Posts Tagged ‘creating email’

How to Personalize Your Emails

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Imagine that you’re receiving an email from your own company. Would you open a letter that doesn’t even mention who you, the recipient, are? The thought isn’t enthralling, and your subconscious instantly realizes that you’re merely a number in the eyes of the sender. Dismissing the recipient’s name isn’t the only mistake that marketers make. Imagine that you receive a skiing equipment offer… if you reside in Florida! Doesn’t make much sense.

Start personalizing your emails even before you start a campaign. If selling products through email marketing is what you do, a few additional questions on the email subscription form on your website won’t hurt. In fact, the more information you have about your subscribers, the better your targeting is, and thus the bigger are the chances of converting your clients. Keep the subscription form simple, but effective. Focus on obtaining more information from fewer questions.

The emails you send should be as personal as possible, not only to avoid the confusion, but also to connect with the reader. It is very powerful tactic to include the subscriber’s name in the subject field. Furthermore, if you can tell the subscribers why they should open the email, your click-through rates are likely to skyrocket.

It is especially important to mention the name in the subject field when you start a campaign and send a welcome message. The subscriber has to know that he/she can expect information that is made for them, not some random guy whose email you bought from a shady company.

Use the available email marketing system to your advantage. Numerous email marketing companies have a ton of effects that employ an if-then scheme when sending the emails. The newest software is any marketer’s dream, but only if you know how to utilize your subscribers to the fullest. You have to ask yourself what are you selling and to whom are you selling. Only when you use targeted emails you’ll start to grasp the infinite possibilities of email marketing.

Segmentation is the most overlooked part of marketing, even though many say that it’s the most important part of the process. Although initially it may seam it is harder to measure how effective targeted marketing is in comparison to standard marketing, you’ll start to see your efforts fruit in rapidly increased conversion rates.

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Posted in Tips & Tricks | 1 Comment »

Composing Email From Names and Subject Lines

Monday, May 24th, 2010

You can send valuable newsletters that interest your subscribers, but you have to compose an e-mail that the readers will actually read. That’s why there are certain guidelines to follow when you’re sending out email to your customers, and the “from” and “subject” lines are the most important; you have to make them as effective as possible – it often lies on those two lines whether or not the email will be opened at all.

The ‘from’ field is the field that the recipient looks at first.

As a rule, it has to be either one of the following:

  • A person the recipient knows from your company;
  • A customer group he/she belongs to;
  • Your company name that the client knows well.

Of course, the “from” field isn’t limited to these three options. Basically everything that is somewhat personal will work, for example, if the recipients are from Texas, the ‘from’ field can be ‘<your company> Texas’, or any local place or city.

The subject line is secondary, but by no means should you disregard it.

The email subject line has to be catchy, short, and should focus on the benefit to the person receiving it. It should also suggest the nature of the email; for example, if the email is a promotion, include relevant terms like “save on <product name>”, “this week’s xxx”, etc, in the subject line, as they urge the buyer to take action. It is, of course, necessary to include personal details like the name of the recipient in the subject line. The subject line should also be shorter than 50 characters or seven words, but again, this varies depending on the name of the recipient.

Never underestimate these basic details, as mistakes in those two fields can wreck your campaign. However, don’t go too far in cropping or personalizing these fields; the customer still has to know that you have something to offer, which means that you have to state your case. Also, be aware that the subject field needs to sound somewhat natural, not like it was written by a robot. Keep it simple, don’t stress it too much, and good things will happen.

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Email Marketing isn’t Rocket Science.

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Nearly every big marketing move has something in common with the other big moves. And that’s innovation. From the ’50s Marlboro Man to the more recent web buzz generating grasshopper , we can see that innovation plays a huge role in any marketing. From these simple yet hugely successful marketing campaigns we can conclude that creative marketing can generate a lot of buzz – and huge returns – if its executed properly.

The Marlboro man was an expensive campaign, but from Marlboro Man we learned that brand awareness can be shifted. Before the cowboy appeared, filter cigarettes were considered feminine, but with the massive campaign the brand was turned around entirely. Speaking in ideas and social context, the Marlboro Man was using a ‘breaking rapport’ tonality when addressing potential customers, who thought that feminine cigarettes were masculine. This means that the campaign was actually meant to change the client’s emotion towards something, and that is what made Marlboro Man – an emotional connection with the clients.

The Grasshopper, however, was a guerrilla marketing campaign where… well… you know. People emailed famous people chocolate covered grasshoppers. Besides some shocked vegetarians, the campaign generated tremendous results and the small company, which supplies -800 numbers to people, has had huge returns from this small campaign, as grasshopper entirely occupied twitter and the blogosphere with its odd marketing campaign.

These two ideas are great illustrations of wonders that creativity and genuine congruence about the value of your products can do. No one has to be a genius to come up with ground breaking ideas. The best ideas are often derived from other sources–which have to be hidden, as Einstein said. And besides that, email marketing is somewhat limited in terms of innovation, which is good. Because there’s less to think about.

