Posts Tagged ‘email campaigns’

Start Your Engines – 2011 Holiday Email

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

Have you started planning your holiday marketing campaigns? Some researchers believe the 2011 email marketing holiday season will be bigger than last year as online sales continue to grow year over year. During the holidays buyers are bombarded with messages, so get started planning your strategies for the hectic holiday season. Here are some tips to help you plan and end the year with a bang!

Plan Your Campaign Milestones

There are several significant holiday dates for bargain hunters, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Hanukkah, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The National Retail Federation research says 60 percent of shoppers will take advantage of retailers’ sales and discounts for their 2011 holiday purchases. That’s a big group of people looking for the best deals.

Black Friday, November 25 – since 2005, day after Thanksgiving in the United States has been the busiest shopping day of the year. Capture that shopping fervor with targeted messages the week of Thanksgiving, and remember Holiday discounts will draw the in-store traffic.

Cyber Monday, November 28 is the Monday immediately following Black Friday and was created by companies to entice people to shop online. Offer your subscribers great follow up deals to support Black Friday purchases and create online traffic.

After Cyber Monday, create a campaign leading up to the Christmas holiday. Some examples of great campaigns are 12 days of Christmas countdowns, a list of favorite things, top ten products, and products offered by demographic (his, her, children, age group, geek, gardener, etc.).

Hanukkah starts December 20th and lasts for eight days. If you have a segment of your audience celebrating Hanukkah, offer 8 days of deals prior to the holiday.

Promoting last minute deals for the shopper who waits until Christmas Eve is a great way to build some in-store purchases. Offer items that are potential stocking stuffers and great deals for the procrastinator. Where possible, integrate with an SMS campaign to drive last minute purchases.

Don’t forget about the post holiday shopper. Many people return gifts or use gift cards to shop deals the day after Christmas or at the start of the New Year.

To help with planning, you can use our new Email Campaign Planning Tool to create a compelling email campaign and generate holiday sales. Using a deliberate step by step plan will set you apart from competition. Don’t forget we are always here to help! If you need help contact our team of holiday helpers to get started.

Happy Holidays!

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Posted in Email Marketing Campaign | 1 Comment »

How to build email list with QR codes?

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

With the exploding rise of smartphones marketers are mobilizing their email marketing programs. Some tactics include making emails mobile-friendly, signing up for newsletters via SMS and social media engagement in email list building. Many marketers are finding QR codes are one of the most attractive and exciting new ways to gather email subscribers.

What is QR code?

If you are not familiar with QR codes, you’ve probably seen them on billboards, labels or advertisements and didn’t even know it. The code is a two-dimensional matrix barcode readable by QR reader apps on camera phones. It consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded in a QR code can be text, URL or other data.

In short: it is a scanable picture that instantly redirects you to a website with more detailed information or sign up form. Other versions of codes include Microsoft Tag and Google Goggles.

QR codes are commonly used in Asia and are starting to become more common in the US. From July to December 2010, QR code scanning jumped dramatically by 1200% from the first half-year 2010.

Offline list building

More and more we find QR codes are a fun new way to build your subscriber list from sources other than online. Place a QR code on an outdoor ad for people to scan be led directly to a sign-up form.

We’ve got some tips for placing QR codes:

  • print ads, newspaper articles, press releases;
  • brochures, leaflets, posters, stickers;
  • business cards, online PDF materials;
  • bills, receipts, order forms;
  • books, CD covers, menus, packaging;
  • souvenirs, T-shirts, clothing tags, name tags;
  • exhibition stands, store windows, checkout counters.

Another engaging use of QR codes is polling new subscribers. After filling in the survey, invite them to join your email list and then segment them with the information collected. (read about Mailigen online surveys). Couple that with adding social sharing buttons after people have subscribed to your email list (see our blog on importance of social sharing).

Online to offline

QR codes can be a many faceted tool, here’s why you should include QR codes in your email newsletter.

  • Encode a special promotion code in your QR code. Recipients will scan it, store it in their mobile phones and then show it to salesmen, increasing offline traffic and sales.
  • Use a QR code in newsletter instead of a link in order to make call to action more appealing and to make the call to action pop.
  • Add a QR code at the end of newsletter and encode in it your contact information. Recipients can easily add it to their phonebook.

How to create a QR code for your sign-up form?

There are a lot of pages where you can create QR codes. Let’s take for example www.goqr.me.

Choose the URL and enter the address of your sign-up form (Mailigen offers creating sign-up forms).

And here it is – your brand new QR code! Simple and fast.

