I think it is time to talk about Christmas :-)

More and more, I  receive more corporate digital Christmas cards than tradicional postal cards. I notice it, at least. And you? Personally, I've been "crossed" to e-cards to wish the best to family and friends too.

Maybe you're thinking about changing your Christmas greetings system or, at least, you have doubts whether do it or not. I believe that today you can send  traditional corporate greeting or digital postcard-but customized, of course-. Nowadays, both of them are valid.

I invite you to ask us personalized advice and learn how we can help you wish your clients a Merry Christmas in an elegant and effective  way.

Ho, ho, ho!

Surely, applying this mathematical formula in your e-mail campaigns you will achieve your marketing goals. Although I am not designer, I would like to talk about this matter from another point of view: corporate communication.

I thought about this when I received an email that was composed of only an image, and it was a deformed image on top of that!. What I had in my inbox was an e-mail marketing  "disaster": you could not see the product, you could not read the text because it was distorted too and, in short, the corporate image of the company seemed very inappropriate.

I think that comming of Christmas  promotes the growth of e-mail marketing, especially about promotional gifts, Christmas hampers, printing works and similar articles. I believe this is the reason why the quality of mailings go down and their amount increase .

If you're thinking about making e-mail marketing actions to these special dates, do not neglect the ways and ask professionals. And remember: text,is  text; image, image.

Here we are ;-)

We often say not to use Outlook or any other email client to send your e-mail campaigns. All the email marketing software are specifically created to achieve effective results and the other ordinary email clients don´t .

Anyway, if you use Outlook for that, please, do not use the option "High Importance". When you send all your messages with high priority, they stop being all important; so when messages are really priority, nobody takes it as important. The email can be deleted without open. Dou you remember the fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"? It is the same essence.

For example, on September 18th I received an email with "High Importance" asking me to enroll a course whose registration period ended ... on October 5th! I think this time the symbol is dispensable. Don´t you think?  If we add that the subject line was written in capital letter, it seemed the announcement of the imminent arrival of a meteorite ;-)

Be careful with this...

I normally use several e-mail accounts for work and for personal issues. One of my personal e-mail accounts is from Gmail, one of the most widely used free e-mail providers.

GMail has more than 146 million monthly active users, and it’s only the third largest provider, behind Hotmail (343 million) and Yahoo (285 million). So, as you can imagine, the chance of someone having an email address very similar to mine is huge.

Each week I receive a lot of email that is not targeted at me, but is received in my Gmail account. I receive newsletters, party invitations, invoices, business documents, passwords to access all sort of on-line accounts, and so on. All this crappy e-mail annoys me a lot, and what is worst, when I try to unsubscribe to some of these newsletters, there is no option at all to do it :-(

This kind of problem arises from bad practices building subscription lists. We’ve already written about the problems of single opt-in. This bad practice is not only terrible for the owners of e-mail accounts (as myself, as yourself), but for marketers too, because you can contribute to mail bombing, or see how your e-mails are trapped by spam filters if a competitor or cracker subscribes honey-pot addresses to your list.

So, if you are using building a subscriber list in your site, please, please, please, use double opt-in. It’s good for you and it’s good for innocent people like me who are blasted every day with tons of emails aimed at other people :-)

MAILCast, of course, has built-in support for double opt-in signing, allowing you to decide the exact contents of each step involved in the process.

From time to time you send an e-mail using your conventional e-mail client and, suddenly, you get a bounced e-mail as a response.

For example, take this one that I received today in my Outlook inbox:

What people usually do is just ignore and delete this kind of messages, but you should not do that. They contain very interesting information about the causes that lead to it, so you can know why the email get bounced and if this is a temporary or permanent failure among other things. You should look for this information in the body of the message (like in the previous image, surrounded by a red line) or in an attached text file.

The status code always consists in three numbers. They are standard SMTP codes defined under the RFC 1893 document.

As you can check by yourself in that document, for example, my bounced e-mail indicates a 5.1.1 status code, which means the following:

· 5: Permanent Failure
· 1: Addressing status (that’s is, something related to the address)
· 1: Bad destination mailbox address

So, obviously, it's an address that does not exist, although we already know that just looking at the "User unkown" sentence just after it. However not every email server in the Internet behaves in this same standards-compliant way.

Some SMTP servers return codes not totally compliant to the standard RFC and sometimes cause strange errors that can led to confusion. For example, a few days ago I receive a bounced mail with a status of 4.0.0. If you check the RFC you get this meaning for the code:

 · 4: Persistent Transient Failure
 · 0: Undefined Status (it does not give information about the problem)
 · 0: Other undefined Status

So actuality it says nothing at all about the cause, and no SMTP server should return a 4.0.0 code, but there are several of them out there that wrongly do this. For example I checked the full status message for the bounced address and got this response from the server:

      4.0.0:  user over quota

Hey, that's just a crowded inbox, as long as we trust the returned message. But according to the RFC this situation should be it indicated by the standard status 4.2.2 which means specifically that the mailbox is full or over-quota.

