Posts Tagged ‘email tips’

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Email deliverability: global situation and tips for improvement

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Last week, Return Path, the world’s leading email reputation monitoring company, published Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report of the first half of 2011. The report shows that only four out of every five or 81% of permission-based email gets delivered to the inbox. Of the rest 19%, 7% of email lands in a spam or junk folder and 12% of email is blocked by ISP level filtering and simply goes missing.

Global situation

Return Path reviews data from 149 ISPs worldwide, and the research indicates deliverability rates vary by each region.

North America shows the highest inbox placement rate (IPR) with 86% of emails delivered exactly to recipients. Europe ranks second with 2% less than US and Canada (84%) but Asia and the Asia Pacific territories and Central and Latin America go under the global average, accordingly 78% and 62%.

Why so many emails do not reach the inbox?

Bounce rate myth

Marketers continue to spread a widely believed „lie” if email doesn’t bounce it reaches the inbox and hide a little known „secret” that it’s not exactly true. Even if email gets sent, for various reasons it can land to spam or junk folder. Recipients usually don’t read spam messages, so we can consider email actually is not delivered.

Deliverability failures

Even though deliverability problems cost a lot of money, marketers don’t pay enough attention to that. Focusing just on revenue comming from campaigns, marketers do not think how to increase email marketing ROI. However, ignoring deliverability failures is a real lost of money.

Impact of new inbox technologies

Return Path analyzed a panel of sample 30 000 Gmail mailboxes and indicated that 91% of emails arrived in the inbox, while 9% were missing – blocked before reaching the mailbox. Moreover, 81% of Gmail mailboxes had priority inbox enable, but only 17% of emails in the inbox were marked with priority.

Business inboxes are particularly difficult to reach because they are protected by systems like Postini, Symantec and MessageLabs. Only 80% of emails go through these filtering methods.

Missing email marketing best practices

A lot of marketers still don’t follow the best practices, for example, sending only permission-based emails, including unsubscribe link or cleaning old email lists. Return Path revealed that even top brands fail in implementing the best practices.

How to improve email delivery?

Monitor email delivery

  • follow spam complaints and unsubscribe rate that point to the bad quality of campaigns
  • ask for advice your e-mail marketing consultant to fix delivery problems

Clean your list

  • check spelling mistakes of bounce emails and correct them (.gmal, .ocm etc.)
  • delete hard bounce emails from your list (non-existing email addresses and blocked emails)
  • remove maintenance addresses (support, noreply, admin etc.)
  • if your list is more than 6 month old, make general data base cleaning to remove non-existing emails (Mailigen offers the service)

Ask for permission

  • when making a list, use double opt-in to be sure about existing email addresses and willingness to receive emails
  • if using email list for a long time, ask subscribers for permission confirmation
  • practice re-engangement campaigns to involve inactive contacts
  • always include unsubscribe link in emails

Send relevant information

  • send information that people have subscribed for to avoid spam complaints
  • segment subscribers in groups to send even more tergeted emails
  • avoid spammy subject lines and content

Use professional email service providers

Together with the best email marketing practices, your campaigns have more than good chances to reach the inbox.

Deliverability on Mailigen service

Email marketing service Mailigen is proud about its high deliverability rates. Taking into consideration the best technical practice, Mailigen shows its inbox placement rate of 86% that is similar to the global leader North America and higher than Europe average rate.

If you have any questions or want to increase your deliverability rate, please contact our consultants. We will be more than happy to help you.

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Posted in Email Deliverability | No Comments »

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 subject lines that work: what, why & how

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

Writing good email subject linesWriting email subject lines is often guesswork, and, like copywriting, your ability to write a strong subject line can depend on “the flow of the moment”, not only your past experience.

However, you can make your newsletter subject lines better than the average, and set them forth in the recipient’s inbox so your emails get opened — which is ultimately what you want.

10 newsletter subject line best practices

1. Write them short.

You have to catch the reader’s attention, and long sentences don’t do it properly. Although short headlines don’t necessarily have a purpose or a call to action (which is to open the particular email), it is likelier that a short headline will have one.

2. Put the most important words at the beginning.

Even if you write a 100 character subject line, if the first words are interesting, chances are that it will be opened. Subscribers don’t really read the subject lines, they skim read even those 50 characters for something interesting — if it’s there, they’ll stick around.

3. A/B testing.

As it is important to read into your past campaigns to determine what subject lines work best, it is worthwhile to do actual, real-time A/B testing. The open rate will tell you which is the most effective subject line. It’s easy too: simply send two or three the same content emails with different subject lines and see which one get’s better results.

4. Greet new subscribers politely.

If your email list is fresh, you probably won’t talk with familiarity and utter clever phrases. Be polite if you’ve had an influx of new subscribers or you are new in the business.

