It’s happened to all of us. You hit an “I Agree” or “Subscribe” or “Buy” button without reading the fine print, only to discover that you’ve inadvertently signed up for a monthly newsletter, weekly promotional flyer, and daily deal alerts, all without intending to. When the first email arrives, you franticly click the unsubscribe button only to be told that your request may take up to a week for processing and that in the meantime you will continue to receive daily emails until your request is processed.

While you can hope that these experiences don’t happen to you on a regular basis, they should spur you to think about your own email marketing practices. With a little effort, you can create an experience that lets your subscribers know you care about their preferences by giving them the right to choose.

• Automate Your Unsubscribe Feature

When a customer wants to unsubscribe, let him. You’re not going to win any brownie points by making him wait 7-10 days or by trying to convince him at the last minute to stay. Instead, these tactics will encourage him to report you as spam. eConnect Email automatically handles unsubscribe requests (immediately) and we also provide you with a suppression feature so that you can prevent emails addresses/ domains from subscribing to your mailing list.

• Let Customers Make Their Own Decisions

When you give a customer the option of signing up for your various newsletters, resist the urge to pre-select options for them. Allowing customers to choose the contact options themselves will reduce the number of people who sign up accidentally and then become frustrated when they receive unexpected emails.

• Offer Detail Modification Options

Can your customers modify their contact details and subscription preferences easily? A customer should be able to update his email address or unsubscribe from one newsletter while continuing to receive others. With eConnect Email you can give your subscribers the ability to manage their contact information and subscription options through the preference center. Giving customers the opportunity to choose will make them more likely to remain on the lists they want rather than unsubscribing altogether.

Giving your customers the opportunity to choose their preferences and to say good-bye if they so choose will leave a positive impression in their minds about your company. Even if a subscriber opts out of your list, he’ll be more likely to buy from you later if you haven’t irritated him with your list management practices. By taking advantage of the easy list management options available through eConnect Email, you can create a positive experience for your customers.

Is your email marketing program in need of a redesign? If you haven’t evaluated your marketing practices since last year, then it’s time to ask some pertinent questions about your marketing objectives and strategy. Consider these best practices and start your new year off on the right foot.

1.     Craft Your Welcome Letter as a Marketing Email

Don’t settle for a run-of-the-mill boring welcome letter. Instead, use it as an opportunity to start building a solid relationship with your subscribers.  Invite your subscribers to connect with you via social media and include links to additional content about your products/ services. Need help?  We’d be happy to give you some pointers or help you craft and design an effective welcome email.

2.     Use Emails to Follow Up on Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment rates are astonishingly high, but you can draw some of that lost business back by using emails to follow-up with customers who bailed out before buying. Remind them of their selections and use the email to cross-sell or up-sell. You can also give them the opportunity to leave feedback or offer an incentive for them to come back and complete the purchase.

3.     Use Split Tests to Achieve Higher Open and Click Rates

If you don’t test various options, then you’re essentially guessing what will entice readers.  Split Testing allows you to choose the most effective subject line, call to action, images, and copy for every email campaign.

4.     Give your Subscribers Options

Give your readers the chance to unsubscribe, modify details, or change email preferences without jumping through hoops. Making this process easy leaves a sweet taste in their mouth even if they choose not to remain on your mailing list.  With eConnect Email’s list management options, you can stay on top of subscriber information and make sure your emails reach their intended destinations.

5.     Integrate Social Media with Your Email Campaign

With the rise of social media you’ll want to make sure you adapt your email campaign to the new landscape. You can increase your overall reach by giving your subscribers the opportunity to share your campaign on the various social networking websites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).

As you rethink your email marketing initiative, take advantage of the tools and solutions available with eConnect Email in order to further engage and interact with your subscribers.  If you have any questions or there is ever anything we can do to help you out let us know!

We have just rolled out a number of new features to eConnect Email, and we are very excited to share them with you here.  As always, we want to make eConnect Email better, stronger and more fun to use, so this new batch of updates is geared towards making subscriber management and campaign building easier for you.  So, what do we have in store for you? Check these out:

• Free templates for you
• Subscriber Preference Center
• Inline CSS
• API (Application Programming Interface)

Free Templates For You

You have experienced the ease and fun of designing and sending your campaigns using eConnect Email.  Now, we top it off with some glossy new templates that we provide to you absolutely free. You can use these templates for your own campaigns.  Now, your campaigns can have a great professional look without breaking the bank.  See them in their full glory now!

Subscriber Preference Center

We all know it’s crucial to be able to hold our subscriber’s attention, and high unsubscribe rates are truly depressing for most marketers.  Yet, more often than not, when a subscriber unsubscribes, it may not necessarily be that he/she does not want to hear from you anymore.  There could be times when a subscriber changes email addresses when he/she graduates from school, changes jobs or changes email providers, and so will not be able to receive your campaigns at the same email address anymore.  Most of them will simply unsubscribe and may never return to resubscribe themselves.  So what can marketers like you do in these cases?  Enter the subscriber preference center.  With a preference center, we can give your subscribers a way to update their email addresses, instead of totally opting out of your lists.  Not only that, the preference center also gives them the means to update their own information themselves.