I checked other server that returned other "strange" 4.5.2. code, and I got the following message:

      4.5.2: Recipient address rejected: user over quota

Which is a totally wrong code because the meaning of this 4.5.2 is something related to the protocol, no t related to problems with the mailbox:

· 4: Persistent Transient Failure
· 5: Mail Delivery Protocol Status
· 2: Syntax error

Which is a crazy behavior from the mail server.

Normally you should not get 4.0.0 status codes, but if you do normally they are received from very unprofessional emails services, and normally they mean that the address does not exist. Our MAILCast service automatically handle and interpret all this bounced emails, and shows you a classified list of them that you can even export to Excel to do further processing on your own:

Besides the e-mail address that bounced and a short explanation, there is the received status code too (when is a hard bounce), so that you can check its meaning by yourself. We have studied a lot of oddities like the one I describe here to try to guess the real status of misbehaved servers, but it's virtually impossible to have them all correctly interpreted as long as some servers behave in a non-standard way. We're pretty accurate but, when in doubt, you know can see for yourself the meaning of any specific bounced email.

Just check the code in the RFC link above. It's easy!

The eMailing Experience gives you warm greetings in this "back to school," especially to all those who, like me, are still "landing" and reading the mail in our inbox ;-) 

My inbox is full of interesting emails for analyze, what about yours?

We are 100% to continue writting about good tips, new tips and, the best and the worst we found in our Inbox. You will make your e-mail marketing more effective.

Recently I received in my inbox a newsletter. I had not subscribed to it. They asked me to send by postal mail my personal information to unsubscribe. What is this?

First, I do not want to receive their communications ; second, I do not want to spend my money and my time to undo something that I do not do.

I sent them an email asking for my unsubscription and telling that I did not send anything by post. They never send me anything else. I think this is a very, very bad marketing strategy. Why did they want that I receive their newsletter if I will never contract them? In fact, they have created an angry no-customer.

To avoid this kind of situations (and you are identified with this sure) note:

-Try to make that  your recipients give you their information.
-Include an "unsubscribe button" at the bottom of each e-mail you send
-Tell your recipients reply your e-mail to ask for the unsubscription
-Do not ask for difficult things to unsubscribe. Why do you make it complicate? You only will get that check all your e-mails as "spam" 
-Obey the laws that protect your recipients´ information

I think that this kind of situations discredit e-mail marketing and the company that make it. Do not fall into this mistake :-(

The Spanish Association of Electronic Commerce and Marketing (AECEM)  has published a White Paper about Electronic Commerce. The book (in Spanish) deal with interesting online marketing practices.

Whether you have an online store or not, I recommend reading this book. You will see many ideas about how to sell online and communicate your products and services.

Section 6.9 talks about e-mail marketing in a clear and concise way. You will find many useful advices that we expand in The eMailing Experience: databases, open rates, subject line... There are four pages with very specific points to keep in mind the essence of e-mail marketing.

Tell us what you think about the book!

Segmenting your database is always important to achieve better results in your campaigns. But sometimes it's even more important due to technology issues.

Maybe you already know it, but recently GMail - the webmail from Google and the one a good share of your subscribers is probably using- has incorporated a new feature to automatically translate emails on the fly. You must add it explicitly to your GMail account through the "Labs" tab in "Settings":

Once this useful feature is finally incorporated to the product by default you'll need to be very careful with the layout issues that will arise.

Expressions/sentences in different languages are normally very different in length, so if your design or layout depends heavily on text you must be careful. If your recipients are translating your mail automatically your design could be easily scrambled.

Take for example this simple e-mail in English:

Click on image to zoom

It contains a headline and some text. The headline uses a quite big text that obviously is intended to fit in a single line.

Let's see what happens when I press the translate link and got my email translated to Spanish:

Click on image to zoom

The headline now uses two lines, and the email is not so beautiful.

This could get much worse on longer phrases and on emails that rely excessively on the size of text fit between images. So take it into account.

If you segment your database well and send contents in the right language to the right people, then -apart from probably getting a much successfully campaign in any conditions- this effect will be minimized.

By the way, the GMail translation plug-in doesn't translate links at this moment. I've reported it through the feedback option and hope that it gets fixed soon :-)

I am going to write about the "Subject" line again, though I have told about it  in many times.

I will not talk about the importance of the subject line to rate opening, or writing, or keywords you must use ... I just going to focus on the size.

 You must focus on one sentence the content of your messages, not write a genuine body of the message in the subject field with full stops, semicolon, punctuation marks .... This never will increase your rate openin. I say it as a person who works in e-marketing and, above all, mainly as a plain e-mail user.

