Segmentation is one of the greatest features that allows you to split the database into particular groups and send relevant content to each of them. Until now, you were able to segment your database only by fields of your contact list, for example, by name, email address or company. If you use online surveys, then responses are added to your database, and the response can also be used to segment contacts.

Now you can profit from our new feature to segment by action! Whether subscribers have opened your newsletter or clicked on links before or after a certain date, or within a set period of time – you can gather these contacts in separate groups and then send special campaigns.

How to create an action based segment?

Segmentation by opens and clicks is similar to our usual segmentation and is easy to perform

Log into your Mailigen account and go to the Contacts. Choose the section of Segments and click on Create Segment.

Select the contact list you want to segment, enter the name of the segment and choose a match type. Finally, filter contacts by your chosen criterion, for example, opened but not clicked in emails you’ve sent in the last month.

Here you can also specify the time when people have opened or clicked:

• date range (from – to)
• is (precise date)
• is not (precise date)
• is before
• is after

When selection is made, save the new segment, and you are ready to send targeted campaigns.

How to use action based segments?

Segmentation by recipients’ action allows you to engage better with your audience.

Know who is opening your emails:

• After sending an email campaign, select those who haven’t opened your newsletter. Change the subject line and send the letter one more time. This may increase your total open rate within campaign.
• If practicing email marketing for some time, take a look back and select those haven’t opened your emails for some months. Create a special reengagement campaign with an especially attractive subject line and try to interest inactive users in your activity. If still without success, it’s time to say goodbye in order to not affect your email deliverability in a negative way.

Know who is clicking on your links:

• Select those who have opened your campaign but haven’t clicked on links. Here you will have to change not only the subject line but also the content and the call to action. Send the campaign one more time and grow total click through rate.
• If you notice you have a lot of subscribers who open regularly your newsletters but never click on links, you should think about more compelling calls to action!

If you like the idea of segmentation but you are not sure about how to get it done, contact our team, and we’ll be happy to build your strategy or manage campaigns.

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1. How should a newsletter look like to say it’s good to go? Could you name some main check points?

Some questions to ask yourself are:

• Does your subject line convey value to the audience – is the WIIFM (What’s In It Foe Me) clear?
• Is your Call-To-Action obvious and actionable – even with images off?
• Are the images you’re using supporting your Call-To-Action(s)?

2. What are the three most common mistakes marketers make in email marketing?

Creating the subject line two minutes before you send the campaign. Subject lines need to be carefully crafted before the actual email is created in order to not rush it.

Humans are task oriented and most email marketers don’t set the task to accomplish clearly enough for their subscribers – this is generally caused by not focusing on the objective of the email.

Not looking at the email holistically – email marketing isn’t just about the email – it’s about the email journey. Meaning that the PPC driving people to your subscription page needs to be tested and optimized as it will affect your results as an email marketer. The landing pages also need to be tested and optimized as well as any barriers to conversions here will have an impact upon your results.

3. How often should marketers change the email template?

If the current email template is performing well, then a minor refresh would be advisable every 12-18 months or so. On the other hand, if it’s not performing well, then a major redesign may be required.

4. How important is it to maintain the same tone throughout email campaigns? Is it good to “surprise” subscribers from time to time?

It is good to ‘surprise and delight’ your readers – this can help to re-engage them nicely as well as sometimes they can become ‘blind to always being ‘sold to’. This can be achieved by offering them something without anything being asked in return, or it could be a lovely horizontal designed email telling them a story – there are many ways in which this can be achieved.

5. Which world-known brands or companies perform excellent email marketing? In what way?

Amazon and Sonymobile are two brands that come instantly to mind. They do more than just market via email – they create a personal experience. Sonymobile has an amazing eCRM program – completely based on your purchase, your behavior and where you are within the life-cycle. Amazon test everything and have immense results because of it. They’re leaders in this area and for good reason – they don’t ever assume – but test and optimize continually for the best results.

