How to Reap the Benefits of Email Marketing

Posted on May 17, 2012 by bulk-email-broadcasting

Email might seem like a cost-effective way to deliver your marketing messages.  For the most part, it is because you can send personalized, targeted, and interest-specific messages to a large number of people.  The value of email marketing doesn’t end with the cost, however.  Email marketing has certain advantages over other forms of direct marketing for your business and for the people who request and receive your emails.

Good thing about email is that you don’t have to wait around too long to determine whether an email message was successful.  After an email is opened, it doesn’t take long for your audience to take immediate action because people can take action on an email with one click of the mouse.  Immediate actions include opening and reading the email, clicking a link, clicking a reply button, forwarding, printing the email, and saving the email.

Email is a two-way form of communication, and even commercial email can be used to gather feedback and responses from your audience.  People can easily reply to emails and many consumers love to share their opinions when it’s easy for them to do so.  Feedback from emails comes in two basic categories.  Stated feedback happens when someone fills out an online form, fills out an online survey, and sends a reply.  Behavioral feedback happens when you track clicks on links, email open rates, and emails forwarded to friends.

When was the last time you mailed thousands of postcards, and your customers began crowding around copy machines trying to duplicate the postcard so they can stick stamps to them and forward the message to their friends?  Email programs have a forward button with which users can easily send a copy of your email to one or more people in your recipient’s address book.  Email service providers (ESPs) also provide a trackable forward link that you can insert in your emails so you can find out who is forwarding your emails.

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When to Choose a Promotional, an Event Invitation, or an Announcement Email Format

Posted on May 16, 2012 by bulk-email-broadcasting

When is the right time to use a promotional format in your email marketing campaign?  Email promotions ask your audience to take specific actions, usually in the form of a purchase decision or a personal commitment.

Promotional email templates involve a wide variety of designs and layouts, so keep the images, text, headlines, and links focused on your main call to action.  Be sure to keep the content related to the promotion.  Examples of email promotional content include sales and discounts that call for an immediate purchase or an immediate commitment to a decision.  Descriptions and images of products and services with links to more information, limited time offers requiring immediate action.  Step – by – step directions for taking action on the email content, and testimonials and facts to help readers justify a purchase decision.  You should also choose an email promotional format when your content contains the following:  a single main idea or message asking for a purchase decision or a personal commitment, a single call or multiple calls to action tied by a similar theme, design elements that reinforce the items or actions that your message is promoting, more promotional information than informative, and delivery on a routine or event-driven basis in order to drive sales.

Aside from a promotional email format you also want to know when to use an event invitation format.  Email invitations focus on a single event or a group of related events and should contain a single call to action in the form of confirming or declining attendance.  Email is one of the best ways to deliver event invitations because people tend to respond to email invitations more quickly than they respond to invitations delivered via postal mail.  Examples of email invitation content include invitations to attend customer appreciation events, attend seminars and workshops, public appearances, and meetings and networking events.

If you don’t need to use a promotional or event invitation format then you could use an announcement format.  An email announcement format is useful when your email message doesn’t need to call for a specific type of action on the part of your audience.  Some email announcement formats make your email seem urgent, like when you’re sending a special bulletin.  Other email announcement formats can convey a message without any urgency, like when you’re sending a Thank You card.  Examples of email announcement content include press releases, holiday greetings and annual recognitions, official notices and statements, and bulletins.

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When to Use a Newsletter Format

Posted on May 15, 2012 by bulk-email-broadcasting

Newsletters are emails containing information that interests a particular group such as the members of an organization or the customers of a certain store.

People don’t read email newsletters the same way they read paper newsletters, so don’t be too quick to cut and paste your paper newsletter content into an email newsletter template.  Consumers are more likely to read to a website where additional content resides in HTML or in Portable Document Format (PDF).

Email newsletters are popular formats because they can deliver multiple messages and more creative types of content than other formats allow.  Examples of email newsletter content include communications to members of an organization, advice and opinion columns, stories and musings, product support articles, event calendar highlights, and excerpts and summaries of larger bodies of information.

Newsletters typically have multiple columns so you can organize different groups of content by priority.  Choose an email newsletter format when your email content meets the following situations: contains multiple headlines and messages targeted to one or more audiences, contains multiple calls to action with multiple themes, requires a consistent look and feel to tie multiple messages, contains more informative content than promotional content, and delivered on a regularly scheduled basis in order to keep your audience informed.

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Determining the Proper Format for Your Email Marketing Campaign

Posted on May 14, 2012 by bulk-email-broadcasting

Deciding how to design and layout your email content is possibly the most important step in executing your email marketing strategy.  Designing your email content entails choosing a format, such as a newsletter or event invitation, that matches your message and placing your content in visually appealing arrangements.  Email design is important because consumers tend to scan emails instead of reading them in their entirety.

