consider starting a newsletter -or any other e-mail based strategy- is the lack of a good recipients' list. "We have few customers" or "We don't have the e-mail addresses of our customers" are the main concerns they usually have.
Well, the fact that you don't have any e-mails is a problem. In fact it is a catch 22 problem: you don't start a mail strategy because you don't have a good list, and you don't maintain a good list because you are not using e-mail at all.
However, e-mail customer relationship, marketing, or customer retention need long-term strategies. So, the fact is that, if you don't start building your list right now you'll never have a list at all.
There are a lot of ways to proactively start growing a good e-mail list, and buying a database is not among them (they are very inaccurate and, in most cases, even illegal).
Ways to grow your list
Try to maintain a good (I mean: with a lot of added value) newsletter and promote it as hard as you can: in envelopes, business cards, brochures... and ask people to sign in or send you their e-mail in order for you to subscribe them.
Slowly but surely, make e-mail your main and natural way to communicate with customers. Just not use it for marketing or newsletters. Start sending your invoices by e-mail. Notify your customers by e-mail about product availability, order confirmations, product deliveries, and so on. This way they'll get used to receive e-mail from you, and will be more receptive to your information through this means.
Get as many e-mails as you can from your current customers. You can ask for their e-mails when you talk to them on the phone or in commercial visits. Ask for it in your paper-based communications too (ex.: invoices).
Ask for their e-mail to the visits that get into your facilities. For example, if you have a shop, inform the visitors about the existence of your newsletter or the value-added services you can offer them by e-mail (ex: product availability notifications, catalog updates...).
Of course, put a subscription box to your newsletter on your website. Make it easy to subscribe (but comply with law offering double opt-in, more on this on next posts). If you make it even easier to unsubscribe in case they don't want to keep receiving your mail, the will be less wary about subscribing in the first place.
Another fantastic way of getting a lot of e-mails at once is by arranging a contest or competition. A good place to start is in business events or conventions. If you have a stand there, collect names and e-mails from visitors and offer several prizes. They not have to be very costly, and can be your own products. Notify the visitors that they e-mails are going to be used only to send them your newsletter and that is very easy to unsubscribe if they're not interested later. You can arrange this kind of competitions in your shop or in your website. They are an effective way to grow your list of people interested in your products or services.
Once you start your strategy in a sustainable way your list will grow fast.
It’s well
known that, when economic downturns strike (as the current economic situation),
the immediate response is to cut costs, not increase them. Which costs? First,
always, marketing and advertising (oh, what a mistake!, in fact, I think that during
economic crisis there’s the great chance to position your brand better).
But as the
Galo-Roman Axterix’s Village, there’s an irreducible, measurable and effective
kind of direct marketing that not only doesn’t decrease during economic crisis,
but even grows up!!! Of course, you’re right: it´s e-mail marketing. Why? Because the well known email marketing advantages: it effectiveness, measurability,
low cost, segmentation, high ROI … ¿Do you need more?
Aren`t just
my thoughts, look this extract from a Media Survey (2008 – Source: DatranMedia ),
where 82.4% of marketers who took part of are going to increase their
investment in e-mail marketing during 2008 and 55.3% expect to get a higher ROI in e-mail
marketing .
 What will you do now? Share your thoughts with us. I found the survey at desmarkt.
 When I started to write the title of this post I was tempted to use the colloquial phrase “snail mail” instead of the more politically correct term “postal mail”. In fact I wrote it and immediately change it. It was not my intention to be shamelessly partial when judging one against the other, but in our sector this is a common way to refer to traditional mail.
And that gets to the first point in my list of advantages of e-mail versus postal mail: it’s much faster to start and execute a campaign with e-mail. A traditional direct mail campaign needs planning at least three weeks in advance. With e-mail you can plan the campaign, send it and measure the results in just a few days.
That’s one of the reasons traditional mail gets dubbed as “snail mail” ;-)
Another good reason to choose e-mail is that you can save a lot of money too. Depending on the total size of your recipients’ data base (it gets cheaper as you send higher mail volumes) you can even send hundreds of e-mails per euro. Every postal letter you send costs you more than 50 cents if you take into account paper, printing, envelopes, stamps, handling and so on. So e-mail is thousands of times cheaper than postal mail.
Other annoyance of postal mail is that you must sort it appropriately before going to your postal office. Depending on the final destination of the letters you get a different price, and if you want to optimize the costs is very important to have all the letters sorted by destinations groups. This is an extra cost you must take in account, and one that many people discovers only the first time they arrive to the postal office with their ten thousand letters marketing action in several boxes :-(
With e-mail this just doesn’t happen and you get the same price if you send an e-mail to your country or to one in the other side of the world.