6. How email marketing is going to change within the next few years?

We marketers are going to get our heads around the fact that mobile devices are here to stay and that we need to make the customer’s mobile email (and landing pages) experience a positive one. We’re also coming to grips with the fact that ‘Actions speak louder than words’ and will start to implement more targeted and personalized email campaigns based upon behavior.

7. Can you give us a short insight into your lecture at iLive 2013?

I believe in being persuasive when it comes to email marketing. Often we email marketers focus on the ‘email’ part of our title and forget about the ‘marketer’ part of our title. So this presentation is about how we can use elements of our email to persuade our subscribers to open and take action.

See you at iLive 2013

Thank you, Kath, for the interview! Your tips will help our clients to grow their email campaign success.

Marketer, if you wish to enjoy the presentation of Kath or other world-famous Internet and digital marketing experts, sign up for the iLive 2013 online conference now!

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What, where, when?

So schedule online attendance of the conference on May 9-10 in your marketing calender! Mailigen as one of the main sponsors gives the oportunity to attend the conference online for a price especially affordable for startups and small businesses. Application for the two-day online conference is available on iLive website.

Originally started as Europe oriented conference, the 3rd annual iLive 2013 conference will be available online for the 2nd time therefore exceeding Europe’s limits and reaching global audience.

World-famous experts

We have invited world-famous Internet marketing experts to share their skill sets and experience with you:

• Perry Marshall, world’s leading Google advertising expert
• Dr. Dave Chaffey, SmartInsights co-founder and CEO
• Dr. Karl Blanks, Conversion Rate Experts co-founder and conversion expert
• Andy Atkins-Krueger, WebCertain Group CEO and co-founder of International SEO school
• Kath Pay, PlanToEngage Email and Digital Marketing Expert
• Dietmar Dahmen, Dietmar Dahmen CEO and Digital Brand Expert
• Graham Jones, GrahamJones CEO and Internet Psychologist

„In this session, I’ll be providing great tips and tricks to get your subscribers attention and persuade them to take action. We’ll look at things such as subject lines, calls to actions and using the “Golden Real-Estate” area of an email to convert them to open your emails. You’ll walk away with some easily actionable ideas to implement immediately, enabling you to gain some quick wins within your email marketing programme,” says email marketing guru Kath Pay.

Hottest marketing topics

The main theme of the online conference is conversion analytics and optimization. Above mentioned experts will cover today’s hottest marketing topics:

• email marketing
• digital and Internet marketing strategy
• website conversion and profitability
• analysis of Internet marketing results
• global SEO and the role of content
• brand positioning
• AdWords advertising
• social media measurement and ROI
• Internet business psychology

The top experts will speak not only about hottest marketing trends but also share case studies and experience examples.

“Prior to the Internet you could engage with customers directly and work out what to provide them. Now, people don’t give you time to engage, but spend about 560 milliseconds deciding whether or not to stay or leave a website. You have less than a second to capture them. But how? In my presentation you will discover the important psychological techniques which will help you engage with more customers and get them to spend more”, says Graham Jones, Internet psychologist.

Get a free ticket

We are exclusively offering you a free attendance if you purchase Mailigen email marketing service for the value of a conference ticket. This week the conference is available for a reduced price of 199 euros. If you want to get a free ticket, please contact our team!

See you among the best marketers! For more information please visit iLive 2013 website.

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Mailigen email marketing breakfast is a new initiative in order to share experience in email marketing with our clients. We are happy that many of our clients integrate their email campaigns with social media. However, at the breakfast there were also many questions that were answered by Viacheslav Kolomeyets, account manager in charge of email marketing strategy development and campaign management at Mailigen, and Aldis Blicsons, social network strategist at digital agency Digibrand.

Social Media in Email Marketing Campaigns

Mailigen platform offers various ideas on how to integrate social media into your email marketing campaigns.