5. Personality.

#4 comes after #5, because the readers could dislike your personality, but they will appreciate you being polite. Don’t be afraid to convey your personality, though. The best emails are not always funny, but they leave a pleasant aftertaste to everyone who reads them.

6. Highlight the most attractive piece of what’s inside.

Maybe your newsletter is somewhat scattered and reaching across a number of topics? Not necessarily a bad thing, though. Think about the most interesting articles/snippets in the email, and write about them in the subject.

7. Keep it simple.

If you’re experiencing writer’s block or have no idea of what subject lines could catch your recipient’s information, just keep your subject lines simple. Tell your subscribers what’s inside, and, again, highlight what you yourself find interesting in the email.

8. Buzzwords.

Most of the Apple products from the past few years have been buzzwords, but buzzwords aren’t restricted to brands. For example, taking Rebecca Black’s famous music video as a buzz example, a headline ‘Friday — catch your bus with 20% off’ makes perfect sense and instantly attracts attention.

9. !!!Avoid SPAMMY subject lines!!!

Exclamation marks look unprofessional; generally avoid any spe©ial symbols or CAP$ LOCK
Needless to say, avoid anything that includes “viagra” and “cialis” and other spam words, about that you can read more in our article.

10. Adjust your subject lines for mobile phones.

Which means that you should do steps #2 and #1 until you’re sure that you can catch your reader’s attention with approximately the first 30 characters of your subject line. For the iPhone and E series Nokia which I got to test, the subject lines were 32 characters long and then got truncated.

Please add anything that’s missing from this list in the comments!

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Posted in Tips & Tricks | 1 Comment »

How Email Bounces can Affect Deliverability

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

Email BouncesBounced emails are like all the supervillains in the world combined.

They reduce your income, make your email support provider bill bigger, and can even cause blacklisting of your entire list.

Fortunately, though, things are getting better in terms of delivery for the average sender: an Epsilon study suggests that about 4 per cent of email campaigns were bounced in the 3rd quarter of 2010 (mind that the email bounce rate relies heavily on the industry, though).

Why do emails bounce in the first place?

The most common reason for a bounce is a misspelled email address. Maybe the subscriber uses a local email provider, which doesn’t accept your email due to its size, or has a full inbox. A network failure can also make your email bounce in rare cases, or your sending address might have been blocked by the mail server. It’s also important to distinguish between hard and soft bounces.

Hard bounces are undelivered messages that are permanently kept from reaching the intended recipient. Examples include blocked email, and email sent to mistyped and no longer existing email addresses.

Soft Bounces are email bounces from emails that were sent to a existing address, but were sent back. This can happen due to a full inbox, your message being too large, or because of overwhelmed server capacity.

Bounces can affect your entire list. ISPs can blacklist you because spammers commonly employ a technique known as a “Direct Harvest Attack”, and the respective ISP can mistake you for a spammer if you send email to non-existent addresses, as is done during a “direct harvest attack”.

Needless to say, you shouldn’t send emails after hard bounces, you should delete them right away, and after three soft bounces sending an email becomes a long shot.

7 things you can do to decrease the bounce rate

1. Clean the list you own regularly.
This is a no-brainer. Remove bounced email addresses regularly, and re-engage the customers when doing it can yield returns. Besides, clean email lists give more accurate statistics, and will greatly lower your email bounce rate. For more information on list maintenance, check out our article on email list hygiene.

2. Skim read the bounced addresses.
Chances are that some addresses need correction if you don’t follow a double-opt in system. Even if you do, though, you might want to correct the emails that were mistyped (.ocm, htomail, etc) for the user to get the chance to confirm his or her subscription.

3. Use double opt-in.
Double opt-in confirms each address upon subscribing, reducing the possibility of mistyped addresses to practically zero. In theory, by doing this and you won’t have to do #2.

4. Try a win-back campaign.
Re-engaging inactive subscribers is an option you should consider if your open rates are falling low. A win-back campaign will trim your list greatly, but the result will be a cleaner list with more possibilities to deliver.

5. Send useful and relevant emails.
By doing so you will not only keep your reputation in check, but also potentially sell more, experience fewer complaints and have soaring email open rates. It is tempting to send short-term campaigns with no real value to the customer, because they can work well. But don’t. Just don’t.

6. Make sure your letters aren’t “spammy”.
A letter can be filtered by the webmail client (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo) or desktop email software (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), so insure that your email has no phrases like “Cialis, Viagra, sex tape”, and so on prior to sending it.

7. Remove spam traps and maintenance addresses.
Scan for addresses such as help@domain.com, admin@domain.com, etc. Addresses like antispam@stopspam.org are most likely added by people who don’t very much like you or think they are funny. Do your best to remove them.

