The MailShotBot Blog

The Value of Email Marketing

Email marketing can be a very cost effective and powerful tool in your marketing efforts. Companies are increasingly turning to online forms of marketing such as search engine optimization, banner ads, Google ads and email marketing. Email marketing is the simplest, and most targeted of these options.
 
Email Marketing is:
 
Effective:
Sending out regular newsletter with information that is relevant and interesting to your client base is an excellent way to keep in communication with them, thereby increasing your chances of referrals and repeat business. If you can make your newsletter content valuable enough your newsletter may even become a value add that you provide for your customer, increasing your value from their perspective.
 
Targeted:
With permission based email marketing your message is going directly to people who are interested in your product. Whether they be existing or past clients, or potential clients who have signed up for your newsletter on your website, your audience is targeted and open to listening to your message.
 
Affordable:
Email marketing is incredibly cost effective. For small businesses email marketing is a powerful tool and in this arena the playing field can be completely leveled. With a professional, branded and interesting email newsletter a small business can compete equally with a much larger business with a far greater marketing budget.
 
Green:
It’s great for the planet and this can also be an effective selling point to get email addresses from your clients and potential clients.
 
Source: Yellow Jersey Design
 
 

7 tips for successful email campaigns

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Will your marketing e-mail campaign succeed?

To send e-mail marketing messages that are clearly defined and well-timed, make sure to go through and check the items that apply to your e-mail before sending:

·       I have explicit permission to send the e-mail.

·       I pinpointed the main objective

·       My e-mail content is easy to scan.

·       My e-mail contains a strong call to action.

·       My images help to tell the story of my e-mail.

·       I’m prepared to handle inbound responses.

·       I’m sending at a time when my audience is likely to notice.


 Dummies.com has more about this here

Engaging with your subscribers

The best email marketing campaigns may not be a hard sales pitch
directed at your subscribers. Good campaigns inspire the recipient to
forward the email on to friends, family and colleagues. Including
something useful for the reader, instead of just information thrown at
the reader, could help to engage your market. Gyms could send out
useful training tips, instead of a blatant membership price tag.
Restaurants could include tasty recipes; hardware stores can include
DIY tips. Forwarding on an email is the modern day word of mouth, and
for the price of one email you could reach a whole group of potential
customers.

A campaign which engages the subscriber and offers the reader more
than a simple catalogue of prices has the potential to move from
mailbox to mailbox - free marketing! If your subscribers expect your
emails to contain useful information they’re more likely to open
subsequent emails, instead of deleting without reading.

Provide value in your campaigns, not empty messages, and your
unsubscribe link will find itself feeling pretty obsolete.

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spammity spam.

Everyone has a spam filter, or I’d hope so. Just in the last five days I have had 12 emails offering me great fake Rolex's.  Luckily for me they’ve bypassed my inbox and gone straight into my spam folder.  Unfortunately sometimes valid emails get caught in the spam net, which begs the question ‘why?’ 

Firstly, what is spam?  

We all know it when we get it, because we don’t want it and we haven’t asked for it.  That’s pretty much what it boils down to. The Spamhaus Project’s definition is: A message is spam only if it is both unsolicited and bulk.
Normal emails can be unsolicited, e.g. a job application, and bulk emails can be normal, e.g. subscriber newsletters.  It’s only when someone sends out mass emails to people who have not asked for them that the message is classed as spam.  

What do spam filters look for?

Points are allocated according to certain criteria, and if these points add up to a certain amount the email is classified as spam.  Here are some examples of things that get flagged in emails:
Subject is ALL CAPS (0.763 Points)
Contains phrases like ‘Removes wrinkles’ (1.73 Points)
Talks about large amounts of money (0.193 Points)
Contains G.a.p.p.y-T.e.x.t (1.365 Points)
Has phrases like ‘What are you waiting for’ (2.24 Points)

The rules that the spam filters follow will depend on the spam threshold set by the receiver - if they’re really sick of spam then the spam filters will block just about anything.  These are only some of the criteria.  For a more detailed list from a leading spam filter see Spam Assassin 

Manage your subscriber lists well - all the people that you’re sending emails to should have agreed to be on your list.  MailShotBot has a double opt-in process; when someone subscribes to your list they are sent an email with a confirmation link, which means that everyone on your lists actually wants to be there.  All unsubscribes should be completed within a week. MailShotBot offers a one click unsubscribe option, but if you’re doing this manually make sure you follow up on the request promptly. 

Some easy to avoid mistakes - email marketers make some common and avoidable mistakes.

