How do you define a great email campaign? Effective copy, concise subject line, clear call-to-action, sure. But putting hours of effort into an email campaign means nothing if you don’t see results. A successful campaign boils down to your brand understanding how to meet (and exceed) the expectations of your audience.

I, like most of us, am subscribed to numerous newsletters for a wide variety of reasons. Some for aggregated news purposes, business tips, daily deals or retail companies that offer value. I think we all know our favorites by the excitement we get seeing the new email freshly unopened in our inbox. This for marketers is a dream come true; these loyal subscribers are the pulse of the messages they create and move the needle for what’s to come.

A company recently caught my attention and now goes into a short list of brands that I not only enjoy watching, but admire their email campaigns and overall integrated marketing.

One night, killing some time before dinner I walked around downtown San Diego and went into the Goorin Bros. hat shop. The store pulled us in and almost back in time as we tried on hats reminiscent of the 1960s, old derby days that radiated class. It was so fun spending time in the store that on my way out I wrote my name in a book to be added to their newsletter list.

A few days later I received my first email from the Goorin Bros. and I was able to open it on my phone without a hitch. I thought the email looked very clean, sharp and with closer notice to this and emails to come, I was continually impressed with the beautiful, thoughtful design, clear messaging and access to information.

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Subscribers need to have the ability to ‘modify their details’ within an email for many reasons. It’s so frustrating when you simply want to update your email address or some other bit of information and there’s no means to do it or you have to jump through too many hoops to get there.

Just like any other online account, users should be able to update their email subscription information online.  From a marketer’s standpoint, you want users to have the option of updating their info with you at any time and deter them from unsubscribing.

The more in tune your clients are with you, the more likely they are to keep their information up to date at all times.

More and more, you see the words ‘Modify Details’ or ‘Update Profile’ right next to the Unsubscribe link in email footers, a trend that is especially important if you have multiple lists. Like fashion, taste in food and what rotates through my iPod, preferences change and what someone wanted to receive two months ago may not be copacetic with them now.

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Worried about the response rate to your email campaign? If so, you’re not alone. Over 90% of email subscribers have unsubscribed from a list they initially opted into. Of those, the majority have done so because they felt the content was boring or irrelevant.

Did you see those numbers? Go back and read them again. That’s a lot of people who are dissatisfied with the way businesses are marketing themselves. Most likely, those unsubscribes started out as non-responses. If you can reach the non-responders before they opt out, you may be able to salvage some valuable contacts. For everyone who has ever sent out a boring or irrelevant email (let’s just all admit that we have), it’s time to consider these strategies for keeping your subscribers engaged.

• Value, Value, Value

Why should anyone read your email? Does it provide useful information, special offers, discount codes, or other incentives? Is it personalized? Do you use list segmentation to target your offers even further? If you don’t know what your audience considers valuable, try sending them a brief survey asking what their expectations are.

• Optimized Subject Lines

Subject lines that appear cutesy, overly clever, or use gimmicks to grab attention (exclamation marks, all caps, strange punctuation) will often be viewed as spam. Keep your subject lines clear and straightforward, incorporate your keyword, and try to communicate the overall value of the email.

• Other Communication Channels

If certain subscribers don’t respond no matter what you do, try reaching them through other communication channels before you purge them from your list. Direct mail and social media can provide opportunities to entice subscribers back with special offers or incentives.

• Set Frequency Expectations

Another reason people unsubscribe from email lists is that messages arrive too frequently. Communicate up front how often you’ll be sending your messages and stick with it. If you plan to change the frequency (around a holiday or before a big sale, for instance) let readers know so they won’t feel deluged.

• Credible From Address

If the from address looks spammy, your message may not make it to the inbox. Be careful with abbreviations and try to stick with a from address that is immediately recognizable.

eConnect Email can help you at each stage of the process, whether you’re improving the design of your email, segmenting your list, tracking user behavior, or testing alternate versions of a particular message element.  If all else fails and you can’t re-engage the non-responders on your list, it may be time to let them go, clean up your list, and move on.

Increasing deliverability is a noble goal for every email marketer. And while you may be able to boost your rates with subject line and offer techniques, there is an underlying issue that often gets overlooked: list building.

The Wrong Approach to List Building

Despite the mountains of evidence showing the benefits of building your own email list, less than 45% of all email marketers use permission-based lists. That means that more than half of businesses who send emails on a regular basis buy, rent, or use co-registration to build email lists. That’s a problem for three reasons:

• People who don’t explicitly sign up for your newsletter will be more likely to send you to the spam folder.
• People who sign up for your list accidentally or only as a result of another promotion will be unlikely to remain active.
• Purchased or rented lists have high unsubscribe rates because they consist of people who haven’t showed any interest in your products or services.

