View Your Email Marketing as a Conversation

Imagine you’re having a face-to-face conversation with a friend. You’re talking about something that fascinates you but you want to judge the interest of your fellow conversationalist. You analyze facial expressions, body language, and verbal response in an effort to see if your friend is interested, distracted, or entirely tuning you out. By monitoring their responses, you can adjust your conversation as needed and hold their interest. In the same way that watching your friend’s reactions helps you carry on a better conversation, monitoring email response rates help gauge the interest of your subscribers.

Keep Track of Interested Subscribers

First, take a look at how many people are reading your emails. Sending your emails through an email marketing application (like eConnect Email) will provided the statistics needed to fully understand and track the interest of your subscribers.  Once you’ve fully analyzed the reports of your campaign you can begin tailoring your marketing efforts based on the things that interest your subscribers.

Reach Uninterested Subscribers

Consider that friend you’re having a conversation with. If he or she seems uninterested you might try changing your tone, reevaluating your subject matter, or addressing your friend specifically, even asking, “Am I boring you?”

With your email marketing reports, look at who consistently ignores you. Isolate this group. Consider what might be turning them off. Look and see if you’re writing about topics that they may find uninteresting. If the recipient signed up to receive emails about snowboarding but you’re sending them emails about water sports this could be a reason for the disconnect. Finally, consider sending out an email asking for the group’s input. But remember, you’ll have to use an enticing subject line to make sure they actually open the email.

Know When You’ve Lost a Subscriber

Of course even the most careful and concerned conversationalist will always have people who don’t want to listen. By using an email service like eConnect Email, if someone chooses to move on and unsubscribe from your contact list, this will be automatically handled for you.

Remember, response rates are one of your most powerful tools for improving upon your email marketing efforts. Use these tools and you will find that your subscribers are more engaged which will have a positive effect on your bottom line.

While the conveniences of modern technology have certainly simplified the marketing process, these days some of our most useful tools can end up causing the greatest amount of frustration. Chances are you have experienced this yourself. You open up your inbox, only to find that you have 57 new emails, when just last night, there were two. After an hour of irritated sorting, deleting, and replying you have to ask yourself how email has taken over your life. There’s a name for this kind of frustration: inbox exhaustion.

Inbox exhaustion can occur when someone is bombarded by daily emails from well-meaning companies that can’t seem to find a balance between too much and not enough. You can be guilty of this, if you are not careful. The danger is that too much emailing will not only frustrate subscribers, but actually turn them off completely. For some people, the problem gets so severe that they declare email bankruptcy and permanently deactivate their email accounts!

So how do you know if you are exhausting your subscribers? Take a look at your stats. Are they dropping? Are people unsubscribing? Odds are good that if you are sending daily emails, your subscribers are feeling overwhelmed. Try cutting back to weekly or bi-weekly, and see what happens. Backing off on emails does not mean that you are less committed to email marketing. It’s a strategy for avoiding email exhaustion and keeping your subscribers happy.

Finding a balance is the key. Instead of focusing on quantity, focus on quality. When you send an email, make sure that it’s exactly what your subscribers need to know. Succinct, to the point, and well-spread-out emails will keep people on board without them feeling like they’re in the middle of a game of email dodge ball.

Certainly, you do not want to lose touch with subscribers. Halting your entire email marketing scheme is not the answer. Fail to send enough emails, and your readers may forget about you or mark you as spam after a month or two of no communication. Email exhaustion can be avoided if you carefully balance the amount of emails you send, the length and quality of the content, and the overall approach you take to email marketing.

Most people like email communication. Use it effectively, and the tool will prove invaluable for your business. Exhaust your readers, and you will almost certainly lose them.

Are you tired of mediocre open rates from your email campaigns? What if you could eliminate the frustration of guessing at subject lines and content that will gain the attention of your subscribers? Imagine getting great results the first time you send out an email. When it comes to email marketing split testing is a no brainer.  Using this powerful tool, you can put your marketing strategies in overdrive.