E-mail marketing campaigns give you instant access to results and metrics, and you start to receive information only seconds after sending the e-mails. You can have a level of detail impossible to get through other means. Sure, you can measure things with traditional mail, but is more difficult and inaccurate, it takes a lot of time, and generally you must use some kind of reward to get people back to you (coupons, discounts…). And that costs you money too.
Despite all this advantages and some more, many times postal mail is the only choice you have. Maybe your target sector is a very low tech one and e-mail is not very common in it. Or maybe, plain and simple, you don’t have the e-mail address of the people you want to contact. Even worse: maybe you have the e-mail addresses but don’t have the permission to use it (be careful with privacy laws: they’re much harder with e-mail than with –in my opinion- the more annoying fax or environmental unfriendly postal mail).
But if you can e-mail is generally speaking a much cheaper, agile and effective way to keep in touch with your customers, and prospects.
 Blackberry mobile phones are very popular within business users worldwide, although actually only around 12 million receive their e-mail directly in these devices through a subscription.
Blackberry e-mail client has been known for its dreadful support for HTML e-mail. The problem was not that it couldn't read this kind of content (a lot of mobile phones out there which are able to read e-mail don't support html). The real problem is that this devices in fact do think that they can read it, so instead of showing the multi-part text version of the contents (if any), they showed the html version but without being able to display it accordingly. This is a huge pain for marketers.
Hopefully it seems that this is going to change soon. RIM has released a press note about several software updates for server and devices that are going to fix this problem inthe next months. Literally they say:
"HTML and Rich Text Email Rendering – BlackBerry smartphone users will be able to view HTML and rich text email messages with original formatting preserved including font colors and styles, embedded images, hyperlinks, tables, bullets and other formatting. "
This are good news for everyone because Blackberry adoption will surely grow a lot in the next few years, and this will lead the way for others to adopt the same feature (as Windows Mobile Devices did long time ago).
 Most people, as is perfectly normal, are not concerned about the technical details of the e-mail marketing software they use. But they should be. The devil is in the details, and technical ones are very important.
I've recalled this today, analyzing some commercial e-mails I've received recently.
For example, let's take a look to the URL an e-mail marketing provider generates for tracking reading stats for his customers (this is a real one, just changed the domains for privacy):
<IMG src="http://www.anemailprovider.com:8080/pcmwtg/trackingServlet=idtracking=2&idsend=906077">
Take a look at the evident purpose of each parameter of this tracking URL... What if I change the idsend value a little bit to, let's say, 06078?: I've just added a new read count to another user.
If I were not a really nice person (as I am in fact), I could easily mess-up all the reading stats of this provider, making them totally useless to their customers. :-(
Another thing interesting enough is that this image is not pointing to a real image. It doesn't even have an extension or even a real file name, which is easily spotted by some anti-spam filters. Not a good technical decision.
Now take a look at the typical tracking image we use in MAILCast:
<image src="http://mcs.krasis.es/C/R/MTc5NDA1NCAg.gif">
Well, the name of the image is not very beautiful either, but is clearly an image file name, and what's more important: all the information about tracking is nicely codified and encrypted in the name of the image, so is very difficult to tamper, and the stats are much more reliable.
Other issue involves the tracking of links. A tracked link in the previous sample e-mail was like this one:
http://www.anemailprovider.com:8080/pcmwtg/trackingServlet?idtracking=1&url=http://www.customerserver.com/landingpage.htm&idsend=906077
Uh??, The same as before but even worse. I could assign random clicks to anyone and the destination is directly embedded in the link, so I could easily avoid the tracking too.
A typical tracking link in MAILCast looks like this:
http://mcs.krasis.es/C/L/?V05_122498_MTc0NRB2NCAg
Which is, again, ugly (not uglier that the previous one, by the way), but is shorter and don't compromise the reliability of the tracking process.
The worst thing about the technical approach used in many e-mail marketing programs like the one I'm analyzing today is the unsubscribe link:
http://www.anemailprovider.com:8080/pcmwtg/GestionServlet?type=1&idunsubstemplate=10140&idCustomer=2447&idcontact=1572907
When I try writing in the browser that URL I get a message saying that I was successfully unsubscribed. But the customer ID and de contact ID are plain auto-numeric values in a database, so if I start trying different values I start to unsubscribe all the contacts of the customers of this provider too! Oh my!!!