We would like to hear how you are dealing with bounced emails. Which of the 7 tactics you use?

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Email list hygiene – definitely worth it

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

Email List HygieneWe humans are in love with shiny things, because they make us happy. Spring cleaning allows us to throw out the unnecessary and unwanted possessions, and we should allow ourselves to clean and trim our email marketing lists.

However, there’s always that .00001% chance that the subscriber will change his mind at some point. How do you deal with that inner urge to “keep” the inactive accounts in your list?

Why keep the list clean?

Email list cleaning is a process that you will need to do regularly. However, if sending email costs virtually nothing, why should we clean our email marketing lists in the first place?

Here are a few reasons:

  • The owner of a clean list will have fewer or no complaints about unwanted email (inactive subscribers become angry if you keep bombarding them with more messages.
  • Such complaints can actually make your entire list obsolete (see our article on email deliverability).
  • ISPs can block email from you altogether if you keep sending email to bounced emails, because bounced emails are seen as ‘unknown’ addresses to them.
  • Emailing inactive subscribers will reduce your brand’s value.
  • Email list hygiene is keeping on top of misspelled addresses. Correct or remove them as fast as you can.

Mr. Clean’s guide to email list hygiene

1. If you don’t need to prune, keep inactive emails separate from the main list. Sending them only your most attractive offers or a “renewal message” asking them whether they want to continue the  subscription or not.

2. Build only targeted email lists. Although emails that are fake, bought, or acquired through not quite legal means will be something bigger to show your boss, these email addresses will inevitably drain the life of your campaign, and will damage your company for as long as they remain on the list.

3. Start new subscribers with a welcome message which explains how often should they expect messages from you; what you’ll be sending to them, including an initial offer so the subscriber gets to know your product range right from the start. Email list building is about honesty to the subscribers, and if you’re honest to them, they’ll return the compliment.

How to keep the dirt off your email lists

Perhaps the biggest threat to email list quality is aggressive marketing strategies, which (many a time, artificially) inflate the subscriber count. Although the short-term gains of aggressive strategies are more than clear, the long-term losses become evident only through analysis; this article at the Email Experience Council describes one such case in great detail. Pruning your email list will have no effect, if you pad it out in this manner. It is better to have a list with fewer interested subscribers than a huge list with a fraction actually interested in your products.

Then there is the issue of misspelled addresses. When your list is in its infancy, you will obviously be checking the new addresses out, but as the list grows bigger, it can be hard to check each and every new address. Scheduling time to edit your list your lists would work. For example, proofread your list once a week — or simply watch for bounced emails after each sent campaign.

What to take from this

Think of your email lists like of a lawn. You have to mow the lawn regularly, weeding it from time to time; otherwise it will not look its best. That’s also what you need to do with email marketing lists. Although high subscriber numbers are alluring and – superficially – attractive, the list will be worth next to nothing if it has no inside value.

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Posted in Email List Management | 2 Comments »

E-mail open rate ABC

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

Email Open RatesThere are equally many clients who ask “advanced” questions about e-mail marketing as there are clients who ask “beginner” questions. You know, there’s no harm in being new to something.

If e-mail open rates look like mere numbers and double-dutch to you, read on. We’ll explain.

What is an email open rate?

The open rate is the average of opened emails divided by the delivered sent emails.

We know when an e-mail is opened by placing a unique bacon HTML tracking code inside e-mails. The code downloads a tiny image or beacon from our webserver, which in turn signals that this particular e-mail is delivered. The statistic is then inserted in our database.

We count only delivered e-mails, while bounced e-mails are shown as bounce-reate in the statistics.

So, to reiterate, the average email open rate is the number of opened e-mails divided by the number of delivered e-mails.

Benchmarking email open rates

Broadly speaking, an open rate of about 20 to 40 percent is OK. The average open rates vary from niche to niche and heavily depend on the effectiveness of “subject” and “from” lines.

For example, the email open rates industry standard for health-related newsletters is around 30 percent, but people who receive e-mail from governmental e-mail lists usually open around 40 percent of their e-mails.

You can influence an e-mail open rate, but a number higher than around 70 to 80 percent would be, well, shocking. It’s not that people are disinterested in receiving e-mail; the number is like that because nowadays there is so much e-mail.

Besides, people who read your e-mail in e.g. Outlook, Gmail or on smartphones, often don’t show up in the statistics, because the e-mail browser doesn’t allow images to be included into e-mails.

The numbers can be quite plain-looking, especially if you realize that merely around 80 per cent of the emails are delivered at all. However, e-mail marketing is more of a middle way of marketing–it’s not based on masses, but rather individuals, yet not individually. That’s why an open rate, quite like the delivery rate, is not the most important statistic in e-mail marketing.

