‘Tips’ Articles

Going from cold to hot isn’t so tough.

It’s no big news that email lists can go cold. It can happen for any number of reasons. Maybe the list building process took longer than you expected, maybe your boss wasn’t ready to pull the trigger on email marketing when the list was forming, or maybe you’ve just bored your list to tears. Regardless of the reason, you can heat your list back up with some fairly easy methods.

Don’t be afraid to ask your customers why they haven’t been responding to your email.

Communication is key. While you may think that asking your customers directly will make you look bad, it doesn’t. They will respect your honesty and if they do have an issue they will know that you care and are making efforts to correct it.

Offer exclusive incentives to returning customers.

Even if a customer has begun to ignore your email, a particularly good incentive can bring back even customers with the most waning interest. If someone was at one time interested in what you have to offer it’s very likely that they will be again under the right circumstances. Give them a reason to come back.

Change your strategy.

If providing one kind of promotion doesn’t seem to be exciting your audience, try something new. Maybe your recipients are still interested in buying something from you but have just grown tired of the same old offers. If you send them a coupon for 10% off every time, it’s not going to be much of an attention grabber after a while. Consider changing up your offers and occasionally doing something very unique to make your customers do a double-take when they receive your email.

Consider an email redesign.

While content may still be king, good looks certainly can’t hurt. If you aren’t seeing the results you want from your campaign, you may consider taking another look at your email design. A really bad design, and trust me they are all over the place, can scare someone away faster than just about anything. If you want your consumers to trust and respect your company your email should have a design that promotes you in the best light, not as some two-bit spammer.

Re-examine your demographic.

Their wants, needs, and how they interact with your company/organization may have changed over time. What was once a popular subject among the people on your list may now be sorely out of date. Make sure you stay current with the interests and trends among your list. Keep your products and ideas up to date. If possible you could offer incentives to some of your recipients for filling out a survey. A great way for retailers to get people into their store is by giving out a five dollar gift card. Since barely anything costs just five dollars, it’s pretty likely they will be spending some of their own cash once they get started.

If you’re simply using your email statistics to judge the effectiveness of your campaign, you are missing out on a vital tool for improving the success of future email marketing endeavors.

If you want to tap the full potential of email marketing, your work isn’t finished after you send out your campaign. You should give your recipients a few days to read and respond to your email. Not everyone is glued to their computer screens and some take longer than others to act on offers. After you have given ample time for your campaign to be received, you can begin to utilize your statistics. You’ll want to start by getting a general feeling for the overall success of your mailing. You can do this by observing your opens and clickthroughs, but you don’t want to stop there. Below are several other ways you can use campaign statistics to improve your ROI and move your marketing plan forward.

One of the best ways you can use your campaign statistics to your advantage, is by doing targeted follow up mailings. Based on what links people have clicked on, or based on who opened the email, you can send follow up emails to targeted groups. For example, if someone clicked on a link to one of your products, you might want send them out a coupon. Done correctly this can nudge interested recipients into becoming a paying customer!

A slightly more advanced technique is doing a random 50/50 split of your list and sending out an ‘A’ and ‘B’ version of your email. In each version you can vary the content of your email. You might want to change the subject line or present a different offer. Once you have the statistics from both of your campaigns, you can compare the results and get a general idea of which tactics were more effective. Doing this every once in a while will help you get to know your audience better and will make it easier for you to create successful campaigns.

Another tactic that can be useful is to download your list of soft bounces and do a directed mailing specifically to them. It’s best to usually wait a short period of time before sending out to your bounces again, but a specific mailing to them can accomplish two things: 1) You’ll eliminate addresses that aren’t active more quickly and 2) Soft bounce will often times resolve themselves and you’ll be able to contact them on your second mailing.

Email campaigns are a great way to communicate with your list. Whether you are advertising or sending news updates about a group or organization, email can be an effective tool. Despite email’s effectiveness, it isn’t the only way you should be reaching your recipients online.

The online landscape is constantly changing and new forms of communication are being developed every day. Social media sites are some of the most popular new methods of receiving information and they happen to be one of the best additions to any email campaign.

Social media and email are a perfect match. They compliment each other by providing your list members with something everyone craves, choices. Social media is cutting edge and new but can be complicated. If your user base is younger or more technically savvy, they may prefer to use Twitter or Facebook as a means of obtaining information about and communicating with your company. Conversely, email has been around forever and everyone knows how to use it. It’s simple, versatile and almost everyone has an email address. This might be more comfortable for an older, more professional, or less technologically versed list.

By including social media links within your email campaigns you give your user the option of how they want to interact with your company. Maybe someone dislikes email advertising but wouldn’t mind seeing you on their Twitter or Facebook feed. Instead of losing contact with that customer, providing them with the option to use social media instead allows you to maintain communication with them. In this situation, even if people are unsubscribing to your actual email subscription, they may be signing up for your social media campaigns.

At times simplicity is the most effective means of communication. To get your point across with an email, there are occasions when all you need is a simple white background email with text.