Check and recheck

  • Make your landing page (with sign-up form) simple and mobile-friendly.
  • Avoid too many fields to fill in. Remember mobile phone users don’t like typing much.
  • Use black and white for your QR code. Sometimes people use other colors instead of black, but if the contrast is low, the mobile phone won’t be able to scan it.
  • Leave white empty space around the QR code to detect it easily.
  • Avoid too many characters encoding in the QR code. Some mobile phones won’t be able to detect too complex QR images.
  • Test your QR code with different mobile phones and applications to be sure it works.

It’s a good idea to create a special sign-up form for QR code subscribers to track their activities and then evaluate QR campaigns. Think also about a special welcome email to subscribers and treat them differently, of course including QR code activities in campaigns.

If not yet subscribed for Mailigen newsletters, you are welcome to do this right now via QR code

Have you ever used QR codes in your email marketing campaigns or would like to do it? Share your opinion about offline list building on the move.

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Posted in Email List Building | 3 Comments »

Email campaign click through rate: what it is and how to improve it

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

Email Click Through RateAn email click through rate (CTR) is the ratio of clicks through your site in received emails. The CTR can provide you valuable information as to whether your campaign is successful or needs some work.

The CTR is, however, quite an obscure measure: a vast array of factors can influence the click through rate–including factors that you can’t directly measure and affect.

For example, the CTR depends not only on the subject lines (they foremost affect the email open rate) and shiny copy.
Subtler things like link position, time of the day, email length, link emphasis, etc., play a large role in making the CTR what it is. These external factors play a role significantly larger than you’d like them to.

Things that an email click through can tell about your campaign

The average email click through rate is perhaps the first statistic to look at when weighing the efficiency of a particular email campaign–maybe after the email open rate. A good email campaign will have a higher click through rate, but a lower CTR doesn’t mean that the campaign is bad–it merely suggests adjustments, which can make a huge turn.

The average email click through rate depends heavily on the niche, and the nature of your newsletter.

If you are selling products to consumers through email i.e. you own a “B2C” newsletter, the click through rate can be as low as 2-3%.

The average click through rate for business-to-business (B2B) newsletters is a pinch higher, starting from about 5%.

If your CTR has stayed average, or below the average, for some time, there’s email optimization that needs to be done. For example, maybe your emails contain so much content that the user has no real reason to click through?

Common tactics that improve the email click through rate

There are two roads you can take in order to improve the CTR.

First of all, you can look back to campaigns that provided the best results and try to copy the way you used to be. That, sadly, doesn’t always work, but can serve as a temporary fix; plus, looking back is healthy as you can see the emails with a fresh, more experienced look.

You can also take the hard road and try bettering the campaign altogether.
Spice up the content; send out only a truly relevant email newsletter; make your call to action stronger so the client knows what you want. In other words, try making the campaign as attractive as possible, and give a real reason for the user to click to reach your website.

You should pay special attention to the content: sprinkle links generously as more links tend to increase the CTR–adding a single extra link can make users click through your web a whopping 25% more. This doesn’t mean that you have to fill the email with links, though. That’s needy.

Remember that in this business you are fighting for every single click! Use everything you’ve got and take your best shot. The returns are worth it.

We would like to hear your experience with CTR, things that you’ve done to improve the numbers. Have you had over 20% click-through, if so maybe you can share your tricks!

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Posted in Email Marketing Metrics | 1 Comment »

Optimize your email campaign to increase respond rates

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

E-mail marketing optimizationOptimization is what you’d usually do when the “best practices” are already applied, and you’re at a peak of opens, clicks, etc. A peak – as good as the word sounds -, means stagnation for your business if you don’t know what to do next.

Email campaign optimization isn’t merely a thing you do. It’s, well, more like a separate science. In order to optimize an e-mail campaign, you don’t have to learn much — you just have to understand what you can work with and use it. And once you understand, you’ll have an entirely new world to explore.

How to optimize email marketing campaigns?

Start by going back to the “best practices”. Do make sure that you’ve done everything possible to ease subscribing to your site’s visitors; do include social networking tools in your e-mails; do make sure that your subject lines are straight to the point, et cetera. You can always check our blog where we talk about these best practices in-depth.

The functional side is settled. What next?

Offer value to readers through the messages you send. Simple, right? This is, nevertheless, the main problem for many, many companies.

What “value” really means to the client.

Sending only and only relevant content is a “best practice”, and works well in most circumstances. But, in order to reach the next step in your campaign’s ROI, you have to offer something beyond the regular “bargain deals” which, although are relevant, merely try to sell something.

