The year 2010 brought huge changes in the way consumers interact with companies online. As social media opened the door for increased interaction between businesses and their customers, marketing efforts were often left scrambling to keep up with the changing demands of the new marketing landscape. As we head into 2011, the lessons we learned in 2010 can point us in the right direction and keep us on the right track.

• Customer expectations constantly change.

Because customers can now interact in real time with businesses, they expect faster responses to their concerns and requests. For your email marketing campaigns, this means staying on top of customer interests and providing real-time value. eConnect Email can help you achieve these goals through email automation by the implementation of email triggers and auto-responders.

• Social media is here to stay.

While no one knows what the next big “thing” in social media will be, we do know that social media as a technology is not going anywhere anytime soon. While that idea can be intimidating to some businesses, social media actually provides excellent opportunities to grow both your email marketing list and also engage your social media followers online.  This being said, we have embraced social media and have actually integrated with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Buzz.  Click here for information about the integration of social media with eConnect Email.

• Customers expect stellar service.

While customer service has always been a top priority for successful businesses, customers now expect even greater attention to be paid to their needs due to increased interaction online. This means staying on top of subscriber’s preferences and making sure each email arrives at its intended destination.   eConnect Email ensures that your mailing lists stay up to date by using list cleansing, suppression lists, list segmentation as well as giving your subscribers the ability to manage their mailing list subscriptions through the online preference center.

• What works for someone else may not work for you.

It’s easy to put together a list of best practices and slap them up on a website for others to emulate, but building a truly successful email marketing program takes a little more planning and insight. The truth is that what works for one company may not work for another, so it’s vital that you incorporate testing into your email marketing strategy. That’s why I would recommend that you A/B Split Test each and every email campaign.  Split Testing will help ensure that you deliver only the most effective messages to your audience.

With 2010 in the past, businesses will need to take the lessons learned over the past twelve months and build on them to create a strategy that will effectively meet the challenges of 2011. eConnect Email stands ready to help you accomplish this goal with a vast array of tools and features that will help keep your email marketing strategy on the cutting edge.  If you have any questions about the capabilities of our application we’d love to hear from you!

Choosing the right day to launch and send your email campaigns can have a huge effect overall results. Much of the process of deciding on a day will initially rely on intuition (Will people be packing up for the weekend on Friday and therefore be less likely to open emails? Will they be stuck in the doldrums on Wednesday and therefore be more likely to open?). Your decision will also depend on your list specifics and the idiosyncrasies of your target audience, meaning that best practices will be relative. However, there are some concrete steps you can take to determine what day your subscribers will be most likely to engage with the content you send them.

• Make an educated guess.

You know your customers better than anyone and you’ve had the chance to observe their habits over time. Take advantage of eConnect Email’s analytics tools to monitor open rates and click rates and then make an educated guess as to which day will be best for your email campaign based on what you learn.

• Test.

Don’t rely strictly on guesswork, however. Test your theories by sending emails on various days and observing how customers interact with them (again spend some time reviewing campaign stats from previously sent emails).

• Consider weekends vs. weekdays.

Aggregated benchmarks often point to weekends as good days to send email. If you engage primarily in business-to-business marketing, however, weekends probably won’t perform well for you.  On the other hand, many people can now check email from the comfort of their easy chairs via smartphones, making weekend email checking easier than ever before. Again, we recommend testing, reviewing results and testing again.

• Consider the email content.

Does your email discuss a weekend sale? Is it a newsletter that talks about best practices for business? How about a weekend gardening project? The day you send each email will be affected by what the email contains, so be willing to alter the content within your campaign if you’re sending a time-specific message.

• Be flexible.

Even if you’ve found the perfect day to send, it’s still important to remain flexible. You might usually send on Mondays, but you’ll want to alter your strategy for Labor Day weekend, for example.

The bottom line is that there is no perfect day to send email that will work for every business. The analytics and stats tools available from eConnect Email can help you determine what the best practice will be for your company in order to maximize the actions (opens, clicks, purchases) taken by your subscribers.