1. Post your email campaigns on social media automatically

In step 1 of making your campaign, choose an option to post the link of your campaign on Twitter and Facebook. Moreover, now it is possible to post campaigns not only on your private Facebook profile, but also on your company Facebook page.

2. Add social media accounts to your newsletter

Invite your subscribers to follow your company’s social profiles by including links in your email template.

3. Share your content on social media

If you include news or blog posts in your email campaigns, add social sharing links to each of them. If people don’t want to share the whole email, they will be able to share a specific article on their social media sites. Search for the option in step 4.

“People who sign up for news and those following company’s social profiles are often two different groups. By connecting both channels you may grow both groups – those who follow social media might subscribe for newsletters, and subscribers will start to follow social networks. In any case, you should communicate through both channels so that customers can get information in the most convenient way for them,” said Aldis Blicsons, Digibrand social media expert.

Email Marketing on Social Media

You can also promote email marketing on social media. First of all, grow your database using social media sites.

1. Add a sign-up form to your Facebook page

During the breakfast, the most talked about topic was on how to gather subscribers on a Facebook page using the Facebook application. Here are more detailed instructions on how to add a sign-up form to your Facebook page.

2. Promote a subscription on Twitter, LinkedIn

You can also add a sign-up form or promote a subscription link on other social media sites, for example, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Read more about how to build your email list with top social media sites.

“Until this, we had only seen but not actually tried sharing our email content on social media. This might be a great opportunity to boost our audience because not all our social followers are our clients who receive email newsletters. It would be useful to add a sign-up form to social media sites as well. We’ll definitely try to put into practice what we heard at the breakfast,” Ieva Pasevska and Kristine Gruznova from Outlet Optika shared their opinion after the breakfast.

During the breakfast, social media experts highlighted that short and precise messages on social media are the best way to attract people. But as most messages stay unnoticed, it’s worthwhile repeating texts by paraphrasing them, especially on Twitter. After all, no matter which communication channel you use, the most important thing is to develop a common marketing strategy. Campaigns also addressed to a vast audience will be more effective if containing personalization elements. But we will discuss personalized marketing at yet another Mailigen breakfast.

If you have an idea about the theme of the next breakfast or want to participate, please contact our team.

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To keep track of which particular web form was used to sign up for your updates, you have to do some small changes to your web signup form code. A step-by-step instructions are given below.

1. Firstly, before creating a web signup form, you will need to create a unique data field within your Mailigen contact list where you will store custom field value to identify the placement of the form. You can create a field by clicking „edit contact fields” link under the list options in the contacts menu. Create a new field and enter „Subscription source” as a title of label and merge tag. The new field will keep information about the form through which the subscriber has come.

2. In the web signup form section select HTML embed code of the web form, leave all the fields you need for your web form, including the field where the value of subscription source will be entered.

3. Copy the code to your blog (for example, WordPress) or your website, but before publishing, make all the necessary changes in the HTML code that are shown below.

Find the following part in your HTML code:

And make the following changes marked in red below:

In the example above, “myblog” is the value where you can insert your own descriptive form source name. It could be your homepage or social network like Facebook, Linkedin etc. The line style=”display:none;” will hide both the name of the signup form field and the input field itself.

As a result, the field with information about subscription source will not be visible to the user, but when he signs up for news, the information with the form source will be added to the contact’s information.

Below you can see how Ernests has subscribed for news via our blog sign up form. As a result in the Mailigen contact list you can see that the subscription source is „myblog”. If you have multiple placements of your web form, the subscribers from different forms will then show the corresponding source e.g. Facebook, landing page or any other sources you have defined.

Afterwards you can segment your contact list by subscription sources and send individual campaigns taking into account where subscribers have come from.

If you wish to track and analyze new subscriber source, but need some help, please, contact our team. Moreover, our designers at Mailigen will be happy to create a brand new design for your sign-up form!