What you want is good conversation. You want good relationships with your clients, and, to achieve this, you must offer something beyond the traditional “material value”. You want to convey the things you want to say; albeit in a tone which the recipients will appreciate (humor works).

There has to be a reason why someone opens your e-mail. For example, picture yourself receiving an e-mail from a friend; you take the time to open and read the email, because the friend is a friend and gives you good feelings.

Now, a sales e-mail doesn’t exactly give good feelings, but something interesting does, and you should aim for being interesting. Logical arguments don’t really work in sales. Even if they’re true, such arguments can make you sound arrogant and pushy. That is exactly what you don’t want your clients to think about you. Good deals are interesting, yes, but without personal connection you’re closer to a regular sales person.

Call to Action

The best alternative to bold salesmanship is a subtle call to action included in your e-mails. The desired “action” you want the client to take, can vary; from simply visiting your website for view offers, to flying visiting the landing page in a single click.

A subtle call to action isn’t “sneaky tactics”. It is polite marketing. For example, a good call to action is a simple, relevant advertisement, which doesn’t bite the eye, but is noticeable.

Concise and interesting

Start being interesting from the very beginning. Your homepage, the subscription form, “subject” field, and the first sentence in your e-mails… they all should sound interesting. Display personality. Your business has one, right?

You should preserve a clear and concise format of your e-mails and messages. It is nice to go in depth about what features the product has… but it’s better to actually tell what the product does, and only then go the extra mile of telling about your offers’ benefits.

E-mail marketing landing pages

Landing pages are ridiculously important. Their tone shouldn’t be different from the one in regular e-mails, and there shouldn’t be a wall of text — contrary to what “experts” say.

The landing page should look good, obviously. It is also the place where a buyer interested in your offers has finally arrived. So, in landing pages, simply do your best to (politely) convince the buyer that the offer is worthy of his consideration.

Optimization isn’t finished when you click the “Send” button.

Assess the results of your campaign.

Learn from mistakes, and if something brings you good results, keep on doing it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you want to really optimize email marketing campaign, you have to dedicate continuous effort to make it really shine.

Then, after you’ve finished, take a good look at the campaign, and polish it again as you notice subtle things that need attention. Think of e-mail marketing optimization like a process that you can do over and over.

If, piece by piece, you scrupulously make sure that your campaign is in order, you will find that it brings better results. For example, remove that small, albeit unnecessary advertising block from your e-mails. It’s a small matter, but it counts.

By continuously polishing the campaign, you’ll achieve a huge cumulative bonus, which, in turn, will bring the results you are so longing for.

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Posted in Campaign Optimization, Email Marketing Campaign | No Comments »

When And How Often To Send Emails

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

There has been a lot of debate about when and how often do marketers have to send email newsletters. Although this is all but inconclusive for companies with international clients, there are certain patterns that should interest anyone who’s sending out emails and wants to achieve the best results from an email marketing campaign.

Stick to Schedule

best time to send emailIt doesn’t really matter how often you send emails, as long as you stick to a schedule. Even if the content isn’t top-notch, the users will often suffice with what you send as long as you send it every time without fail. It is important to let the user know how often will he/she receive emails right from the start (“subscribe to our weekly newsletter”); furthermore, it is important to notify the user that you, if at all, will also send promotional offers (“and receive promotional offers that might interest you”).

Right Time

We have the how often down, but what time of the day do you have to send the mails? This is quite tough; at first you have the international subscribers, but a quick look at your analytic stats will enlighten you about the time zone you’re on. And then there are the subscribers which are with their own schedules, their own office times, and their own away from keyboard times.

If your subscribers are business people, it’s easy – email them during work hours on Tuesdays to Thursdays. Mondays are busy and the subscribers will likely have other email to work with; Friday mornings work, too, but for the most part the business people are mourning on how it is Friday and they still have a lot of work left, or, if they don’t have any, they just won’t read your email and it will be gone by Monday. If your subscribers are direct customers, email them on Fridays to Sundays, as your offers are more likely to be reviewed and thought through when the subscribers have free time.

Remember: by staying true to your schedule, you’ll stay true to the customers. And as a side note, if you feel you don’t have the time to make a weekly newsletter, opt for a bi-weekly one or even a monthly one, because if you take the time to create a truly unique and interesting newsletter, your subscribers will be full with anticipation, as opposed to boring weekly newsletters that were finished at the last second.

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Posted in Tips & Tricks | 2 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 »