These are real "subjects" in my "Inbox":

• ULTIMAS PLAZAS - PROXIMOS CURSOS XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX - BANK SIMULATIONS - MADRID - BARCELONA - MAYO - JUNIO - JULIO 2009
• GRUPO XXXXXXXX XX XXXXXXX - JORNADA SISTEMAS DE INFORMACION SAP EN LA EMPRESA - 09.07.2009 - 17:30 HS.
• CURSOS GRATUITOS PARA TRABAJADORES DEL SECTOR XXXXX. NUEVA CONVOCATORIA DEL PLAN FORMATIVO DE XXXXXXXX
• Revista GRATUITA XXXXXXXXXXX - 218 páginas Ya disponible. Viajes, Artículos, Fotografías, Vida marina, Buceo y mucho más. Oferta Maldivas y Mar Rojo Sur.
• NUEVOS SERVICIOS XXXXXXXXX: CENTROAMAERICA-CARIBE-MEXICO-US GULF-USEC Y MEDITERRANEO.
• A la atención del departamento de xxxxxxxxx - Servicios xxxxxxxxxxx de calidad - Especialistas en libros de texto y profesionales
• JORNADA DE PRESENTACIÓN DE LA FERIA INTERNACIONAL DE LA PYME DE CHINA (XXXXXX) EL DÍA 21 DE ABRIL EN XXXXXXXX XX XXXXXXXXXX

Do you want to open some? Why? All the information is in the "subject"  ;-)

This is a post to refresh you the best way to optimize your campaigns by collecting some tips from our previous posts, so you will increase your CTR and ROI and avoid being tagged as Spam:

1 - Don`t use Outlook

Don`t send with Outlook (or similar software), use only professional email marketing software. But if don’t mind what I say and you do, remember that BBC field is your friend.

2 - Align your interests with your recipient’s ones

How? by choosing the right words for the subject and the message to get a closer email.

3 - Optimize your html

Optimize your html, create it with a specific html editor and use the proper image size & formats. Remember, text is text, images are images. Don’t write text into images, don’t send ‘just-one-image’ emails and be sure that your email is comprehensible without images.

4 - Create a killer subscription list

Don’t buy email lists (god kills a kitten each time you do), create yourself recipient's list by including a form into your website and giving incentives to your subscribers.

5 - Don’t send big attachments

Big attachments increase the email weight and will be sent and downloaded slower. Put the attachment in your server and link it, your email’s weight will decrease and you will be able to track who downloads it.

6 – Choose the proper day and hour

Doesn´t exist a perfect day for every case, but Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are usual to be the better days, and the period between 10 am and 12 am the better time. Test, test and test to find the better moment to send your campaign.

7 - Read theemailingexperience.com

Subscribe to our RSS and you’ll improve your email marketing skills and will get happiest recipients.

¿Have I forgotten any tip else?

Recently I received in my inbox an invitation to draw for a cruise "only" registering on a website. Like many users, I clicked thinking "a second to lose and maybe win" . The fact is that when I open the link I received the following form:

23 fields to participate!? I am not going to waste my time...

I think many users stop in this moment their check in.

In short, my advice is that if you want to do some kind of e-mail marketing action like this (highly recommended, to increase your recipients), be sure to provide facilities to your target. E-mail, name and surname are enough. Another actions will come to know something about them.

Knowing all the information about your recipients is great, but this is not the way. You can not ask for"blood". You take the risk that the e-marketing action don not get results.

Everybody says that the email is a cold way to communicate. I disagree.

We will not forget the limitations of email, but  there are many resources  to transmit emotions through an email. I am going to focus on the text:

-Orthographic symbols are enough to express feelings: exclamation marks, question marks, suspension points ... Everything communicates.
-Bold, italics and underlined: a classical. Emphasize on what interests you.
-Words you use in your email will say the tone: distended or formal. Choose it looking at your target and your organization.
-Phrases. Short one, build a dynamic text; long one,a  formal text. All depends on what you want to say.
-If you finish your sentences with a "smiley" will give feelings to the language, expressing your mood. Be careful! Do not fill your email  with happy and sad "little faces" Remember, less is more

Analyze how you are doing el-communications with your customers. Do not think you can put something  of life in your emails? ;-)

A lot of people start making e-mail marketing (kind of) using Outlook or any other similar desktop program. Outlook is easy, powerful, affordable and -most of all- is widely pushed by Microsoft, so is what you find in almost any SME in the world; maybe in its free version (Outlook Express o Windows Mail) or Office Outlook, the really powerful version. I love Outlook and in fact it has been my e-mail client since its very first versions. I find it perfect as a Personal Information Manager and to send my everyday email.

However, when you need to do marketing campaigns to lots of people, things get very different. Size does matter, so it's not the same sending an email to a couple of customers than to send it to even so few as several tens or hundreds, not to mention to thousands of recipients.

The first problem is that you have no way to design a "compatible" e-mail, so that it is going to be correctly displayed in most e-mail clients out there. Your design looks great in your Outlook, and probably in the Outlook of other recipients, but is very probably breaking in other applications such as Thunderbird, GMail, HotMail, Lotus Notes, etc... What's worse: different versions of Outlook are incompatible when displaying email so, for example, your message crafted with Outlook 2007 is not displayed correctly when opened in Outlook 2003.

When you send an email to a huge list using your own Internet connection you are consuming a high bandwidth that impacts the other on-line activities in the company, and you normally have much more less bandwidth for sending information outside the company (upload) than for downloading it. Upon this, your e-mail provider -in order to prevent spamming- is probably blocking emails which have more than a few dozen recipients in it.