Split testing sounds like a complicated procedure, but it is really quite simple to understand. The first step is taking a look at the information you are seeking to convey to your subscribers. You take that information and create two similar emails that are almost (but not quite) identical. Perhaps you slightly change the subject heading or alter the phrasing of a campaign slogan. The split comes when you send the two different versions of the email to a small sampling of your mailing list to see which campaign performs the best. Once you know which email receives the most favorable response you send the best performing campaign out to the remaining recipients.

The novelty of split testing is that you can take the results from your tests and evaluate which strategies were the most effective.  Let’s say you varied your two emails by including a graphic in one that you did not include in the other. If the email including the graphic receives the most favorable results then you know that your readers respond to the graphic. You can then go on to include more graphic elements in future emails.

The more you split test, the more effective your email marketing will be. Don’t stop with just one test. Once you receive the results of the first one, immediately begin a new test that builds on the information you gathered. The more you learn about your subscribers’ tastes, the more your marketing will reflect the strategies that cater to them. This will increase traffic and encourage more effective marketing.

Today, split testing is being used in more ways than just email marketing. It is so effective that now people use it in website design and online advertising, as well. The usefulness of being able to test out different strategies before fully launching a campaign is invaluable.  Don’t be left behind, eConnect Email has built split testing into our application so make use of it.

How do you go about split testing within eConnect Email 3.0?

1)    First create the two variations of your email campaign which you would like to test

2)    Now select “Create Split Test” from the “Email Campaigns” tab

3)    Give you Split Test a name

4)    Choose the two versions of the emails campaigns to use for testing

5)    Select how a winner is chosen

6)    Finally, select what kind of test to run

7)    Now sit back, kick your feet up and let technology work for you.

Questions?  Give us a call, we’re here to help!

At eConnect Email, we want to help make our customers look smart and save time with their email marketing. We have put together a list of some of our sweet features that will help you with short cuts and tricks to making you a better email marketer…your subscribers will be impressed!

To view our August Newsletter – Tips & Tricks – CLICK HERE!

I recently subscribed to Entertainment Weekly and naturally gave them my email address when I created my profile online. Not long after, I received an email from Entertainment Weekly that said I could register for the Advance Screening Program and see new Hollywood movies before they hit the theaters.

Unfortunately, the email was too good to be true. After reading the first paragraph it was pretty clear that this email was not recently updated as it referenced Shrek The Third, which came out in 2007 and Dreamgirls, which was released in late 2006. Rush Hour 3 which is pictured in the movie poster was also released in 2007.

It appears that this email was set up as an autoresponder but was later abandoned by Entertainment Weekly. Do they still offer advanced movie screenings to their subscribers? Do they even realize that their subscribers are still receiving these emails? Surely, if they realized that the emails were still being sent they would take the time to update them every few months with more recent movies. It’s just good advertising.

If you have autoresponders and triggers set up, think about their content. Will any of it become dated? How quickly will your autoresponders become irrelevant? How often should you update them? Do you need to set up a system to remind you to update that information frequently to keep everything in your triggers fresh?

Updating your triggers and autoresponders won’t take much time and it will keep your content from looking as dated as last summer’s top ten list.

Until just a few years ago big city newspapers like the NY Times were the premiere news source for people who wanted more news than the fifteen or so 30-second clips they could get on the evening news TV shows.  Times have changed dramatically.  Now those same sources are scrambling to find ways to compete successfully with sources that provide free access to all sorts of news to customers who access portals at virtually any time of day of night.  Some newspapers are trying to find ways to monetize their content and information.  Theirs is a delicate balance; they must move carefully so that they don’t jeopardize their reputation for accurate reporting while at the same time trying to figure out how to get readers to pay for what some provide free-of-charge.  The situation is a marketer’s nightmare, for sure.