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Although some tactics marketers should better consult with their email delivery experts, the majority of top tactics are easy to implement if not already included into your marketing strategy. After taking a look at the most used methods, rethink carefully whether your email campaigns deliver the maximum return to your business.

Communicate with the interested subscribers

The vast majority or 62% marketers follow the simplest, yet smartest tactic: the easier to unsubscribe, the more likely your newsletter will be read by only interested subscribers. This goes hand in hand with the chart’s top 5 tactic that is maintaining opt-in only subscriber lists.

We are sure you already perform permission-based email marketing and have placed an unsubscribe link at the end of the newsletter. Just make sure it’s obvious and easy accessible.

Expert tip: Place an unsubscribe link at the top of the newsletter. The more visible unsubscribe link, the less possibility that irritated people will click on the spam button. Moreover, add a funny „goodbye” message to the unsubscribe landing page to separate with your subscribers in a friendly way.

Make regular list cleaning

More than a half or 51% of organizations measure and remove hard bounces, 27% evaluate soft bounces, and the third most used tactic for delivery improvement is a general list cleanup. How about your email campaigns and bounces? Are those only some statistics you have a quick look at while looking through campaign reports or something you analyze more scrupulously?

Expert tip: Beware of bounces! Some ISPs turn old email addresses into spam traps. For example, if you send a newsletter to the email address that has not been used for 6 months, you will see this email address as non-existent or it has hard bounced. But if you send a newsletter after a year, in your report you will see that email address is existing because the ISP has automatically transformed this account into spam trap email.

Remove or reengage inactive subscribers

The fourth most used tactic with 39% is removing inactive subscribers, 17% of organizations launch reactivation campaigns for inactives, and 7% send repermission campaigns. How many of your subscribers are just sitting in your database without really engaging with your emails?

Expert tip: Start with simple list monitoring every few months where your note how your list is growing and… yes, getting older. Segment your subscribers depending on how active they are. For those opening your newsletters but never clicking on links, prepare a click-oriented campaign with eye-catching CTA links. For those that haven’t opened your newsletters for a half-year, prepare an exciting offer that is mentioned already in the subject line. If there is no success even after several times, than face the truth they are not interested any more and it’s time to unsubscribe them and say a friendly „goodbye”.

These and other tactics mentioned in the chart will help you to increase the overall delivery rate. If you have any question regarding white and black lists, authentication, reputation and other issues, please contact our team. Our email delivery experts will take care of your campaign delivery results.

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Our giveaway for CeBIT guests

This was our second time participating at the CeBIT exhibition; therefore, we presented two issues at once.

Green marketing

We went to Hannover to introduce European market with a new marketing concept. Saving 3 CeBIT-sized forests per year, we were presenting the green marketing concept. Mailigen’s integrated marketing platform corresponds to all green standards and includes only paperless marketing methods – email marketing, mobile marketing and social media marketing. To save unnecessary use of paper and deforestation, we invited European marketers to save trees and choose green marketing methods like email marketing. And how about you? Are you practicing green marketing?

Free email marketing

CeBIT 2013 was our first public launch of Epic Free. Our new product allows users to grow their database to up to 5,000 subscribers and use email marketing for free, forever. Epic Free is basically focused on startups, business incubators, accelerators, small and medium businesses that are new to email marketing. If you are representing one of them, take a chance of our offer!

Our takeaway from CeBIT

CeBIT always surprises with technological wonders, as well as showcast upcoming tendencies. Being a smart marketer, follow these big trends and try to incorporate them into your business strategy.

Cloud solutions

Cloud computing was the main CeBIT theme last year. As we are more and more „living in a cloud”, this theme is continuing to be at the top also this year. Mailigen is a web-based solution, so cloud solutions should be already familiar to you. But why not think about other marketing components to bring in the cloud?