In the aftermath of Black Friday and with Christmas just a couple days away, most businesses are operating on full-throttle holiday adrenaline. Promotional emails and advertising messages flood customer inboxes, but if businesses could step inside the mind of the reader as they’re faced with all these emails, what would they find?

During the week of Black Friday (and also, incidentally, Thanksgiving) I received nearly 70 promotional messages from dozens of retailers between my two email accounts. One of those retailers sent me six messages during that week—seven, if you count the email I received on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Of those 70 emails, only two acknowledged the holiday that supposedly enjoyed the limelight that week. Call me sentimental, but I enjoyed being wished a Happy Thanksgiving, even by a company with whom I rarely shop.

What’s the point? It’s that customers like to be appreciated and treated as people. Not every email you send has to say thanks, and there is definitely a time for promotional emails that advertise special sales events. But there’s also a time and place for letting your customers know you appreciate them—and not just after they’ve made a purchase. Here are some tips for crafting a thank you message that will keep you on your customers’ nice list this holiday season.

• Personalize

Include the customer’s name and other relevant info such as the last product they purchased. Use eConnect Email’s custom fields/ mail merge features to further personalize email for every customer you contact.

• Invite Feedback

Ask your customers how their purchases worked for them and whether they have any comments about the service they received. Make it easy for them to reply and communicate your desire to hear from them.

• Be Timely

If you’re thanking a customer for his or her purchase, make sure they receive your email within 24-48 hours of the transaction. You can use eConnect Email’s personalized autoresponder/ email trigger capabilities to make sure emails arrive in a timely fashion.

• Include freebies or special discounts

If you really want people to know you appreciate them, give them a little something extra. An additional 10% discount or a free gift with purchase can go a long way toward cementing your relationship with your customers.

Whether you’re responding to a purchase or just checking in with a subscriber you haven’t heard from in a while, a thank you email can boost your company image significantly in the eyes of your customers. Use the personalization and list management tools available from eConnect Email to design a thank you note that will fill your readers with holiday cheer.

The team at eConnect Email would like to wish you a wonderful Holiday Season and best wishes for a prosperous 2011!  We have put together some tips and tricks to making your email marketing a success in the new year.  As always we welcome your feedback and if you have any questions about our software, we are hear to help.

Have a merry little email and a happy new marketing campaign…

For This Month’s Tips & Tricks – CLICK HERE

The most wonderful time of year is upon us! This goes for business as well…so let your client/customers know how much you appreciate them with an email. As things get hectic it’s best to map out a well planned campaign for the next couple of months and keep your brand in people’s minds as they dream of sugar plums and candy canes 😉

Happy emailing, and have a safe and warm Thanksgiving!

For This Month’s Tips & Tricks – CLICK HERE

Sales are down. Money is tight. You need to increase your bottom line. But you don’t have the money to launch a full fledge marketing campaign. In the past, you would’ve had only a few options: buckle down and spend the money, launch a mediocre campaign, or simply go without and pray for the best.

In today’s market, technology has changed the playing field. Businesses now have an inexpensive and extremely effective solution–email marketing. To launch a successful email marketing campaign, consider the following tips first.

Get Subscribers

To actually start your campaign, you’ll first need subscribers (people who want to hear from you).  An easy way to start building your subscriber base is to reach out to the people you already interact with professionally and personally and ask if you can add them to your contact list. Be ready to give them reasons for subscribing though. No one wants more junk mail. Also, don’t think you’ve arrived once you have an email list. Getting subscribers is easy. Keeping them, however, is the key and getting them to engage is the golden egg.

Make it Professional

Consider your design. Remember, your subscribers have no obligation to read your email. If they click on your email and find it cluttered, ugly, or disorganized, they likely will delete it without reading. Setup an account with an email marketing company (like eConnect Email ). We can provide our users with a library of professionally designed email templates that can be customized to fit your existing branding.

Say Something

Make sure your newsletters actually say something. Your customers don’t want another pointless piece of mail.  In addition to alerting them about your specials and promotions, keep them informed about your industry.  Set yourself up as an industry expert your subscribers can trust. Once you build a rapport with your audience, they’ll want to be in the know.