In a day of real-time anything, wise media companies need to focus first on creating great content and then on getting it to their customers quickly.  The customers will choose for themselves which content/access combination they feel is best, and will utilize that one.  Companies in this situation also need to broaden their thinking regarding the service they provide.  To compete effectively, a media company must view itself as competing with all sorts of providers.  It’s not enough to simply see yourself as a radio station, a newspaper company or a TV station in competition with other local radio stations, newspapers or TV stations.  Internet, RSS and email have essentially reshaped several media markets into one giant market.  The customer still wants great news content delivered quickly, but now it needs to be delivered right to his inbox or as a feed on Twitter.

Winning in this market will require that the content and the delivery are just right.

One media company’s example.

Even though generating good content is important and has its challenges, doing so is not the major difficulty faced by the average media firm.  The key challenge is to get that information through the available channels in a way that an audience wants it.  A major issue here is whether or not a website has the capacity to regularly update its content.  The consumer looking for headlines doesn’t want to read from a page that’s no longer current. So, how does an audience know that content is updated?

We realize that email marketing is not the only way to reach customers.  However, since we are an email marketing service provider, we are obviously biased toward that medium as a preferred method.  Not long ago we assisted a traditional TV network with 14 affiliates as it started delivering headlines and breaking news alerts directly to customers’ inboxes twice daily.  At the same time in the morning and in the afternoon customers found updated news pieces waiting in their inboxes.

To accomplish this we used our RSS-to-Email technology combined with our advanced triggers/advanced scheduling. The network employees do the jobs they know best; they create and publish excellent articles.  Our technology allows them to automatically deliver that great content twice daily to thousands of inboxes.  They don’t have to do a thing.

Now that this first step is implemented, this media firm can start working to integrate social networking and mobile alerts.  This first step has shown that customers want information quickly and that by accessing the available information they are indicating their preference for it in particular format.  The message to this firm—and a host of other companies—is clear.  It’s time to look beyond a single information channel and be willing to provide information how, when and where the customer wants it.  Companies that don’t do so may find themselves without an audience.

When it comes to writing the subject line for an email campaign all email marketers struggle from time to time.  It’s a struggle because you know that no matter how relevant, compelling and irresistible the content of your email may be, if it doesn’t get opened, you’re not going to get results.

Below we will give you some tips and solid advice based on many years of email marketing experience, to help take the struggle out of your subject line composing, and help you maximize your open and response rates.

Anyone involved with email marketing will find this study of interest. Whether working in a B2C, B2B or Non-Profit organization, marketers, designers, developers and technicians will find both inspiration and hands-on guidance in the results and recommendations provided.

Rules:

1. Rule number 1 is… there are no rules.  The way a group of recipients reacts to a given subject line will depend on who those individuals are, what their motivations are, how busy they are, how frequently you email them, etc.  Any number of variables may be in play, which leads us to rule number 2…
2. TEST, TEST, TEST. There is no better way to learn and hone the most successful approach to subject lines for your target audience and your campaigns than by split testing them.
3. Get the key elements of your subject line into the first 50 characters. There has been a lot of analysis and reporting into subject line length and what works best.  There certainly is no hard and fast rule that your subject lines should be short or should be long. But what they should do is deliver the key message or proposition within the first 50 characters.  That doesn’t mean they should only be 50 characters long – split test different subject line lengths.
4. Avoid the ‘mysterious and oblique’.  Generally speaking, mysterious or vague subject lines that are designed to entice recipients to open out of curiosity, will not deliver you the metrics you want to see, i.e. high click through’s and conversions.  There are exceptions to this rule, but beware.  Focus on the objectives of your campaign before you choose this approach.
5. Make the content of your subject line specific and single-minded.  Focus on the key message, offer or proposition in your email and spell it out clearly and succinctly in your subject line.  Specific, relevant subject lines are more likely to generate not only opens, but click through’s and conversions too.
6. Tell – don’t sell. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put an offer in your subject line if it’s your key message.  It does mean you should keep the subject line factual and avoid those ‘Power Adjectives’.  If the offer is ‘20% off’ then state it, but avoid the ‘amazing 20% off’ in your subject line.
7. Write your subject line AFTER you’ve written your message.  Many marketers do this the wrong way around. This is not a chicken and egg story – your content should come first.
8. Test your email through a spam checker. This will highlight any issues within both your subject line and your content that may channel your email into junk boxes.  To ensure your subject line is spam filter friendly, make sure you avoid the use of capital letters and exclamation marks.  You can use the word ‘free’ but never use ‘FREE!’
9. As with all your copywriting, you should know who you are writing your subject line for – who your target market is, who they are as people, what they do, what motivates them, how busy they are.  Put yourself in their shoes as a recipient of your email when you write your all-important subject line.
10. Lastly, find inspiration in your own inbox.  It’s always worth signing up to your competitors’ emailing lists and those of other organizations relevant to what you do. Use a separate email account and check it regularly for subject lines that stand out and make you want to open the emails.  Save them in a word file and you’ll have ready-made inspiration when staring at that dreaded blank subject line field.