Maybe the worst problem you're facing is that of the "bounces" or wrong emails that get returned to the sender because of non-existent addresses, full mailboxes, and so on. The bounce rate could be sometimes a percentage of two digits, so if you're sending hundreds or thousands of emails expect to be flooded by bounced-back emails in your inbox. You need to cope with that and you need to clean your list manually. This could be a real pain and very error-prone.

Of course you don't have any idea of what is happening with your messages. Are people reading it?, How often?, Are they clicking on your links to get more information?, What things interest them the more?

There're lots of other things to take into account. This table summarizes some of them:

	MAILCast	Outlook
Distributed content creation	X	-
By-stages content creation	X	-
Automatic composing	X
E-mail delivery capabilities	Tens of thousands	Dozens
Delivery scheduling	X	-
Avoid corporate server and lines saturation	X	-
Bounced-back management	X	-
External data source integration	X	Limited
Segmentation and filtering	X	Limited
Reading stats	X	-
Click-throug stats	X	-
RSS export and reuse	X	-
Website integration	X	-
Subscriptions stats	X	-
RSS use stats	X	-
News reading stats	X	-

Conventional email clients are great for sending conventional emails, but are plain useful for making serious e-mail marketing and communication. Resort to a professional hosted email marketing service like MAILCast and, most of all, try to get professional training on the subject too.

You'll get:

• Messages that display well in all the email clients
• Not a single bit of your connection used for delivering the mailing
• Automatic bounce management
• A lot of interesting marketing stats and reports
• High deliverability

Related posts:

• Email marketing vs. postal mail marketing
• e-mailing: Hosted service vs. Desktop Application
• Why is a good idea to leave images on the server?
• BCC field: Be careful when sending an e-mail to multiple recipients
• TIP: How to manually test problems and bounces with e-mail addresses
• Mobile e-mail is going to replace SMS in the near future

One of the key to make successful marketing campaigns -and successful sales- is know our target. Everything you can. Why not ask them? If we subtly do it we will get many results.  That is the way...

An e-mail marketing campaign  or a newsletter with appropriate links can bring us first-hand information such as what our customers interest and need. For example, products that we must promote or  discounts we must offer How decide it? Publish it in your newsletter .  All people who  "click" will be a great target for a future e-marketing campaign. Be sure.

Use e-mail marketing as more than a tool to promote products and attract potential customers. With imagination you can get more from e-mailing. Look for the feedebacks.  And remember: do not let your recipients discover it ;-)

Sometimes,  we have told you the importance of simplicity. You must not show all information when you write a newsletter, but show a "more info" or "click here" . Now  we recommend the same idea  in creating an  e-mail marketing campaign .

Typically, in our inbox are a lot of e-mails full of  information. Finally, you do not know exactly what kind of message you just received so you delete it and read the next one.

Our advice: do not get tired. Use a message to say one information only. Probably your company offers many products and services you would like to list but  concentrate on one idea that does not disperse the attention of your recipients. Avoid the noise in your communication.

Remember, you can not bomb all the information about your company in an e-mail. Try  link to your website and interested people will go there to analyze your products and services. Sure they will appreciate it  :-)

When you send an email what you aim for is that it arrives at its destination and that it can be visualised correctly. These aims may seem obvious and are normally taken for granted, however it’s not as easy as it seems. Why?

Besides the actual message you want to send, which consists of the text body, there also exists some elements surrounding this which are responsible for supplying the format and general layout. The content of the messages is in fact HTML code which supplies the necessary information to the email clients so they know how to view it, e.g. bold type, alignment, backgrounds, etc. The effects of this situation are:

• Inbound emails cannot be visualised correctly: the formats aren’t maintained, and
distributions, width, etc are affected.
• Received emails cannot be read.
• If the receiver can’t read the email without first downloading images, then the email
will most likely end up in the deleted folder without even being read.
• It gives an unprofessional image of the company who is sending the email. After
getting one or two emails like this the receiver will black list the company and will,
therefore, stop receiving that company’s emails.
• The content is confused with spam and won’t arrive at its destination.

Keep in mind these in the preparation of your e-communications.  Look for professionals if you think you can not do it alone. Effectiveness of your campaigns will increase considerably. We are sure!

In times of "lean" we have to be original to enhance. We need results but we can not spend money. So, we have to look for alternatives... Have you think  in e-mail marketing? It will help you! Sure...

Email is a cheap alternative to make good marketing. Perhaps now is time to think about buying an email marketing  tool. You will measure your campaigns and get real results of your actions.  You will stand out from the competition too and improve your image.

In these times, you must also take care of your current customers. Keep your customers is more important than get new ones. You can get their loyalty ,for example, by developing a newsletter with specific offers.  You can do that with a suitable software.

We have stressed these ideas on many other posts because we believe in what we do. Do not underestimate the power of email marketing and its ability as a communication tool. Now more than ever.

You can read in this article (in Spanish) some advices to achieve your purposes on 2009.  It may be usefull for you and helps you reach your goals during this year.

Often, we promise our customers things that finally we don´t keep. This is the worst we can do with someone who trust in us. A dissatisfied customer will tell a lot of people you are not trustworthy. Be carefull with your words

Enjoy it!