Choosing the proper format is also important because each format visually communicates the main idea of your email content before your audience even begins to read it.  Familiar formats with email marketing are newsletters which include one, two, or three columns, promotions with one or more offers in one or more columns, event invitations and calendars in a variety of layouts, and announcements and greetings in a single column.  Deciding which format to use entails matching your email content to the format that best suits your audience’s expectations for the content.  For example, most consumers expect email newsletter formats to contain informative content, and consumers expect email promotional formats to contain content asking to consider a purchase decision or another type of commitment.

An easy way to utilize various email formats is to use an email template for each format.  An email template is an HTML mock-up of an email with design elements that you can customize and populate with your own text, images, and links.  Unless you understand HTML, you will need to have an HTML programmer design your email templates.  However most email service providers (ESPs) provide email templates that you can customize for your purposes, and some ESPs provide various levels of customized template creation and content insertion services.

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A Ten-Point Strategy to Email Marketing Pt. 2

Posted on May 11, 2012 by bulk-email-broadcasting

Last post was the first part of using a ten- point strategy system.  This post has the last steps in that process.

An important step is to develop acquisition, retention, and reactivating programs.  Although most marketers immediately jump to developing ongoing retention- or newsletter- oriented mailings, our experience indicates that acquisition and reactivation programs are not well thought out.

You are going to want to optimize your content.  Managing content and creative often represents the largest part of the production process.  Consider the manner in which your messages render in a variety of email clients, including provisions for Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)- enable devices such as handhelds with email.

Eighth step is to develop seed lists.  Find some individuals within your company to place on seed and proof lists.  This ensures that you and your colleagues will get test versions of the mailing for proofing as well as the actual email when it is sent.  Additionally, develop seed lists that incorporate a wide variety of internet service providers to measure delivery and message placement across a large number of domains.

You are going to want to determine use of multichannel marketing in early stages of planning process.  Some companies may turn to email marketing first because it is relatively inexpensive and make coordinating and integrating email campaigns and data with marketing in other channels a long-term goal.  Even if that is your strategy, it’s important to determine how you will use multichannel marketing as early as possible in the planning process.

Lastly you want to map out continuity campaigns for leverage.  An ancillary benefit of using sequenced strings of messages is that much of the work involved in creating individual messages within campaigns can be leveraged and reused.  Allowing your mailing to be triggered by an event, such as a customer click- through or an elapsed timed event, is referred to a triggered mailing.  Once you tie multiple triggers together, this is referred to as a continuity campaign.

This is the rest of 10 very important strategy steps.

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A Ten-Point Strategy to Email Marketing Pt. 1

Posted on May 10, 2012 by bulk-email-broadcasting

For your email marketing campaign you need to perform ten important steps to determine which tools work for you.  Today we’ll go over the first five.

The first step is to begin with the end in mind; incorporate testing and use frequency caps.  To ensure that email marketing mailings focus on goals by incorporating regular testing into marketing campaigns.  Tests should focus on variables that are levers (for example, frequency, time of day, and content) for attaining target goals (for example, conversion).  As well as determine the maximum number of messages subscribers will receive in a given month this is known as a frequency cap.

You want to place value on email addresses.  Determining the value of email address requires understanding email acquisition costs and metrics such as the average revenue per email subscriber.  A more detailed approach can mirror customer lifetime value calculations, incorporating customer- specific recency, frequency, and monetary values.  A recency, frequency, and monetary score or value is commonly referred to as RFM analysis.  The RFM approach is used to segment customers into different groupings based on their (monetary) spending, the frequency of their purchases, and the recency of their last purchases.

In the third step you want to develop key performance indicators.  The necessary ingredients for developing an engagement metric to trend the health of a mailing list are rates for open, click-through, conversion, and delivery.  Along with these metrics, add the subscribe rate, spam complaint rate, new subscriber rate, and hard bounces to a quotient that directionally indicates the quality and performance of the mailing list.

The forth step is focus on behavior.  This approach will create a behavioral segmentation framework to drive subsequent mailing and remarketing campaigns, and in turn provide an completely effective means of targeting.

You also want to develop/ tailor landing pages.  Driving subscribers to the primary website is generally the preferred tactic of most marketers.  Tailoring landing pages to reinforce email content that further drives subscribers to a desired outcome could be necessary if organizations choose to tailor the site experience by subscriber segment or persona.

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Email is Public and Permanent

Posted on May 9, 2012 by bulk-email-broadcasting

There are some important things to remember when dealing with email and email marketing.  Remember email isn’t the same as sealing it into an envelope or delivering to someone a secure phone line.  Email is a public medium.  Think of email as sending a postcard, shouting down the hall, or talking on a cell phone that is being monitored by a van parked outside the building.  Unfortunately many people have a false sense of security by putting disclaimers on their email, such as, “this email is strictly confidential”.  And others think they can protect confidentiality by putting “Do not forward” in bold letters at the top of a message.  Despite making careful precautions your recipients can accidently forward your email on, or mistakenly leave the original message when sending a copy of their reply to someone.