Testing your email subject lines

Subject line split testing should be an integral part of your campaign process.  Split testing simply means you take 2 different subject lines and send them to 2 samples of your target audience and measure which is the most successful – then use that subject line when you send to the remaining bulk of your list.

How do you measure success?

This depends on what you are aiming to achieve with your email campaign.  If you are spreading awareness or a branding message or running a teaser and you have no direct call to action, then your open rate stats could be your measure of success, i.e. what percentage of those who received the email, opened it.

If (as is more likely) you are driving traffic to your website or landing pages using links from your email, then you might choose to measure the ‘click to open’ rate of your split test, i.e. what percentage of those who opened the email, went on to click through.

If your email campaign has a final goal, i.e. to drive recipients to buy a product online, or to register for something on your website, or fill out a contact form, then you might want to look deeper at the conversion rate of the split tests.   Any of these measurements have their value – your choice depends how much detail you want to measure on and how much time you realistically have to invest in testing.

Your subject line testing shouldn’t be a one off.  What works in one month may not work in 3 months time.  That’s the nature of the game, so you need to test for each campaign on an ongoing basis.

One interesting facet of email marketing is holding contests—this isn’t exactly a novel idea anymore, but it can add interest and involve your customers.  But if you decide to run a contest, beware of how you post the winners!  Some sites have opted for using a mix of email marketing and other media such as Facebook and Twitter.  If you decide to post pictures of your contest winners in your emails, beware of the pictures you choose to use.  Don’t use pictures that make your winners look bad.  They probably won’t appreciate it, and it won’t exactly make you look like you have a respectable customer base.  And if you don’t have their picture, request it from them—don’t post a default image.  It’s better to request pictures up front from your contestants and let them know that you’ll be putting them in your email.  You’re more likely to get decent pictures that way.  If you decide not to go with pictures, a clever logo or design can be just as creative.  Remember, your customers have used your business and are participating, so do them a favor and present them in the best possible light.

Our development team is always working to make our email marketing application the most robust in the industry.  We are always introducing new features or helping our clients improve their inbox results.  So, I wanted to take a few minutes to outline some pretty cool features about our system that you may not know about. Take advantage of them – they’ll make you a better email marketer.