So how do you become creative in email marketing, then?

At first, realize what you have to work with in email marketing. That includes the subject line, the ‘from’ field, the Web Sign-Up forms, things like market segmentation and personalization, etc. When you’ve covered your market comes the hard part; if you want to stand out from the crowd, try changing the stuff you can work with, one by one, to make it even more appealing to the customers.

Email marketing isn’t rocket science.

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Words NOT to Use and Avoid in Emails

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

There are words that are boring for the subscriber, and interesting for the spam filter. To insure interesting emails that are more likely to be opened and received, not only you must write good headlines and interesting copy. You must also avoid words that are likely to be dismissed by the client, or make your email spammy–which means that many clients won’t receive it at all.

email-spam-words

To make your email attractive to the client, as a rule, use the active tense in your writing; in short, write sentences that have power. Active sentences look better than passive sentences. It may not be so evident, but ‘Cats love salmon’ sounds better than ‘Salmon is loved by cats’. Using the active voice eliminates many other problems, too. Rambling is a good example (rambling can be said to be present in this sentence). Use of active voice for email marketing is key, as it calls to action.

To make your emails slip through the spam filters, avoid using bad words. Not only are these words disliked by the spam filter, they also suck up the value of your content in the eyes of the subscriber.

Keep in mind:

  • Avoid words like “Free; Discount; Act Now; 50% off; You’ve been selected; All Natural”.
  • Also avoid words that relate to the particular email. Phrases like “Don’t Delete; Read This; Urgent; See What’s Inside; etc” are bad marketing practice and can severely damage your brand.
  • And, of course, unless you plan to gather a mailing list for selling Viagra (what?) or other drugs, avoid such brand names entirely. Also, avoid extensive use of !!/$$/&&/** or other symbols. They look unprofessional and spammy.

The problem behind these words is simple. They are disliked for their misleading and overused ways. If you can’t avoid using such words, limit them to one occasion per email. Using synonyms is a lot better.

Overall, there aren’t that many words you shouldn’t say, there are more bad emailing practices that you should avoid. Remember that attractive content is a good start, avoid the passive voice and bad words, and you’ll see that your emails have a better clickthrough rate.

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Posted in Email Deliverability, Tips & Tricks | 4 Comments »

Creating email marketing campaigns (part 1)

Monday, April 19th, 2010

When you have chosen your potential clients, created a list of addressees and have combined it all together with your message – you are ready to start the sending.

There are several message delivery options:

1. In case your list of addressees is a short one, and you don’t need any advanced tools of analysis and research, you may go with the traditional choice – Microsoft Outlook.

2. When it comes to big lists, use software that supports mixed types of e-mail message sending so that you can send messages right from your computer or an internal SMTP server.

3. And last but not least – you may choose an option of subscribing to an e-mail marketing service provider which will use its own servers to deal with the sending.

This time we are going to discuss the strong and the week points concerning all these methods.

Standard software for sending e-mails

Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Eudora, all these are meant for private correspondence and none of them are the best choice if you want to create or manage contacts professionally.

Surprisingly large number of small and medium sized companies still is using these kinds of methods in reaching their auditory. Actually the e-mail software which is meant for private correspondence has to be used in a later phase – when company’s commercial branch is aware of which client has replied positively to initial communication.

The standard software can also prove useful when it comes to keeping all the correspondence and its history in one place.

Microsoft Outlook can turn out to be problematic in terms of e-mail sending for the masses. It doesn’t mean that Outlook is trashy software; it just wasn’t made for this kind of purpose. It will be pretty hard for you to get Outlook do the trick with the function „mail merge” or, in other words, to send personalized e-mails using one basic template with different allocutions for each recipient that would be taken directly from addressees list.

In fact there’s an article on Microsoft support page describing these kinds of problems when using Microsoft Outlook.

Other e-mail software will take even programming knowledge in order to work the way you want them to.

Many e-mail software developers have added an option of tracking the number of e-mail openings. However to get this statistics the recipient has to click on the “opening cover note”. Although it is only one click that has to be done you will never be sure about the objectivity of these statistics.

Since this kind of software can be configured easily, you may track all the undelivered e-mails, thus getting an idea of how solid your e-mail mechanism really is. The message might be bounced because of nonexistent e-mail address or because the message was identified as spam.

Note that your standard e-mail software is not able to delete nonexistent e-mail addresses automatically from your addressees list. It can only receive and show these requests as well as offer you a superficial notion about how many of your e-mails have been opened. Speaking of standard e-mail software there is no way of managing campaigns automatically.

In general, as a tool, standard e-mail software depletes its potential fast, especially considering the fact that it’s unable to carry out sending of professional e-mail messages when it comes to medium or large amounts; it can’t do cycle repeat, research and analyze and all the other things that can be done with a help of professional e-mail sending software.

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Posted in Email Marketing Campaign | 1 Comment »