Even If I get a message telling me that a unsubscribe confirmation e-mail is going to be sent to me, a malicious attacker could flood the inbox of all those contacts with unsubscribe confirmation e-mails which is in fact a cruel attack.
In fact if I try other values that are not numbers, in this case I could even make a SQL Injection Attack to the database, and don't want to know what a malicious attacker could do with this.
This is a very critical sample, but in fact a real one extracted from an email I've received this week. Just yesterday I received at least two newsletters that had this kind of issues, that are more common than you may think.
So the moral is: you don't have to be technical savvy for using an e-mail marketing or newsletter software, but is very important that you get advice from a skilled programmer or technician so that you don't have problems in the future. In fact you should get advice with any software you purchase, and this gets more important if you're dealing with your image and your customers' privacy.
This post ends the "Call to Action" series I started a few days ago (you can find the links below).
Today I'm going to talk about good practices for location and aspect in CTAs, the two last main parameters that have influence in CTA performance.
 The obvious place to locate your CTA is at the end of your e-mail. That's not bad, but not all of your readers will read your whole message, so maybe a lot of them don't even get to see the CTA. It's advisable to put it in higher positions of the message body too.
Why settle for a single CTA? You can use several links and graphics at different locations in your e-mail body, all pointing to your landing page. Use several options, for example: a link in the header, a left aligned graphic and a final sentence each of them pointing to your landing page. You don't know which will be more effective, so don't limit yourself, but don't abuse neither. It is sometimes interesting to have a first CTA-link in the first two lines of your content.
A word of caution when using images: take into account that images are probably initially blocked in your recipient's e-mail client; so don't rely on having them visible, as I've already pointed in this blog before. Anyway always use an ALT attribute. At least they will read the purpose of the image if they can't see it.
Regarding text-based CTAs, is advisable to highlight in some subtle way the CTA so that it will stand out from the rest of the paragraph. But not too much. For example, you can make the text bold or underlined, but you should not use loud colors (light red or similar) neither bigger font sizes. The main reason is that this is something very common in non-solicited mail messages and your message will have more choices of being considered spam. Another tip to highlight your text CTA is to add a linefeed and align it to the right, so that it will be clearly visible.
Summing up: try to use several locations for your CTA. Don't rely on images as the only way to go to your landing page, and use subtle ways to highlight your text-based CTAs.
Previous posts in this series:
 In my previous post I talked about the first of the four variables that impact the most in our CTAs: the words.
Now it's the time for another important parameter you must take into account: the action or, what most of the times it's the same, the landing page.
As we have already discussed, the words of your CTA must transmit clearly what your recipients are going to find on the other side, after they click on it. So the first rule for landing pages is quite obvious: they must contain the type of content you promised in the claim of your CTA. So if you wrote "Customize your new computer" don't send users to a page that has only information and that will force them to search for the customization page. Many will not even try to do it, and if they do, they will be a little bit upset.
Unless there is no other choice or it is very pertinent, never link to a general page, such as your homepage or the root information of your product. Try to be more specific and link to a features page, a price list, etc... You can use several links in your e-mail to send prospective customers to different pages (that is, several CTA). This way they go straight to what interests them, and as plus, you get extra information too. For example, if a lot people go straight to your price information page you will know that price is a big concern for your target. Otherwise, if your features' page is the most demanded, probably they are more interested in what your product can offer.
The content of your page is very important too. Apart from giving enough information in the right place, try to anticipate the fears of your prospective customers, and give information about it. For example, if you're selling something that must be phisically delivered, include a link or a sentence that state clearly your shipping costs. If they must fill in a form with their credit card, notice that all data will be sent securely through SSL and that you will not lend or sell their personal data. Just try to walk in their shoes and don't let them wondering about anything, or they will not buy.
Summing up: your landing page must be specific and reflect exactly the expectations your CTA created before clicking it. The contents must be clear and will try to foresee the concerns your visitors might have.
In the next post I'll talk about the other two parameters of a good CTA: location an aspect.
 We have already seen what a Call To Action is. Now let's see how a good CTA is designed.
When you are writing a CTA for your marketing message you must take in account at least four main variables:
1. The words you are going to use.
2. The action you want them to take.
3. Its location.
4. Its appearance (color, size, design if it's an image)
Let's see today something about the first one.
A lot of people limit their CTAs to links with phrases like "Click here" or "Buy it now!" and the like. In fact, although this kind of sentences could seem good CTAs because they are very straight forward and imperative, they're not.
