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 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.
 Spanair (a spanish flying company) is looking for a new logo, and this week has arranged a poll at his website to decide between the two candidates, so visitors and customers can vote after providing their e-mail (there will be a prize draw for a travel). I think that this is a great trick that you can also use to build up loyalty and your mailing list, or improve it with potential customers whom get emotionally involved with your brand. Arranging a poll, gift raffles or just special offers for subscriber are always interesting initiatives to encourage people subscribing to your mailing list. Also there’s a second interpretation to this strategy from the SEO side. On past 20 August 2008, a Spanair flight crashed at Barajas airport, in Madrid (Spain). Nowadays, wen you search Spanair at Google, there are many results related to the crash in the first page, so the poll could also be a linkbaiting strategy to create buzz and “move” this results to the second and successive pages.
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:
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 th e 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 ;-)
Google has recently begun to expand the autocomplete functionality (Google suggest) to all of their domains (it was just at google.com). And? What’s the matter? Is there any matter?
Well, in depends, this will affect to your SEO strategy because will change user’s search. Searching will become more specific and users will see better targeted AdSense ads before arriving to your site (if they do). It may be good or not, but be sure that will affect to your sites. In conclusion, you should start to build your customer loyalty right now ( if you already haven’t), because you can’t decide how search engines will evolve, and if you depend of them and their visitors, you are in risk of being in offside if their rules change. RSS, SMM are nice tools to buid up loyalty, but, still have to tell you which is one of the best loyalty tools?
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 creatin g 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 visualise d 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!
 Financial crisis is in everyone's lips these days. Shrinking budgets and lay-offs sprout everywhere. In such times is when your company must invest strongly in communication, whether it is in fact affected by the downturn or not. It's imperative to send out the right message to internal and external stakeholders.
I've been reading this remarkable article from Paul A. Argenti in Financial Times: "How to talk your way through a downturn". I think is very interesting to read and follow it's conclusions. Even in small companies.
Unlike during good times, you have an impatient audience expecting corporate messages. Employees, providers, customers... everyone is anxious to know about your company. Beware of being guilty by association: although your company is in good shape, if you don't communicate in the right way people could think you're in trouble just because the rest of the market is.
Argenti gives a lot of good advice:
• Do not hide
• Gather relevant information and stick to your story
• Communicate early and often
• Centralise communications
• Get inside the media’s head
• Choose communication channels thoughtfully
• Communicate directly with affected constituencies
• Keep the business running
• Keep values and character centre-stage
You can get into detail if you read the full article.
I think that e-mail is a good tool to use for this kind of communication too. The tracking information that you can obtain will be of good value, and you can adapt new messages to the results of the previous ones.
And don't forget that opted-in, planned, and well designed e-mail campaigns are one of your best allies to selling more and staying ahead of your competitors. When crisis strikes, the first reaction is to trim your marketing budget, when you should do the opposite. If customers are buying less you should do more marketing to overcome that tendency. If your competitors are trimming their investment in marketing to cut cost, you should increase it to be more relevant and take a definitive advantage.
Summing up: crisis times are times to invest more in communication in order to give the right messages to everyone and try to sell more. e-mail is your best friend for this.
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