Customer relationship management

Nowadays businesses are looking for advanced CRM systems that run in the cloud and are easy to integrate with other platforms. We at Mailigen are also following the trend and very soon we will be able to announce our integration with the world’s No. 1 web-based customer relationship management application. Coming soon…

Big data

To cope with the fast growing amount of information, global statistics etc., companies are looking for new large data processing solutions. But even for smaller cases – today we cannot imagine our marketing activities without analyzing campaign statistics. Although Mailigen already enables exporting full statistics, we are continuously improving our statistics services, including SMS reports.

And of course we were happy to meet there our European clients, as well as those we met at CeBIT last year. Have you visited the exhibition? Share your stories with us on social media!

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Subscriptions allow you to build a database. As more and more people sign up, you may need to know through which communication channels subscribers come. Is it organic search? Google AdWords? Social media? Or blog links posted in other resources? It is important to answer this question in order to let you understand which communication channels are the most effective in attracting new potential customers. As well, you may also need this information to decide which channels to spend your marketing budget on.

This article will explain how Google Analytics can help you determine these channels. Just follow these few easy steps.

1. Adding a tracking code to the Subscribe button

First you need to modify html code for the Subscribe button of your sign-up form.

An additional tracking code needs to be added to the existing code of the Subscribe button. You can create such code by yourself. There are several ways to do it. One of the simplest options is to create this code automatically through the website http://gaconfig.com/google-analytics-event-tracking/. It is important to remember to specify at least Category and Action. In our example that could be Registration (category) and Left Mail (action).

The additional code will look like this:

onClick=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Registration', 'Left Mail',,, false]);”

This code needs to be added to the Subscribe button code. Subscribe button code before adding a tracking code:

This is what your Subscribe button code will look like after adding a tracking code:

2. Setting a Goal in Google Analytics account

After the tracking code has been added, you need to set a Goal in your Google Analytics account. To do that you must be an administrator of your Google Analytics account. To create a Goal, go to the Admin tab and then select Goals tab.

In Goals tab you need to select Event as a type of Goal and specify Category and Action (please see below). They need to precisely match the names you used in creating an additional tracking code. In our example:

1. Category name Registration
2. Action name Left Mail

Save the information you just entered. Now Goal has been set correctly and you can analyze data through standard reports such as Conversions or Customized reports.

About the author

Dr. Sergejs Volvenkins is a leading internet marketing expert of a full service internet marketing agency imarketings.lv, a certified Google AdWords specialist and a Google Analytics expert.

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From 5th till 9th March we are at CeBIT 2013 in Hannover, Germany, the world’s leading high-tech event showcasting digital IT and telecommunication solutions. Saving 3 CeBIT-sized forests per year, we are presenting green marketing at the exhibition.

What’s so green about email marketing?

What is actually our mission at CeBIT 2013? Go to www.savemoreleaves.com and reveal the greenest email marketing on the planet! Every year we send about 1.8 billion emails all over the world. If we consider one email newsletter being roughly equivalent of one A4 sheet of office paper used for direct marketing, it is not hard to calculate that we would have cut 250,040 trees or 167 hectares of forest* that is 3 times larger than the area where CeBIT is exhibited.

Our integrated marketing platform corresponds to all green standards and includes only paperless marketing methods – email marketing, mobile marketing and social media marketing – that can be mutually integrated within common campaigns. To save unnecessary use of paper and deforestation, we invite you to save trees and choose green marketing methods like email marketing.

Supporting startups with Epic Free

Recently we have launched our new Epic Free product that allows users to grow their database to up to 5,000 subscribers and use email marketing for free, forever. CeBIT exhibition is our first public launch of Epic Free for German startups, business incubators, accelerators, small and medium businesses that are new to email marketing.

Germany is not only the Europe’s major but also most vibrant economy. According to the Startup Ecosytem Report 2012 by Startup Genome, Berlin, the capital city of Germany, is the third best startup ecosystem in Europe and the 15th best startup ecosystem in the world. We are sure Epic Free will help them to kickstart their businesses, as well as yours.