How to Build a List That Jump Starts Deliverability

Deliverability depends heavily on your subscribers wanting the messages you send them. If they didn’t sign up to receive your messages or they don’t remember signing up, they’ll hit the spam button. Respecting your subscribers’ right to choose which messages they receive and which ones they don’t can make a huge difference in how many of your emails reach their intended destination. In order to achieve better deliverability rates, implement these proven list-building strategies.

• Use double opt-ins whenever possible. By sending an initial email with a link that must be clicked to complete the opt-in process, you increase the likelihood that your subscribers will remember signing up.
• Make it easier to unsubscribe. Sound counterintuitive? Look at it this way. If a subscriber can’t easily see the unsubscribe link, he’ll hit the spam button instead, which will chip away at your deliverability rates. By making the unsubscribe link more visible, you ensure that the email addresses on your list belong to people who still want what you have to offer.
• Monitor and remove both hard and soft bounces. A hard bounce should be removed immediately from your list, while a soft bounce can be retried several times before removal. Either way, don’t let bounces sabotage your deliverability.

At eConnect Email, we help you maintain stellar deliverability by helping you monitor the vital stats of every email campaign you send. Keeping your lists clean ensures that the highest number of emails possible will reach their intended destination, meaning greater return on the investment you’ve made.

Loyalty-targeted emails can result in open rates as much as 40 percent higher than bulk mailings. That’s a statistic worth noting. If you don’t currently use segmentation to cater to subscriber preferences and build loyalty among existing customers, now is the time to start.

Thank You Notes

A simple “thank you” for subscribing, purchasing, or providing feedback goes a long way toward building rapport with your audience. Let subscribers know you appreciate their business and offer them a special discount or coupon code to be used toward a future purchase.

Shopping Cart Recovery

Use shopping cart recovery software to remind customers of unfinished purchases. A timely email letting them know the cart is about to expire or that the items are now on sale may be enough to bring them back to your website.

Redemption Reminders

If you use a loyalty program that incorporates points, coupon codes, or e-dollars, send subscribers an email when these incentives are about to expire. They’ll appreciate the reminder and the tactic could boost your sales.

Feedback

Solicit customer feedback in the form of interest and opinion surveys, product reviews, and social sharing buttons. Customers appreciate knowing that you care what they think.

Shopping Preferences

Use previous subscriber behavior to target emails toward their individual shopping preferences. By tracking what users click on, what they search for, and what they ultimately buy you can create emails that cater to their needs.

Demographics

Send offers that relate to the subscriber’s location, age, profession, or gender. You don’t want your senior citizen market to receive emails about college savings or your Los Angeles subscribers to receive information about discount flights from New York to Miami.

Purchasing Volume

Customers who spend significant money with your company should receive special offers such as free shipping, platinum status, or early notice of sales. On the other hand, one-time spenders may also be encouraged to shop again if you offer them a special deal.

Repeat Customers Vs. Prospective Customers

Both repeat and prospective customers deserve special attention, but in a different way. Offer special deals or discount codes to repeat customers, and make sure they aren’t turned away when they notice that your prospective customers get seemingly better offers than they did. You can entice both these markets by creating email messages tailored to their needs and purchasing habits.

eConnect Email offers stellar list segmentation options that allow you to send emails designed with a particular audience in mind. Use custom fields to manage subscriber data and then segment your lists based on the criteria and user behavior of your clients, customers and subscribers.

Strong opinions abound on both sides of the co-registration debate. Co-registration, or the practice of subscribing to multiple newsletters simultaneously, walks a fine line when it comes to ethical list building practices. Let’s take a look at both sides of the debate.

Co-Registration is the Answer to All Your List Building Woes!

Adherents to this viewpoint believe that co-registration offers an easy way to build an opt-in list without having to go through the actual work of soliciting subscribers. By teaming up with other websites, you can mutually build your email lists with a minimum of effort. Touted benefits include:

• Rapid list building
• Lower spam rates than you get with purchased or rented lists
• Increasing subscriber interest by offering a broader range of information than they signed up for
• Networking with other businesses

While some of these benefits are iffy at best, the ease and speed with which you can build a list do seem tempting. However, before you jump in with both feet, here’s the other side of the story.

Co-Registration Will Sabotage Your Credibility!