A simple "Click here" at the end of your message can mean a lot of different things. Some readers may think it's a link that leads to a buying page, and many of them will not click it if they are not very interested at first. But, what if this link leads only to a page with more information? Maybe many doubtful readers will click it if they had known.
So be specific about what the CTA will really do, and let your readers know what to expect. Express clearly what they are going to find. If you want them to know more about your product just write something like "Learn more about the new BrandNewProduct". Don't use just a mere "Click here".
Maybe you want them to buy your product right now (of course), but chances are that the link you use doesn't lead directly to a purchase, but more to an information page or to a selection page. Trust your customer. If you're selling a new shirt model, instead of using a "Buy now!" CTA, you can use a "Choose your favorite color". At the landing page she will be intelligent enough to make the purchase if she's interested.
In order to raise its effectiveness, try to choose wisely the rest of the contents that support your CTA. Give recipients information enough about your product, but not so much that they have no reason to click the link.
It's important not to repeat the same CTAs over and over throughout the document. Use your imagination and run away from the common ones.
Summing up: a good CTA text must state clearly, with only a few words, why the recipient must click it and what to expect when she does it.
In next posts I'm going to talk about the rest of the variables that affect a good CTA.
At this time of year everybody receives a lot of Christmas holidays greeting cards. Most of them consist only in one or more images with some snowy view or something like that, sending us the best wishes of providers, customers and friends.
This is great. But, not surprisingly, many of them end up in the spam folder right as they are received. Why?
Well there are plenty of reasons depending on the way the e-mail was sent, and in fact all this issues are related to the same flaws that most commercial e-mail has.
In this post I’m going to talk only about a couple of issues that have influence in the deliverability of your e-mail, but they are important ones, and not only for greeting cards, but for every single e-mail that you send.
First of all there are images. I know that is easier to create a very visual e-mail using images, but you get a real chance for your message to be considered spam. That’s because your message will in fact have no content at all, and this is serious. In addition a lot of spammers send e-mail that consists essentially in images. And even worse: most of the e-mail clients in the market today won’t display images at first chance, letting the recipient to decide if she wants them displayed, so they will not see anything at all.
For example, just a few minutes ago I received a greeting card (as a customer) by one of the world’s largest banks. This message went directly to the spam folder. When I opened it the only thing I could see was this (click to enlarge):
Nice, uh?
Well, this is obviously not a good practice.
But as I inquired a little bit more I got another clue for knowing why this message was considered spam. When I took a look to its headers I found that I was delivered from the IP 213.229.186.XX which corresponded to the domain ly10.XXXXX.com (I will keep the guilty anonymous). But the “return-path” header for the e-mail was responses.megabank.com which has a MX IP address assigned that was not related in any way with the sender IP. And it also has a sender header with an address in the domain emailings.megabank.com with another unrelated IP.
Well, the fact is that this bank needs to choose a technically wiser provider, because as long as the contents are plain wrong and the basis of the DNS infrastructure are very bad set-up, they are losing a lot of e-mails in the spam folders of their millions and millions of customers.
Summing up: you have to put stress in the content you send to your recipients, and that’s your part. But you have to choose a solvent provider so that you don’t end up losing a huge percentage of your e-mails and, worst, without even noticing it.
Happy new year for everyone! :-)
When you write an email you must pay close attention to this first pieces of content. Apart from the fact that they are the ones that catch the interest of your recipients (so that they keep reading the rest of the document), there is an important consideration that is not usually taken in account by marketers. It's the fact that several e-mail clients show these two first lines to the reader without her needing to even open the e-mail!
How is this?
Well, take a look at GMail for example:
As you can see in the picture above, GMail shows the first words of the email automatically to your recipients. And notice that I've said "the first words". So, even although you have several images before the first word in the email, GMail effectively will show them in its small preview. GMail will fit in this space, the first 15 to 20 words in your email. If the recipient reads those lines and didn't get hooked-up then your message will probably end up in the trash folder.
But GMail is not the only example of this behaviour. Outlook does the same thing when "Enable automatic preview" is enabled (which is, by default), so your e-mails will look similar to these:
Outlook fits in its preview pane about 50 to 60 words, so it's even longer than GMail's. And the effect is the same.
So the conclusion is this: choose wisely the first words you enter in your e-mail so that people who read them will know exactly what it is about, and can get interested in the content.
Corolary: If you personalize your e-mails so that the first name of your subscribers goes in these first words, you get more chances for it to be read. A tool like MAILCast and its powerful personalization features can do a good job with this kind of issues.