Meet us at CeBIT

Come around and meet us at the CeBIT exhibition! We are located in Hall 006, Stand D34. Beside email marketing talks, you’ll be able to play a novuss with our team. Have you ever heard about our favorite game?

* Based on calculation 1 email newsletter = 1 A4 sheet of 80 g/m2; forest density – 1’500 trees per ha.
http://conservatree.org/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml

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We are offering 26 great tips on how you can improve your email quality and sender reputation in order to get your email campaigns delivered to the inbox and increase open rates.

Email newsletter quality

1. Before sending an email campaign, check the spam score. You can do this at the 4th step of the email campaign builder. The maximum acceptable spam score is 5 but we do not recommend to send campaigns with more than 1 point.

2. Make sure that email content or subject field does not include spam words.

3. Due to spam filters, do not send campaigns with too large images. Keep image width at maximum 600 px.

4. Do not send campaigns where image size (px and kb) exceed the size of the text. Recommended proportion is 50/50.

5. Do not send campaigns with too large attachments. Keep the size of attachments below 1Mb.

6. Do not send campaigns with too long or too short subject fields. Keep their length from 18 till 52 symbols.

7. Do not send campaigns with too many CAPS LOCK LETTERS. Keep 1 caps lock letter for each 6 – 8 symbols.

8. If you track html clicks in your campaigns, do not send text links with full URL „http://…” formatting in the email content. Email programs can look at them as SCAM, or masked link, that spammers are often using. Build links as words or phrases. For example, add link http://www.mailigen.com to the following text instead „mailigen.com”.

9. Do not send campaigns with incorrect or non-existing destination links because spam filters may throw your message in the spam, not inbox folder because of these broken links.

10. Do not send campaings with “phishy” requests, where you demand personal information from clients in your email. This could be identified as phishing spam email.

11. Send only relevant content, so that your message gets good engagement. Our expert campaign managers will always be happy to help you with that.

12. Keep the subject field and email content similar to those in the previous newsletters.

13. Make sure your email campaign does not include too many HTML code errors. You can check this using W3 validator.

14. Do not include forms and scripts in the email content.

15. Do not send campaigns that recipients could probably mark as spam. In order to avoid it:

• keep the contacts in one list and segment them;
• insert unsubscribe link at to top of the newsletter.

Sender reputation

16. If a newsletter has landed in the spam folder, the recipient should mark it as not spam. If he marks it as spam, then other, e.g. Gmail recipients may also receive it in the spam folder. But if he marks it as not spam, your reputation will be raised „in the eyes of Gmail”.

17. Ask recipients to add your email address to their address books in order for your newsletters safely land in their inbox.

18. Encourage recipients to reply to your message. For example, Gmail automatically adds email address to the address book if recipient does reply to an email. So don’t send campaigns from „noreply@” address.

19. Do not send campaigns to hard bounced or dead email addresses.

20. Do not send several campaigns to the the same recipient on the same day.

• do not send email campaigns too often;
• survey your clients on how often they want to receive newsletters from you and what topics they want you to include.

21. Encourage recipients to always load remote content within your emails, so your images open automatically in the future.

22. Segment your contacts. Send campaigns less often to those contacts who rarely open your newsletters because low open rates can negatively affect your email delivery.

23. Analyse regularly content and statistics of your campaigns. Set the best campaigns as examples and try to get better results, higher ROI for your further campaigns.

24. Send a re-engagement campaign with a special offer to those contacts who have been ignoring the last 10 of your newsletters. Encourage them to respond to your call to action, so they get back into your active list.

25. Encourage your customers to mark your newsletters as priority emails. For example, in Gmail they can add a star, in Outlook/Hotmail – a flag.

26. Use domain authentication for your email campaigns.

Use our tips to considerably improve your email campaign delivery. If you have any question about email delivery, please contact our team!

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