How to get a good email open rate

Well, here’s where the opinion varies; there are many techniques that will help you increase the respondents’ open rate. Some work better in one case, some in another.

  • First of all, send targeted e-mail. A targeted email list is bound to be more interesting to recipients, because the subject is interesting to them. Sending relevant email newsletter is, by the way, one of the “best practices” of e-mail marketing–so here’s to study more. You can target your users better by dividing them into segments.
  • Secondly, polish your “from” and “subject” lines. Of course, you shouldn’t retort to sending e-mail with a fake headline; such e-mail will make your brand’s trust diminish immediately. But try your best to spark the recipients’ attention.
  • Lastly, make long-term conclusions. There are external factors that influence the open rate–and even the weather can be one of them. If your open rate drops 2 per cent in a single campaign, don’t panic. If it does drop 2 per cent in the term of a year, maybe you ought to try something different.

Overview

A good email open rate doesn’t tell you a whole lot, but it is an important statistic, because email open rates can give you and edge against your competitors if you make the right conclusions.

For example, comparing two different types of e-mail you’ve sent, or evaluating your overall performance is quite easy if you have access to the average open rate.

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Posted in Email Marketing Campaign, Email Marketing Metrics | 2 Comments »

Top 10 email marketing mistakes

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Email Marketing MistakesThere are many common email marketing mistakes that marketers make, and not because they don’t know what they’re doing. Email marketing mistakes are made simply because there are many things you need to check over and over again, because some mistakes are deadly for success.

We’ve arranged some things that you should double — if not triple or quadruple — check before you send out your campaign.

1. No permission for sending e-mails

Yeah, some people still don’t get it.
E-mail marketing isn’t regular marketing. You can’t expect to sell a product by annoying people, nor by sending spam (which is illegal, by the way). If you don’t have explicit permission to mail to the people on the list then don’t e-mail them. You shouldn’t buy or rent an e-mail lists either.

2. Sending out rushed campaigns

Most marketers know how to write attractive content, but time is a beast, and it can mess up even the most intelligent campaign. You cannot allow to send content before it’s ready for the client, and you absolutely need to write decent “Subject” lines, which brings us to the next common mistake.

3. Botched “From” and “Subject” fields

These two fields are easily the most important variable that influences the open rate. Poorly chosen email “From” and “Subject” lines are the only few things which bring measurable results… you know how to make these fields work, don’t you? Just be carefull not to send from “no-reply@” emails etc., people like persolaization.

4. Non-targeted or irrelevant content

The word “targeted” sounds a bit complicated. But basically what sending targeted content means in e-mail marketing is, well, sending content you said you’d send. You should also use all the tools at your disposal: don’t be afraid to experiment a little and segment the users.

5. Sending bad content at a bad time

This mistake is as common as it is relative. Bad content means that users will most likely unsubscribe if they utterly dislike your content. Grammar errors and missing links will make you look unprofessional. A bad sending time will make the users skip the e-mail altogether. A good time to send e-mails is, as a rule, between Monday to Thursday. Always be weary about how often you send the e-mails, too.

6. Too many graphics

Yes, graphics are what attract attention in e-mails, but keep in mind that they are disabled altogether for Gmail, and do not show up in a number of e-mail clients automatically, if you are not a trusted sender. Furthermore, too many graphics increase the loading time — that, in turn, means that many readers will not read it thoroughly.

7. No call to action

Believe it or not, people often are so hyped up about their campaign that they forget to do their best to increase conversions. No email call to action means little, if any conversions. Make your wants clear and simple to the readers.

8. No unsubscribe link

Like #1, this relates to the CAN-SPAM act and appeals to humanity of marketing. Not only dismissing the unsubscribe link is illegal. It’s very bad for your brand, and such a practice can get you blacklisted (unable to send e-mails at all) in a breeze.

9. Not doing anything with the list

Well, “not doing anything” is not a mistake, as nothing is done. However, not doing anything leads to an awful lot of bad things–users will simply forget you if you’re inactive. To recover an old list, you have to remind the users about your existence with a “reminder e-mail”. In most cases you’ll have to lose at least 30% of your subscribers.

10. Using e-mail marketing only for e-mail marketing

Encourage the users to provide feedback; encourage the users to contact you directly. Why not include links to your company’s profiles in social media sites? This isn’t what every contemporary business does. It’s what the every contemporary client expects.

The consequences to making mistakes in email marketing are much worse than with other types of marketing.

A bad “Subject” field can botch the entire campaign; too frequent e-mails and irrelevant content can give ground to spam complaints (utterly bad); and sending e-mail to strangers is all but a business suicide.

E-mail marketing is a fragile tool, which can yield great returns, but breaks easily. Don’t be scared to try and use it to the fullest potential–whilst still remembering that there are boundaries that needn’t to be crossed.

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