Co-registration offers usually include wording such as “I would like to receive news and special offers from ThusandSo Co. and from other carefully selected companies.” Subscribers are asked to check the box (which in some cases may already be checked). This check mark constitutes an “opt-in” for these other carefully selected companies. Are red flags going up? They should be, because:

• Pre-checking a box which may get overlooked is a sneaky way to build an email list. It will also result in high unsubscribe and spam rates.
• The subscriber may not read the fine print and may not realize he is “opting in” for additional emails. While it’s not technically spam, it’s still going to destroy your credibility with that subscriber as he begins receiving emails he doesn’t remember signing up for.

The Nays Have It!

Your credibility as a company is worth far more than the few extra subscribers on your list who may open emails they receive as a result of co-registration. It’s never a good idea to trick people into signing up for your newsletter. Practicing ethically unquestionable list building techniques will ensure that your list remains clean and targeted to the people who have shown genuine interest.

eConnect Email helps keep your lists clean and deliverable by tracking key email metrics, keeping your lists updated, and ensuring that your deliverability rates remain as high as possible.

There may be more people with split personalities walking among us.  You may in fact be one of them.  How do you know?  Check out your work inbox vs. your personal inbox.  At work, you may be the OCD type that responds instantly to e-mail, takes care of all related tasks, and deletes with a sense of satisfaction, fulfillment, and overall well-being.  What about your personal inbox?  If you treat that inbox with the same immediacy as your work inbox, you are safe from the split personality diagnosis.  If you are like some others among us, your personal mailbox may be cluttered with all kinds of emails that you just don’t really feel like dealing with (especially at the end of a work day in which you were on top of everything for 8 hours non-stop).

Maybe these descriptions don’t fit you at all.  What is your inbox style?  We’ve already touched on the “deleter” types (see above).  Once you deal with it, you want it out of your inbox, your files, and your mind.  You don’t like clutter in your mind, your email, your house, or anywhere else for that matter.

Maybe you are an electronic pack-rat (for those who prefer a more positive connotation, you can use the words frugal, thrifty, or someone-who-possesses-enough-foresight-to-realize-when-something-might-come-in-handy-later).  You save every file, document, YouTube link, forward…in case you might need it.  Almost reminds you of teachers in the olden days who saved magazines to cut out pictures for future bulletin boards.  Unfortunately, these types usually have no system of organizing their emails—so these carefully hoarded emails may never be found when (if) the moment of need comes.  If you have an organization system that works, great—hoard away.

Maybe the way your inbox looks is comparable to the way your closet at home looks.  When you have time, it is impeccably organized/color coded/neatly lined rows of shoes, etc.  When your life gets busy, things just end up a little bit scrambled—even though it’s not your preference.  It’s easy during a hectic day at work not to drop those emails in the proper folder or forget to reply to something relatively important.  This in-between type is a reflection of life circumstances.

So what does it matter what kind of inbox you have?  Simplifying your life and have more time for the good stuff is a great reason.  Some tips for organizing your inbox (and subsequently, your life).  Make sure subject lines are relevant and to the point.  It’s easier to categorize and locate emails that are concise and well labeled.  If you are writing to the deleters among us, this will probably get their prompt attention.  If you are writing to a hoarder, at least they can search by subject and find what they are looking for.  The in-between?  Well, make it as interesting as possible so that even if it’s one of those hectic days, they’ll be more likely to take a look.

Plenty has been said about how to keep email marketing messages out of the spam trap, how to keep subscribers from clicking the spam button, and how to stay relevant. But underneath all this practical advice is a deeper question: What constitutes spam in the first place? Most people define spam as any marketing message they don’t want. Retailers on the other hand, operate under a much narrower definition. Let’s take a look at what constitutes spam both technically and practically, and how you can avoid earning the spam designation.

Sender Perspective

As a sender, your definition of spam differs dramatically from that of the recipient. While there will be some gray areas, most spam falls into these three categories:

• CAN-SPAM act violations—The CAN-SPAM Act sets forth guidelines for email marketing messages which include accurate from lines, unsubscribe mechanisms, opt-out compliance, and accurate headers. Messages that violate these guidelines are spam in the most technical sense of the word.
• Unsolicited marketing messages—While not technically spam according to the CAN-SPAM Act, unsolicited messages (purchased email lists) are considered to be spam by most recipients and senders, rendering the usefulness of such lists virtually zilch.
• Third-party affiliate messages—You may have a check box on your email sign-up page that gives permission for third-party affiliates to send messages to that subscriber. But if the box is automatically checked or the recipient doesn’t remember signing up for such emails, these messages will also be considered spam.

Subscriber Perspective

It’s much harder to provide a concrete definition of spam from the subscriber’s perspective. Basically, if a subscriber doesn’t want a particular marketing message to appear in his inbox, he’s likely to hit the spam button and send all future messages from that sender to the spam folder. Spam, in the eyes of the subscriber, is any marketing message he doesn’t currently want, even if he initially signed up to receive your emails.