I am sure that this year will be the year of email marketing. It will become the king of corporate marketing tool. Increasingly, the companies value e-mail marketing as an effective form of business communication.

This is possible because of the versatility, the immediacy of response, low cost, easeness of customization and possibility of tracking among other things. 

If you are thinking about preparing a newsletter or e-mailing a promotional offer, don´t doubt. Include e-mail marketing inside the  communication strategy of your company during. Make e-mail marketing your best allied to stand out your competence.

New Year ... New Email Marketing ;-)

I like to emphasize the versatility of e-mail marketing to promote our products or  services. The key will be more in contents than in the tool you use to communicate.

If you're thinking about making an e-mail marketing campaign, look  for what is your marketing message:

-If you are selling products. Remember that the consumers see the physical characteristics of the products. You can talk about added value and services that they will buy too.

-If you are selling services. Try to make something ethereal and intangible into something real. Consumers will not perceive that they buy smoke.

In both cases, offer several options to the consumer, because we like choose.

Apply the flexibility that characterizes e-mail marketing to your relationship with your customers. It will help you to redesign an old or false perception about them.

We have already told about the many advantages of e-mail marketing opposite to other tools communication. Today I am going to talk about form.

We can show the content of our e-marketing  in "wrappers" as:

• Offers
• News
• Newsletter
• Subscriptions
• Invitations
• Polls 
• Specific formats for specific season, such as Christmas cards

The choice depends on what we want to say to our target and the kind of customers in our database.

We need to explore different ways of communication. We must try to get thar our recipients understand the message. E-mail marketing will adapt to any of them!

This phrase can be applied  in many moments of our professional and personal live. It will be useful when you write a newsletter too :-)

When you write a newsletter try to minimize what you want say. Arouse your readers curiosity in a headline, summarize what you want to say in three lines and show a link, a "click here" or a "more info":  the recipient will increase the information "on demand". You must avoid a feeling of saturation that make delete the e-mail.

Another advantage if you let the information "hiding" below a link is that you will know exactly who is interested in what, becouse your software will tell you who has clicked in what link.  This information is vital for future offers to specific target. 

Take care of this and tou will improve the composition of your newsletters. It will be more attractive with less text and the value of each communicated will increase for you.

Krasis has taken part in the conference  Online Marketing: small investment, big profits, organized by the Club Financiero de Vigo. I presented the speech "Email Marketing. Find and maintain your customers" where I summarize very, very, very much what is e-mail marketing, what are their main advantages and how start a e-mail marketing campaign.

You can read it here (in Spanish). Enjoy it  ;-)

Nowadays, there are companies wich think that corporate communication means the diffusion of its image through a letter and envelope  with its logo. This anachronistic thought is a big mistake.

You should not forget that "everything communicates" and "it is impossible not to communicate". Any organization  must show a coherent image in any corporate appearance. Don´t trust it to chance. This includes the presence in different traditional and  emerging technologies media.

Sometimes we neglect something as basic as our website. Our web must provide all the information about our company and must be our "visiting card" for all users too. Not just "copy" and "paste" the content of our dossier Coporate. We need to give them it in an attractive way appropriate to our image.

The same happen with our e-communications, such as newsletters and e-mail marketing campaigns. They are a very good vehicle to spread our corporate image. We recommend a content of interest to our target and an esthetic that identifies it with the organization they belong.

Although  an insipid contents is the worst way to make our electronic communications, an unpleasant image can overshadow the most interesting information. We recommend you to take care of things such as your email and newsletters templates  to be pleasing to the recipients and strengthen interest in the contents.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau can help us making  a sucessful e-mail marketing campaigns. You can find at www.iab.net a lot of resources about the best practises in e-mail marketing.

Glossaries, legal terms, metrics, audiences measurement, case studies... All kind of data that can update your knowledge. You will refresh your information and be more creative in your communications.

We propose you to visit the website and get some ideas for your e-mail marketing campaigns.

Enjoy!

Although  an e-mail marketing campaign  seems something as simple as a bulk sending,  is more than this.  The fact is that a good communication in this area must have a solid starting point based in the planning.  Their success and, consequently, the achievement of objectives will depend on  the proper planning and its implementation.

The first step of the planning is setting goals. We have to decide what needs must  be covered in the short, medium and long term. 

We must bear in mind that any action has be done  in due course, so we must mark a calendar that reflects each part of the communication process.

So we can not let any stage at random. We have to avoid improvisations 

Another point to plan an e-mail marketing campaign  is the target definition as explicit as possible. We must anlyze the conditions and features  of potencial market.

Although the planning of an e-mail marketing campaign has to be defined from the moment of its creation, we must not be rigid. We have to see every stage  to detect and correct deviations.

We have to adapt the e-mail marketing campaign to the response of our audience.

Before sending a massive email to apologize for some mistake, we must think aspects such as:

- Are you sure that this is the best way to correct something you said?. Maybe it looks like you are  hiding  behind a screen... If you know that the offence was serious you must use another way. Sending an e-mail is easy and many people do not take seriously the apology.

- The inmediacy of e-mail make it an advisable way to start some kind of apology. It can be requested when the error is still latent.