There is more than one way to go about creating a plain white-paper email, but the most simple way is to do a plain text email. A plain text email is just text. There is no HTML code included in the message at all. While this means that there are no complications and that your message is slightly (though likely by a negligible amount) more deliverable, it also means that your message will not be able to include links, images, or advanced formatting of any kind. Emails like this are useful if you think your clients will be viewing them on a mobile device, if their email clients don’t allow HTML code, or if you simply want to deliver a complication free, simple, but highly deliverable email.

The other way to create a email with a white background and text is to use one of our white-paper templates. These templates are created to be as simple as possible but still allow you to include links, pictures, font formatting and other content features only available with HTML code. Not only will you have more control over the content of your email, but you will get more information from Accu Trak when using a white-paper template as opposed to a plain text email. Clickthrough tracking is available only in full HTML emails.

Each method has its own pros and cons, you can use the information in this post to pick which is best for your campaign. No matter which you choose, always remember that content is the most important part of your email both for deliveribilty and effectiveness.

We’ve covered a lot of ways to improve your email campaigns in our numerous blog posts. We get so many questions about best practices and how to improve campaign results that we thought that we’d gather up all of our best practices tips and put them in one place. Here is a list of our favorite “Best Practices”.

1. Write great subject lines.

This first rule of email marketing, subject lines are the first things your customer will see and can be the deciding factor in how much attention they give your email. Don’t rush the writing of your subject line. Come up with several different ideas, and chose the one you think would appeal most to your customer. Be honest and avoid the hard sell,  also stay away from SPAM language and your subject line will support your well thought out campaign.

2. Don’t forget the preview pane!

The preview pane is the handy little window that exists in email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird. It shows a preview of the email before it is actually “opened”. It’s so useful in fact, that many people read their emails almost exclusively through this window. Create your email so that the most important part of your offer or message is visible in the preview pane. This means the top section of your email is very important as would be the case regardless since grabbing your reader’s interest quickly is your primary goal anyway.

3. Avoid SPAM language.

Chances are good that you’ve gotten a SPAM message in your email inbox. Have you ever noticed how they all seem share the same language? SPAM stoppers have been designed to pick up on this recurring “language of SPAM” by using Bayesian style filters. These filters have been popular for years and use common “SPAM words” to block potential SPAM messages. Actually, it’s fairly complicated and if you’d like you can read more here. The general idea is that avoiding certain words and phrases can make your email more deliverable. We’ve compiled a list of some of the words to avoid in our Email and Spam Blockers FAQ.

4. Make it look good.

Despite the common advice to not “judge a book by its cover”, all people have a tendency to make snap judgments. Bad design can detract from the positives in your email and can ruin your campaigns potential for success. Not every email needs to be a work of art, but take some time and objectively view your email. Ask yourself, “Does it look like SPAM? Would I be comfortable giving my credit card information to this company?” Make your campaign look professional and your clients will be more apt to click your links and buy your products.

5. Treat your recipients like real people.

In the world of bulk email, treating your clients with a respectful and personal touch can be the difference between success and failure. Email has the tendency to be cold and impersonal. If you manage to find a way to break the mold and connect with your recipients, you will give them a refreshingly positive experience that is sure to drive results.

6. Focus on meaningful content.

Find out what your customers want and give it to them. Too many marketers get so wrapped up in their own product that they forget about the consumer. If you provide your recipients with something valuable, your campaign will be a success. Blatant solicitation without value is a waste of everyone’s time and your money.

7. Establish your brand.

If you are already producing content that your recipients actually want, the next step is to ensure that they don’t overlook your email. Maintaining cohesive design and messaging will make your email familiar and allow your recipients to pick your email out of a crowd. If they have a high traffic inbox, this strategy can be crucial to the success of your campaign.

8. Include an offer.

Including an offer is a fantastic way to attract attention. Avoid being misleading at all costs, if the customer feels lied to, you’ve just lost a customer. Exclusive offers are more attractive and have the potential of prompting recipients to forward the email to a friend. Free marketing doesn’t get any better than that!

9. Avoid large images.

Large images give your email a higher probability of tripping SPAM filters and may also ruin your email design. You may want to show off pictures in high resolution but an email is not the place to do it. Include a thumbnail of the image and have it link to the full sized image hosted elsewhere.

10. Ask to be on their list.

There is no better way to ensure that your future emails don’t wind up in a willing recipients SPAM folder than just asking nicely. Ask your customers to add you to their contact list and, in most email clients, your message’s delivery will be ensured. You can include this request in your first campaign or in all of your campaigns.

11. Know and follow CAN-SPAM regulations.

This one is simple, CAN-SPAM regulations are the law and if you break them you could find yourself with a hefty fine and a nasty mark on your reputation. Avoid these problems by understanding the regulations before starting any email campaign.

12. Study major email providers policy.

Professionals in any field always do their homework. They know more about their topic than anyone else and they use that knowledge to their advantage. If you want to be a pro in the email marketing world, you need to know the policies of the major email providers. You wouldn’t ship goods somewhere without knowing the docking regulations of the port, so don’t be uninformed of the rules and regulations of companies like Yahoo!, Google, or Microsoft.