Our brand new preference center is easy to use. Each list that you create in your account will have a default preference center created for you.  From now on, you just need to insert the preference center link in your campaigns, and voila!  Your subscribers get to update their email addresses without having to first unsubscribe and then resubscribe to your lists.  Note, though, that an unsubscribe link in your campaign is still mandatory so that you stay compliant.  Even in the preference center, your subscribers can also choose to unsubscribe from all of your lists, if they so desire.

Need to customize the preference center to include more fields and your own custom fields?  Just go to the Preference Center tab under your list, and click on Customize and use the easy-to-use form builder to add fields and tweak the appearance of the form.  The form builder is the same one as you have used for setting up your subscription forms, so you know how cool and fun it will be to design your preference center.

Inline CSS

Making your campaigns play well with the myriad of email clients out there can be a hard nut to crack.  There are specific workarounds that you must consider if you want your campaigns to render correctly in most of the mainstream email clients.  Among them is the use of inline CSS so that your campaigns can survive “rendering hell” in such email clients as Gmail and Outlook 2007 which either strips out and replaces the <HEAD> and <BODY> tags in your markup, or just isn’t very good in its support for HTML emails.  But oh, inline CSS is such a nightmare to code up and maintain. Well, we understand that, and we have included a quick and easy way to help you get around that.

Our new inline CSS conversion feature can help convert your embedded style blocks in your markup to inline CSS.  This saves you the hassle of having to code them up by hand.  Simply check on the “Convert to inline CSS” box in the design view and we will do the rest.  You can even preview the conversion and do a side-by-side comparison against your original email before you confirm that you want the conversion to take place.  Now, there are no more excuses not to look pretty in Gmail anymore, are there?

API (Application Programming Interface)

Do you already have a blog, a shopping cart or a custom web application that can just use some sweet tools to integrate them to eConnect Email?  Then, you will be pleased to know that we have launched our first version of the eConnect Email API.  In this version, we focus on giving you the functions to manage your subscribers from your external applications.  Over time, we will enhance and include even more functions into the API, so stay tuned.  In the meantime, check out the new API page to find out more.

What is this “preference center” thing about?

Simply put, the preference center is a kind of membership page where your subscribers can update their information and subscription preferences.  This gives them the convenience of making changes to their subscription when they want.  For example, one of your subscribers (let’s call him John) is switching to a new email provider and would like your newsletter to be sent to his new address.  Without the preference center, what he has to do is to unsubscribe his old email address and then resubscribe using his new one.  If John is like most subscribers out there, he will most probably not bother jumping through these hoops.  When this happens, you lose out.

With a preference center, you make it less tedious for John to change his email address.  He can simply access his preference center and make the update, and voila!  Your next newsletter will reach him in his new inbox.  No more unnecessary unsubscribes!  Of course, we can’t promise that all your subscribers will do this, but having the convenience of the preference center means that you can dramatically cut down the loss of these subscribers to unsubscribes.

Want more? Here’s more.

With some creative thinking, preference centers can be put to other uses.  It is conventional wisdom that nobody likes to fill in long forms, so we always say “keep your subscription form short and simple” and leave the rest of the questions for later.  The rationale behind this is that the actual act of signing up to your list is good indication that this subscriber is interested to know more and is more likely to give more.  That’s when you can ask them to fill out a longer questionnaire about themselves.

OK, so just how can preference centers be used to do this? Here’s how:

First, you need to customize your preference center.  Log in to your account and choose the list that you want and click on the Preference Center tab.  If this is your first time accessing your preference center, you will see some information that tells you that you are currently using a default preference center.  (Every list that you create gets a default preference center automatically set up.) Click on the Customize Now button to start customizing your preference center.

You can see that by default your preference center only requests for Email Address and Name.  The form builder here works the same way as your form builder for Subscription Form, so if you have tried your hand at building your subscription form, you already know how to customize your preference center.  That’s what we always do here at eConnect Email – trying to reduce the learning curve for our customers as much as possible.

You can add more information if you like by clicking on the Add Field button.  Say, you might want to add a field asking for their preferred email format or their gender.  If there is information that you would like to ask for but is not available in the list (like what are their interests, or what is their favorite coffee brand), just go and create a new custom field and come back to the preference center and it will appear in the list for you to choose.

Once you are done setting up your preference center, you can save it and preview what the actual page looks like.

OK, with the preference center now customized, you need to let your subscribers know where to go to update their details.  Click on the Messages tab under your list and choose Welcome Message.  If you have opted not to send your new subscribers any welcome messages, now’s a good time to change that.  Select the option to send a welcome message, and in the visual editor that appears, choose an area where you want the preference center link to appear (tip: you may want to pick a spot that can make the link pretty prominent).  Then click on the Personalize drop down menu, choose Personalized Links and select the Preference Center Link option.  A link will be inserted for you, and you can customize the text of the link to your heart’s desire.  Remember to save your changes once you are all done.

So, what happens now?  Well, each time a new subscriber signs up and confirm his/her subscription, he/she will receive this welcome message which invites him/her to visit the preference center and provide additional information.  You can also create interest groups from the preference center, but I will talk about this in another post.

Go ahead, start exploring your preference center.  If you find any other cool ways of doing something with your preference center, share it with us here.