- You must include the word "forgiveness" or "sorry"in the subject line. This will ensure that the aggrieved party open your mail.

- Do not include anyone else in CC or Bcc without express permission of the recipient. Let the injured party decide if  he want everyone know that you've apologized or not.

But remember that say what you feel in a message is different  that saying that through other ways. Above all think if it is the right channel for your apology and pray for the injured party has ever happened something similar and he will accept your apologies :-)

 

Although I do not like "catechisms" about marketing or any other subject, sometimes they are necessary to recapitulate interesting thinkings and refresh your memory. You must keep in mind what  people say in your sector.

Current trend for successful business is the orientation to the customer. Marketing has to rethink itself to get to the point. Now, corporate communication must be organized on terms such as:

1. Inbound. Customer approach exceeds product approach
2. Initiative. Customer decides when and how contact us.
3. Customers identification. We need to articulate new mechanisms to select customers
4. Customers Intelligence. We must develop tools to get knowledge about customers and guide our product towards them.
5. Interactivity. We must maintain a constant interaction with the customer through any channel.
6.  Marketing and product / service customized.
7. Investment. Treating the customer as an asset whose profitability will return in the medium-term or long- term.
8. Identifying new business opportunities, such as cross-selling or creating new product lines
9. Retention rates. Give the customer a differential value (individualized treatment, personalization service ...)
10. Impact on the income statement. The cost of achieving a customer is more than maintain one .

The e-mail marketing becomes the perfect tool to help you in the change towards a customer orientation. Do not discards it as a piece in your corporate communication strategy.

I think  I can assert  that the formula to get what is the perfect day to send a newsletter does not exist .

Although there are studies that say that the best day is Wednesday,  I say that "depends". Marketing by email is not  "2+2 = 4" because our target is a specific person, belonging to a particular sector and with particular opinions.

The best is adapt the contents and frequency of our newsletter to those who will receive it. One of our clients sends a newsletter where you can find suggestions for weekend and sends it successfully every Friday. Who call those who have developed the study and tell it  them?

My experience tells me that what we should do to get success with open rates of our newsletters is test, test and test. Select  one day and send the newsletter analyzing results. Select another day and analyze.... Try  and try and see what happens ...

It is laborious, but very effective. It's worth it!

The CRM is a software that allows recording and management  the  relationship with our customers. It is the best technological tool to support our marketing efforts within the company.

Nowadays, in a market where products and services are more and more similar,  customer orientation is the key to be better than  our competitors. To talk to him we have to know him and get to the point  with our messages.

Knowing a customer is not easy. This fact make very important organizing all relevant information about him and his company, as well as all our communications with him: telephone calls, email, shared documentation ... We are talking about a kind of marketing one-to-one. We talk to individuals well-informed and demanding that are not satisfied with what they encounter. They are seeking custom-made solutions in those organizations that share their language.

The registration of information with so added value can not be forgotten. We will compile all data on medium that provide us their management and utilization. An appropriate CRM is vital for proper communication on a daily works and specific  communications, for example, an email marketing campaign.

Today more than ever INFORMATION is POWER. Gestionale properly.

The  slump that manages the market nowadays means that we are forced to review every euro invested. Unfortunately, the areas worst affected usually are communication, advertising and marketing. There are few who maintain their position and continue as far as possible with their company communication strategy, in spite of we all know that should not be like that.

In my opinion, this is one of the biggest mistakes that make the directives of an organization during periods of moderate economic growth. The best choice depends on maintaining a consistent attitude to prepare the ground for when the crisis ends, that is, neither increase disproportionately the budget in communication, nor drastically reduce it. The key is to defend it within our means.

Since consumers will continue buying products and services -though not in exactly the same proportion as in times of economic boom-our brand has to continue attending to them. We can not disappear from the map, so those who remain will be those who endure once things back to normal.

So not panic. Economic adjustments in times of crisis: Yes, but in those areas where less impact on the brand image. Think long-term and not disappear from the mental map of the consumer.

Many people still think about email marketing as a massive and cheap way to advertise, just rising spam, or they just think that email marketing is directly Spam. But this is not the true, email marketing used in a right way is a powerful tool to communicate with your costumers.

So let’s throw light on some concepts:

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a form of direct and permission marketing that uses the electronic mail as way to deliver commercial or informative messages between companies and customers.

What is NOT email marketing?

Email marketing is not about bulk unsolicited messages, this is spam.  If you want to take advantage of email marketing, you must ask for your recipient’s permission and send them emails related to their interest.

So, what’s email marketing for?

Mainly, email marketing is very useful for:

• ensuring  your  clients'  loyalty
• obtaining potential new customers by publishing a newsletter that will attract readers interested on your business area.

Come on, enjoy “the emailing experience” . :-)

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:

• 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.
• 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:

• Glossary: Call to Action or CTA
• Call To Action: Good practices (I) - The words
• Call To Action: Good practices (II) - The action

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.

-          Reading stats

They tell us how many times our mailing has been read. Nevertheless these stats may be not 100% accurate, given that your readers may open your email from their mobile phones, Blackberries, using Outlook preview panel, blocking images, etc. and unfortunately these readings will be not counted in the stats.