It’s All About Relevance

Because subscribers take such a broad view of spam, it’s up to email marketers to gain a subscriber’s trust so he’ll keep reading their messages. The most effective way to do this is to make your messages relevant. If a subscriber knows that your content will provide something that benefits him—information, discounts, or special offers—he will look forward to receiving your messages rather than deleting them or designating them as spam.

At eConnect Email, we have years of experience helping our clients stay out of spam traps. Use our subscriber list management tools, segmentation options, and design templates to create email messages that will keep your subscribers wanting more.

If you were given the opportunity to try two things at the same time to see which one would give you the most benefits for the least work, would you take the opportunity? Of course you’d do it!

Think about this. What if whenever you walked up to a girl, you could try a couple different pick-up lines at the same time (and without the girl knowing), to see which line would get her attention? You’d exploit your unfair advantage, I’m sure.

Split testing = An unfair corner on the market

Think about your email campaigns. Whenever you work to compose and send one, you’re pretty much taking a guess each time, hoping that all the hours and effort you put into shaping the most grabbing subject line, the perfect offer, the best body copy and the most motivational call-to-action will make them open it and react. And then, that amazing promotional graphic you creatively designed. You hope your subscribers will not be able to resist that!

Here’s an idea! Why not take the chance element out of it and be certain next time?

When you split test your email campaigns, all you do is copy the original email, change any part (one or multiple), schedule the split test delivery and then sit back and watch the magic happen! Split testing offers a fast way to optimize email marketing campaigns. If you use split testing, you’ll be able to try out a couple versions of your message on a few subscribers, see which one performs better, and then use the better message for the rest of the subscribers.

For your next campaign, you can use the superior message as a foundation. You can then keep testing more elements, improving your email campaigns with each test. What’s the best thing about this? It’s amazingly easy! In fact, it’s so easy I don’t know why you don’t split test EVERY campaign! And think about it: Could you even try to do split testing with a newspaper ad or print campaign?

An easy example

Let’s imagine I’m a restaurant sending out an offer to my clientele to come in and eat on slow Wednesday evenings. Usually your resources (ad agency, in-house, etc.) are pretty much guessing at what offer is going to motivate customers to come into the restaurant. And you pay them for the guessing. The offer seems great. There’s a big enough, bold enough call-to-action. Hey, let’s try it. You press the send button. While you obtain okay open rates, you don’t think you did quite as well as you could have.

Using split testing, you are able to experiment with some variations such as:

* Sender/Envelope Info
* Subject lines
* Calls-to-action
* Images
* Body Copy
* Testimonials
* Personalization
* Message layout/design
* And more…

And with those options guess what you can do? You can get these results:

* Increase Open rates
* Increase Requests for more information
* Increase Click-thrus
* Increase Visits
* Increase Calls
* Increase your knowledge of what works and what doesn’t

Could be that a two-for-one offer isn’t as effective as free apps. How could you have known?

Do you have enough to think about now? Are you willing to give it a try for the next email campaign you send? If you’re an eConnect Email customer, we’re always here to help you! Contact your account manager for a few ideas and help you get started with split testing.

Good luck!

Two months ago, Hotmail announced the addition of new email controls that will give users greater ability to regulate the influx of marketing messages they receive. The new features will address the problem of “graymail,” the messages a user did at one time subscribe to but which now no longer engage his attention.  Newsletters, Groupon-style ads, and online clubs can all fall under the category of graymail if the subscriber deletes or marks them as spam without opening.

How Hotmail users will control graymail

The primary change to Hotmail’s handling of graymail is that newsletters will be automatically marked as such by the email service. This designation will enable Hotmail users to perform tasks such as:

• Scheduled Sweeps—Designate an expiration date for mail from specified senders, with automatic deletions when the message expires. This action also allows Hotmail users to sweep newsletters directly to a subfolder or to delete them altogether

• Inbox Unsubscribes—Unsubscribe from a mailing list directly from Hotmail’s inbox. Hotmail will handle the unsubscribe process for you, or simply block the email

• Instant Actions—Delete, flag, mark read, or sweep messages to a subfolder simply by hovering over the message in your inbox

What this means for marketers

While news of Hotmail’s new graymail controls may cause initial panic for email marketers, the truth is that the success of your email marketing campaign will continue to depend on the same thing it always has: value for the subscriber. Your customers wanted your email once; by making each email communication relevant to your subscribers, you can continue to keep them engaged with the marketing emails you send.

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