The other thing to remember about email is that it is permanent.  You can destroy a paper document by feeding it into a paper shredder.  You can’t do that with email.  Simply sending a message to the trash doesn’t make it disappear.  The message lingers in your trash folder until you empty it which you may forget to do.  After emptying the trash bin the email might still be around if you kept a backup copy.  Plus your organization is likely to have kept a backup copy.

These are two very important things to consider when putting together an email marketing campaign.

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Battling Against Email ADD

Posted on May 8, 2012 by bulk-email-broadcasting

In today’s modern times the volume of emails in our personal and business lives has surpassed the ability to digest the content with any high level of comprehension.  Intelligent emails will go a long way in making your reader feel as though they truly have a relationship with your brand and your company, but by themselves they are nowhere near enough to make your email marketing program successful.  However with all the emails that people receive everyday this has caused email ADD.  It is estimated that for every three words you type in an email, only one is read or retained.  Here are some helpful hints to help combat email ADD.

Remember to always put new content in context before the user hits delete.  If your reader has no context for the message they are reading, your message equity is at risk.  If you send someone an email with just fresh content and no mental notes for them to refer to your message equity drops.  However if your message has associated notes there is a much higher chance of having your message resonate and be responded too.

You want to define the email’s benefits in terms of the reader’s long-term goals.  If your email does not clearly and concisely state why the message will help the reader achieve their long-term goals and fulfill future needs, it is at high risk for low comprehension.  Creating language that is clear and concise and that conveys how your reader will benefit in the long run will pay off many times.

An attention node is some type of formatting in the email that clearly grabs the reader’s attention.  In marketing messages, this is most commonly done with a callout box, action tag/button, or other imagery.

By combining these efforts you will succeed in having your emails looked at more closely.

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Building a Quality List

Posted on May 7, 2012 by bulk-email-broadcasting

The quality of your email list depends greatly on where and how you collect the information in the first place as well as where and how you store and manage the data.  Getting permission directly from the person who owns the information is the best way to collect quality information.  People you would be collecting information from would be your prospects and customers.  Quality list data stored in a useful format is a goldmine for targeting your email marketing messages and converting prospects and customers into steady streams of repeat and referral sales.

Collecting information online requires placing a sign-up link in every online presence possible.  With online you are getting explicit information from that prospect or customer to send them emails.  A sign-up link is a text box, button, or text that usually links to a sign-up form or confirmation page that allows your subscriber to enter and submit additional information and preferences.

Collecting information in person like online still requires explicit permission.  According to the ten foot rule, whenever anyone is within ten feet of you, ask her for her contact information.  Here are some ways to collect information without being too intrusive.  Swapping business cards, placing a guest book on the counter in your store or office, place a basket for business cards on your table at trade shows and events, and train your employees to take down customer information.  Remember you need to ask for permission from the person before using any of this information.

After knowing where to collect the information the question is now what information do I collect?  The two things you need to collect are only an email address and permission to send someone a professional email.  Keeping it to as little information as possible will help you collect more information and subscribers.  Over time you can start to build a relationship to learn more about their interests and personal information.

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Organizing Your Email Content into Themes

Posted on May 4, 2012 by bulk-email-broadcasting

Email marketing has appropriate themes for objectives such as promotional, informational, procedural, and relational.  Emails can sometimes contain content with multiple themes, but in such cases, it’s usually best to have one main theme and several related themes grouped together visually under the main theme.  A theme is the main idea of your entire email campaign.

You want to use a promotional theme when the main objective of your email is to persuade your audience to take a specific action or to ask for a specific purchase decision, make sure your email includes only content that supports and relates to a promotional theme.  Examples of content to include in a promotional themed email are product images and descriptions, coupons, testimonials, headlines and links that call for action, links to information that supports the main call to action, and directions on how to take action.

Informational themes are used to inform you audience to help them form an opinion.  Informational differs from promotional because an informational theme does not include a specific call to action other than reading the message.  The following types of content are informational in nature news articles, stories and narratives, opinions and viewpoints, announcements with no specific call to action, event calendars, and frequently asked questions.

When the main objective of your email is to give official instruction or explain processes, include content that supports and relates to a procedural theme.  Like informational these rarely call for action.  Examples of content you might include are text welcoming a new customer or list subscriber, notifications and official statements, footer text explaining a shipping or privacy policy, and disclosures and warranties.

Relational themes are typically one-way communications with no call to action.  The main objective is to build or deepen personal relationships, your email should include only content that supports and relates to a relational theme.  Some content you might include are greetings and acknowledgements, news or stories about personal experiences, and customer recognition messages.

Sometimes you’ll need to include multiple themes together.  Make sure you state the main theme clearly at the beginning.  After making the main theme, clear group sub-themes together with layout and design elements, such as headings and white space.  If you can’t find a main theme to tie themes together then send separate emails under their own themes.

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