Respond to Criticism

Finally, be willing to respond to criticism. Criticism can come directly or indirectly. Direct criticism may come as a customer responding to your newsletter with things he or she disliked. Take their comments seriously but don’t overreact. Indirect criticism could come by monitoring how many people are viewing or possibly unsubscribing from your contact list. This is where we can help. Our software keeps track of the number of times an email is opened and by whom.  If overall readership starts dropping, it’s time to start making some adjustments to keep your subscribers engaged.

Of course, these tips only skim the surface.  Be willing to make changes and adapt to the ever-changing market place.  If you have questions or need help getting started we’re happy to give you a helping hand.

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.

I wish there was more we could do to get email marketers to use the tools available to them to help increase reader response. So much effort is put into making campaigns look beautiful but often the technology to help increase reader statistics are never used. So, on your next campaign, please consider the following tools to help make your emails a success.

1. Split Testing

This one is a no-brainer.  How awesome would it be to be able to test which headlines or titles would be most successful before sending a newspaper or book to print?  I guarantee if an author could do this he would because more purchases equal dollars in his pocket.  With email marking, this is easy and it’s called split testing. With split-testing, any reputable email platform will allow you stage a few options, hit send and let the system pick the winner based on the criteria you choose (opens and click-thru’s) and then delivers the remainder of your campaign to the winner. We’ve seen open rates at 20% spike to 45% and click-thru rates jump from 4% to over 10%, just by trying two different subject lines.

Benefit? Find out quickly what works and get a better response rate.

2 . List Segmenting

OK- another no brainer: Targeted emails are obviously more well received so let’s stop batching and blasting those emails to the entire mailing list and take a minute to segment that list.  By importing contacts into a single list with relevant fields of data for your market you can then search for specific criteria within that one list.  For instance if you would like to send an email to everyone on your list with a 92009 zip code you can, or even what products or services a group purchased previously and so on.

Benefit? Cleaner management of data, more targeted mailings, greater response rates.

3. Triggered Mailings/Auto-responders

Let your email marketing go to work for you…and forget about it.  It just takes a little time to set up a series of timed emails but once it’s done you can put your feet up and know that your customers are being informed or reminded of your services automatically.  Scenario: Someone visits your web site and requests a white paper or a trial of your software or perhaps they made a purchase.  Connect that information to your platform and stage mailings to “auto” deploy based on the criteria you set.

Benefit? Let technology go to work for you and keep the right (timed) communication in front of your audience.  Multiple touches and BAM!  They take action!

4. Personalization

This is email marketing 101, but do it in a creative fashion.  Think outside the box and work with the data you know about your subscribers.  Why not personalize an email with some details you know that wouldn’t be what you’d typically store in an email database.  Here’s one, “Hi Brett – we feel horrible.  Your birthday was yesterday and we were late.”  How clever.  Now, I may know intuitively you automated this somehow, but you cleverly spin it to sound human (we made an error!).  Have a purchase history on your customers stored somewhere?  Why not use that to merge the last product purchased or the last interaction with you.

Benefit? Email is all about relevancy.  You must know who your prospects and customers are, right?  Why not demonstrate that?  You’ll keep them engaged MUCH longer.

5. Social Follow & Social Sharing

At this point, if you are not working your email marketing and social networking together, you’re probably living under a rock.  You have to go where the eyeballs are and email/social is a powerful one-two punch.  If you have a Twitter feed or a Facebook fan page like us, you need icons in your emails to not only prompt your customers to follow you, but also to share the content inside your emails with their networks.  Forward to a friend is still a standard and many subscribers will use this, but the NEW forward is really the share feature.  It allows folks to connect this with their personal and professional networks quickly and easily and may garner you some new subscribers.

Benefit? Everyone knows hundreds, sometimes thousands of people you or I don’t. Why not tap that? Let them remarket on your behalf.

So there you have it.  These things are within your grasp today, and as always, the eConnect Email marketing platform lets you set these things up quite easily.  If you need help setting any of these things up in your account, as always, you can reach out to us at anytime.