1. Snippets: Save yourself some time by reusing key elements to your emails like a header, footer, or side bar.  Snippets are small pieces of HTML that you can create and save and use over and over when you need them.
2. Social Share: Did you hear Twitter is going out of business? Me neither. Social media is here to stay and so is email. Insert a simple tag and boom: your subscribers can share your emails with their networks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Buzz.
3. Cart Abandonment: 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are abandoned.  70%! Wow.  eConnect Email can help you recover those lost sales by firing off triggered emails to each person that abandons your cart with an offer, incentives or reminders to complete the purchase.  Studies show nearly 50% of abandoned shop carts can be recovered and turned into cold hard cash!
4. RSS-to-Email: Why work harder than you have to. With this feature you can update a blog and then reuse your content for your newsletter too, automatically!  Some of our customers do this and use the next item to schedule the deployment and deliver while they sleep. It’s hands-free email marketing, baby.
5. Scheduled, Automatic Mailings: Want your emails to be working for you while you play? Just set it and forget it. The eConnect Email advanced scheduler deploys your emails on time, every time. So while you’re grilling on a Sunday afternoon with Sam Adams, we’ll be delivering your messages whenever and wherever you need ‘em.
6. Inbox Preview & Spam Report: Want to know how your email will render in all the top email providers including the Blackberry and iPhone? With one-click, Inbox Preview will provide a detailed screenshot report ensuring emails appear as intended. In addition, we’ll run it through all of the most popular spam filters (gateway, desktop and server-side) to see if your stuff might be mistaken as spam before you send.
7. Advanced Triggers: eConnect Email can communicate with your CRM. While we provide stock Salesforce.com integration, you may want to integrate with some other system. With a standard SOAP API, you can have us “talk back” to any system you’d like.
8. Dynamic Content: Readers will want to keep reading your stuff if it’s relative to them.  So tailor your emails to your client’s specific interests and you’ll keep them hooked a whole lot longer.  It just takes a little set up but the results will be well worth your time.  It’s no longer a one-size fits all world.
9. Browser Image Editing: We have a simple way to edit your photos or images inside our program.  Photoshop can be overkill and sometimes we just need to make a simple edit.  We have included the most common image editing functions inside of eConnect Email through our integration with Google-owned Picnik. Pretty neat.
10. Auto-responders & Triggered Mailings: Let our system go to work for you once again.  Set up your welcome emails and targeted mailings based on subscriber interactions with an auto-response or triggered mailing series, and relax.
11. API/Integration: For you developers out there, here’s one for you…with our API tools you can integrate your stuff with ours like never before. Want to build a custom reports interface for a client? Want to have your CRM and ours talk to one another? Well now you can.
12. The Free Plan…Forever!: Want something that will really entice you …You can have a free account with us for up to 150 emails per month as long as you wish.  That’s a good one…free emails!  Woo hoo!  Here’s what you get: 150 email/month, store an unlimited number of subscribers, access to all account features, no contract or credit card required!  So give it a spin, activate your free account today and see why eConnect Email is simply, email done better.
13. Email Marketing Services: Need some help with your email design and delivery, or maybe your just too busy doing what you do best? Put us to work for you whether it’s one really important campaign or all of your email marketing efforts. Our professional services team helps marketers design, develop and deploy better email marketing campaigns everyday.
14. The most flexible pricing of any ESP: When it comes to pricing, we’ve learned that flexibility is a cool, refreshing approach. We want you to feel comfortable with how you are billed, whether it be monthly or on a pay as you send basis. You give us an idea of your volume, we’ll show you where you fall. And the greatest part? You’re only charged for the emails you send not the number of contacts you have within your account. Simple.
15. You can talk to us: This one is usually the most pleasant surprise to folks checking us out as a potential solution. Many self-service email service providers even refuse to publish a phone number. That’s ok, but that’s not us. We love to talk to you and want you to feel like we’re in this together. Give us a ring we’re here to help – 888.596.9997.

Here’s the rundown: you are like one of the many companies out there with a facebook fanpage…as you should, especially if you have a product or service that lends itself to the world of social media, which is pretty much anyone these days.   You also have an email marketing database that you would like to grow and you have an idea of  “how can I get my Facebook fans to join my email list”.

Lucky for you, this process is easy and soon your facebook fan page and eConnect Email database will have a complimentary relationship.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Navigate to your fan page and select Edit Page (under your main image on the left hand side).
• Scroll down to Static FMBL under Applications. Click ‘Add To My Page’ when the pop-up window appears.
• Go back to your page, hit ‘Edit Page’ again and look for FMBL. Click the editing icon at right and click ‘Edit’.
• Cut and paste the code from your Subscription form which you’ve already created in your eConnect Email account.
• You’re good to go. Just like that. Simply rearrange everything how you’d like and you’re off to growing your mailing list.

Now when your boss complains about your Facebook usage, let em’ know you’re working. The crew @eConnectEmail will vouch for you!