For these reason, MAILCast offers you additional stats, unique reading stats which reflects only one reading for IP address, although one subscriber had read your email ten times, MAILCast will count it as only one time. In addition, MAILCast also gives a detailed report of bounce-back emails, identifying the particular email addresses affected, and the reasons for bouncing (whether the email inbox is full, the server is unavailable, email address is not correct, your message has been considered as Spam by email filters, etc).

-          Links stats

They show us the persons who have click on the links included in your mailing. These stats are 100% accurate. As before, MAILCast not only details who has click on which link, but also how many times has been done. This figure can be extremely useful for sales forecasts, as it will inform us about what products have been more interesting and for what audience.

-          RSS reading stats.

If you are publishing content via RSS, having integrated the MAILCast’s News channel in your website, then MAILCast will give you a report about how many times your content have been accessed, and in what days. So it will enable you to track the result of your publications, what news was more popular for what IP addresses. Given that the RSS readings are anonymous, MAILCast cannot give you personal data from this report.

-          Subscribers’ management stats

If you have online registration forms available in your web and managed by MAILCast, you will receive a detailed report (downloadable in Excel) of the new registrations and cancellations of your newsletter’s subscribers.  Having these online forms in your portal, it will easily increase the number of your subscribers and people who are interested in your business, products and services. Furthermore MAILCast offers you the option of double opt-in and opt-out, helping to comply with the current Data Protection legislation. Furthermore, MAILCast will delete from your database those addresses that have been bouncing, so you will keep your list clean, and it will not affect your business reputation. Taking care of your list of subscribers is important; otherwise most of the email service providers (ESP’s) may flag your mailings as unsolicited commercial emails (Spam).

According to the current legislation and recent anti-Spam consciousness, MAILCast promotes the use of double opt-in to fill up your subscribers lists.

What double opt-in means is that after your subscriber enters their email addresses to receive your newsletters, then they go a step further: they’ll need to confirm their correct email address by replying to an email sent to that particular address. So that you confirm the permission of your subscriber, you avoid misspelled addresses, etc. Tip: when your customers confirm the subscription (clicking on the link), they can go to a “Thank you” webpage where you can advice them to add your sender email address to their address book, so that your newsletter will not finish into the Junk folder.  

Now, double opt-in is fine. What about double opt-out?  A nightmare…! Don’t twist it. If they like to unsubscribe, make it easy. It is nothing more frustrating that going from page to page without finding the bloody option to delete your email address from the database. The longest it takes, the worst feeling you got of that company. Think that the foundation of effective email marketing is building trust and relationships with your subscribers.

The ignorance is bliss, but you can get it right now.

Of course, MAILcast will let you choose the method and messages of your choice for subscribing and unsubscribing to your e-mail newsletters.

Writing up content for digital channels is completely different than writing it up for traditional medium. Because of this, it is essential to know the online environment and its main characteristics before you even start writing.

We should focus on preparing attractive and accessible contents for our users, turning our newsletter into another corporative tool for marketing. There are some patterns that can help us to elaborating interesting content:

·         Don’t  take a detour, go straight to the point.  Reading a document on the screen is far more difficult and tired task than reading on paper. Therefore you should include the relevant information at the top of the newsletter to attract attention to the recipients so they will continue reading, mentioning other news that they will find further down in the document.

·         Choose an appropriate language. It is recommendable to write in short paragraphs and simple sentences. If you are explaining a complex subject, you could use the formula “read more” to satisfy the needs of your interested readers, so they will have access to the complete information. We must use a familiar and ‘easy-to-understand’ language to make our message clear.

·         Insert images and appropriate hyperlinks. The images should support the content, adding meaning  and  impact to the information offered.  Therefore we should insert generic images which do not interfere with the content. Pleas note that the image size should not affect the opening time of your newsletter.

If it is written efficiently, the newsletter will add an important value to our company or organization. It will help us to build up a good reputation for our company. We will gain subscribers and engage to our audience.

In Email marketing, the subject line is vital, mainly because it means to get into the mail inbox and the reading stats. I, myself, every morning delete at least 10 emails without doubt, only by checking the subject line (or the unknown sender). Most of the times they offer me medical or miracle potions that, fortunately, I don´t need.

Having said this, the email marketing professionals, who are sending newsletters or punctual campaigns by email so often, seriously consider the subject of our mailings. In the case of newsletters, it is usually easier because the subject line normally is the title of the periodical publication. In this sense, it is recommendable that you send the last issue to your new subscribers, so they will recognize your newsletter since day 1.

However the case of punctual marketing campaigns is different, and in many cases tricky, too. We have to carefully find an efficient line to introduce the product or service to the audience: it must be short, direct, personalized, informative, original, informative, interesting, shocking, eye-catching, flashy…because a recent study shows that 35% of the recipients open the email based on the subject line.

Therefore it would be ideal that your subject line had the following characteristics:  remark the benefit from reading our email, personalized, according to our recipients’ needs, create expectation, create an own style, not using capital letters or symbols, avoiding words such as ´free´, ´promotion´, ´offer´, ´gift’, ‘buy now’, ‘click here’, ‘opportunity´, ´important´….adn all this in 50 characters max, including spaces…only.