Sometimes when I talk to people unfamiliar with e-mail, and tell them that my company has a platform for doing e-mail marketing, one of the questions I frequently get from them is like "uhh!, do you send spam?". It makes me sick, but I understand that is very easy to misunderstand it or even mix concepts for someone who is not in the industry.
Despite all the fears and concerns about spam, competition of instant messaging or RSS feeds, the fact is that e-mail is still the killer application of the Internet, and much more even in the corporate world.
A well conducted e-mail marketing campaign, sent to customers or permission lists, is often much more effective than any other means of direct marketing, and much more effective than massive marketing campaigns or advertising.
E-mail has several advantages over traditional direct marketing, wich include:
· Everyone reads its e-mail frequently and if you have permission for writting to them and use targeted and relevant information or offers, they will open it.
· It's inmediate.
· It allows instant segmentation for targeting.
· You can measure results inmediately without having to wait for weeks and without having to resort to coupons, discounts or free offers to get people answering you.
· You get a lot of valuable data in a way easy to use.
· It's a good complement to other channels or as a tool to build loyalty, trust and awareness with your customers.
· Promotions sent through e-mail can generate inmediate actions like downloading of brochures, sales, registrations, etc...
· It's a lot more cheaper than traditional direct marketing. Compare the cost of producing and delivering 2.000 or 10.000 paper brochures to prospects with the designing and sending of 2.000 or 10.000 e-mails.
However, not everything is as easy as it may seem. E-mail marketing is a fairly technical and complex marketing discipline. You can't simply take your marketing knowledge from traditional media and move it directly to e-mail. This blog is, in fact, a way to help you in this transition, but don't forget to search for the help of an expert who coaches you in your first campaigns, and a good designer who knows the exact problems she must cope with (just an HTML course its not enough).
And don't forget law and ethics. It's not smart, nor advisable start sending e-mail as mad to people you don't know or don't know about you or your business.
Keeping this in mind, e-mail is your best option to do effective direct marketing.
Nowadays a lot of people receive e-mail in their mobile phones (400.000 in Spain alone). Most of them used to be business travellers that use Windows Mobile devices or Blackberrys. But no anymore...
Today, given the small fees you must pay for GPRS/EDGE connections and unlimited e-mail plans, a lot of people is cathing up. At current SMS prices, you only need to send as few as 34 SMS mesages in order to equal the average unlimited e-mail plan fee. This leads to e-mail being considered cheaper and more useful than the far-limited SMS format.
In Japan, for example, they have been using e-mail in a regular basis for several years, and SMS almost has disappeared.
The current mobile e-mail usage it's expected to soar in the next years, being duplicated in two years, and being twenty times bigger in a 5-years time span. As soon as 2010 are expected to be at least 350 million mobile e-mail accounts worldwide. And these will not be only corporate accounts, but GMail, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts too in a high degree.
What does it mean to you as a marketeer?
Well, the conclusion is clear: you must take in account that many of your e-mail marketing recipients are going to read your mails through mobile devices. And this is now, not in two or three years.
Fortunately MAILCast has built-in support for this kind of situation. When you are creating your new campaign content notice that you have a tab that read "mobile version".
There you can enter the text you want your mobile recipients to receive when they download the e-mail in their cellulars. You can customize the content too.
Click to enlarge
If you not enter any content in this especial tab MAILCast will generate a simplified version of your full featured e-mail for you. This version will have all the text contents of your main e-mail so that at least people can read it in their phones. However we recommend to generate a shorter, summary, down-level version yourself.
Back in their desktops they will download the full-featured e-mail for easy reading in Outlook or other e-mail client.
You will never have to be concerned again about your customers not being able to read your e-mails while on the road :-)
According to Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, the RSS will never substitute the email marketing. Fistly because receiving a personalized newsletter seems warmer and more powerful medium to reach your audience. Secondly, it seems that only few people- mostly techies- like to customize their information through RSS feed.
Moreover, most of the people showed confussion regarding the term RSS. Few of them knew the meaning "Really Simple Syndication", so Nielsen suggests to call them "News feed" instead. This way it will be easier to guess what they actually are for.
While RSS feed are a fantastic tool to keep updated with the latest news of your interest, it can also be seen as other obligation for the Internet users who will need to check another space regularly.
If you like to read all this article, you will find it at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/newsletters.html.
 As far important as our subscribers’ list or our newsletters’ design and content is knowing the efficiency of our email communications. Because of this, it is essential comprehend what our email marketing´s stats mean. Analyzing them, we will find out our mistakes and our success points, and so gaining more from our online marketing strategies.
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