When I tell my friends that I work in the Email Marketing industry, they cannot help having an odd reaction, like if they were thinking so… are you sending SPAM to people? So I have always to clarify than email marketing does not equal to SPAM.

I explained to them that sending personalized emails with relevant information about my company, products or services is just another tool to contacting customers and people who have requested this mailing for business or own interest. 

I also tell them that responsible email marketing, based on permission, is actually a new communication channel that may substitute the traditional mailing. We can think in a Bank as example, they may save millions in paper just sending their information and new products’ information by email instead of through my mailbox.

Given the Internet adoption in our household nowadays, email marketing definitely becomes a saving-costs and resources advertising channel, highly efficient and even ecologic.

But they are partly right. There are always people taking the advantage of the new technologies, abusing, sending unsolicited email advertising to the Internet users. However we cannot let this people to ruin a fantastic mean.

For instance, I wouldn’t personally buy a customer database to launch my marketing campaign. These commercial databases are sold telling you that the persons involved have already agreed to receive your email campaign. In my opinion, these persons may have given permission to this company, but not my company specifically, Therefore I think that this would be a very aggressive manner to reach my potential customers and so, my marketing efforts would be ruined.

If I like to reach new potential clients, I would send them a personalized email, introducing my products and services and inviting them to join my database. It´s not only respect and politeness, it is also be responsible with your business reputation.

Here some basic points that help me to develop my email marketing campaigns. You may need to do some changes according to your specific goals. I find it quite useful and simple; just gathering the basic information that I need to file in order to see the results of the campaign in the long-run.

-          Campaign name

-          Sending date

-          Goals (open rates, CTR, Bounces, Subscriptions…)

-          Database segmentation (potential public to reach)

-          Campaign subject (write at least 4, then you can choose the more adequate)

-          Get your List ready (additional info, filters…)

-          Create your HTML email (don´t forget the Unsubscribe link, forward a friend)

-          Check the links on your newsletter (if they are working correctly, where they go, landing page…)

-          Schedule your mailing in the appropriate day and time.

-          Monitor the results (reading, open-rate, CTR, subscriptions, cancellations, website activity, increased traffic to your web, comments, customer feedback).

-          Analyze the results in relation to the planned goals

-          Conclusions and recommendations to future campaigns.

Customer Segmentation is the subdivision of a market into discrete customer groups that share similar characteristics. It helps developing customized marketing programs, as you can better adapt your product and service to particular customers’ needs. Say that you like to target University students. Logically freshers won´t have the same needs that those students who are finishing their degree. While the first ones will be looking for residence, flats, academies, funding, etc., the second ones will be looking for work placements, travelling abroad, junior jobs, Research or PhD studies,… Then it would be essential to gather what year they are on in your database.  

Therefore Customer segmentation should be a fundamental step in your Email marketing strategy.  The much information you gather from your customer, the better. Name, surname, telephone and email address are not enough. Try to get your customers´ gender, age, profession, job´s title, location, language, industrial sector, likes and dislikes, shopping pattern, annual budget… so next time you send an email campaign, you can personalize further and filter your database, creating different messages for different public, sending the right product to the right person. Improve your effectiveness improving your database, divide and conquer!

I posted yesterday about how important is looking after our database. Being providers of Email Marketing services, we received many call asking us whether we will sell commercial databases, too. Krasis promotes permission-based Email Marketing, and therefore, we don’t provide customers databases. Besides, when our customers sign the contract, they confirm that will not be using MAILCast to send Spam.

There are two different approaches that apply to Email Marketing: Opt-in and Opt-out

Opt-in is an email that is explicitly requested by the recipient. I.e. Sign in to receive a newsletter.  In order to quickly gain opt-in recipients, the easiest way, among others, will be including a sing-in form in your webpages (managed by a automated subscription manager, if possible). Countries such as UK, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Germany or Italy have already adopted the Opt-in policy in the name of the persons’ privacy.

 Opt-out is based on tacit consent, so it assumes a general permission to send emails to customers who has not explicitly stated that they don´t want to receive such information. This is closer to the traditional mailing approach, and to the Spammers philosophy.

Now, one and other approach have generated an extensive debate. Mainly because stats are saying that only 18% of your potential customers would accept to receive your information by email. . However this 20% people are really interested in your services and products… Should we apply the Pareto 20/80 principle?

It is your decision.

Not having any experience in writing a newsletter should not stop you. Nowadays, MAILCast href="http://www.mailcastserver.com/" target=_blank>Email marketing software is generally intuitive tools that make possible to design a professional-looking newsletter with not much effort.

However there are some things to plan about before your start your business’ email communication strategy:

-        Marketing goals. What do you like to achieve? 

-        Define your audience

-        How you will benefit your audience, why will they like to receive your newsletter?

-         Information to communicate

-        Resources required

-        Budget

-        Schedule for your communications, plan in advance for continuity

-        Reach your audience: how will you promote your newsletter and gain subscribers?

And remember…once you start, you´ll get better.