Avoid using spammy phrases like ‘never to be repeated’ or ‘offer you can’t refuse’
Don’t use too many unnecessary punctuation marks!!!!!!!!!!!!
DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPS
Don’t write in coloured fonts
Avoid using the word ‘test’ in subjects
Don’t use sloppy HTML, or HTML that’s just one big image with hardly any text, the spam filter will assume you’re just trying to bypass their filters.

And some other guidelines to follow - there are some useful tips to follow to make your email look valid

Use accurate and subjective subject headings.  Make sure that your subject matches up well with the content on your email
Use a legitimate from name and from email address 
Use a valid reply-to address which can act as an unsubscribe mechanism if required
Include a physical address 

Keep an eye on your open rate, and if there are any sudden drops it may be that your email has been picked up by spam filters.  Bounce backs are another indicator.  MailShotBot offers spam tests by popular spam filters so your campaigns can be automatically checked for you.

For more info on what open rates are typical see our blog entry here.  

How wide should my emails be?

This could sound like a pointless question, but there are a couple of implications from having an email that is too wide or too narrow.  

Most email clients won't allocate the full width of the screen to display your email.  Gmail has advertising running down the one side, and programmes like Outlook or Mail.App often have menus using up prime screen real estate.  If you don't take this into account your email could end up being too big for your reader's screen.  If you have 400 emails coming at you every day, and one of them is so wide that you need to scroll horizontally to see all the content, you're probably going to delete it before you've read it.  I would.  

At the same time, having an email that's too narrow is frustrating and tiring to read, as your eyes keep having to jump back to the left more often than is comfortable.  So what is ideal?  We suggest limiting your email width to 550-600 pixels.  This should give you enough room to lay out your content nicely.  

And the height?

Obviously the amount of content in your emails will determine how long they are, but keep in mind that there may be a preview pane and that the area of your email displayed there should be able to hold your reader's attention.  The average preview pane is 300-500 pixels high, and so all the important and catchy parts of your email should be included in this section.  

And remember - we have over 30 fully tested design templates at your disposal, if you'd like to leave the counting of pixels up to us.  

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Testing your campaign in different email clients

If you've spent time and effort on creating catchy designs, you won't really want your subscriber's email client presenting it incorrectly.  With a host of different email clients out there, this is entirely possible.  So an important part of a successful email campaign is making sure that your email will look good and will read well in all the major email programs.  MailShotBot offers a couple of ways of helping you to know exactly what email your subscribers will be opening.

Using your own resources:

Many people have some of the major email programs available to them, such as Outlook 2007, Blackberry, and online accounts such as Gmail.  MailShotBot allows you to send a preview of your email to several addresses at once, and you can login and see for yourself what your campaign looks like.    Test addresses are remembered for you, so that you can run your tests quickly and easily on your next campaign.

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It's easy to send a couple of test emails out, before sending emails en masse

If you require tests in a wider range of email clients, we can offer another solution for you:

Using the full design and spam testing suite

For a small fee, you can have your email campaign tested in more than 15 of the most popular email clients like Outlook 2007, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Lotus Notes and many more. It covers desktop, web based and mobile clients.

Not only do you have much wider coverage than you would be able to do on your own (at least without a lot of money and time), you also get your email run through several spam filters, including McAfee Security Center, Norton AntiSpam, Outlook, MessageLabs, Postini and Spam Assassin.

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For a small fee you can see what your email looks like in all the above email clients and more

Understanding email open rates

One of the features that MailShotBot offers is an evaluation of past campaigns.  Our reporting and analytics tools help you to see how your emails have been received, and a key element of this is seeing whether or not your emails have even been opened.  In doing this we use an ‘Open Rate’ figure.  Below is an explanation as to what an open is, how we measure it, and what kind of rate is typical in an email marketing campaign.

What is an open rate?

An open rate is an indicator of how many people on an email subscriber list open (or view) a particular email campaign. The open rate is normally expressed as a percentage, and is calculated as follows:

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So a 40% open rate would mean that of every 10 emails delivered to the inbox, 4 were actually opened.


How do you measure an open?

A piece of code is added automatically to each mail sent out, and it requests a tiny, invisible image from our web servers. So when a reader opens the email, the image is downloaded, and we can record that download as an open for that specific email.

It is important to understand that the open rate is not 100% accurate.  Recording an ‘open’ can only happen if the readers email client is capable of displaying html with images, and that option is turned on. So if you are sending text-only emails, there is no way to record open rates (the exception is if they actually click a link). Similarly, people reading your html email without images showing will not be recorded as opens.

Another issue is that your readers may have a preview pane in their email client. That preview pane might be displaying your email automatically (and therefore downloading the images) without the reader ever having to click on it or read it.

So you should always take your open rate with a pinch of salt, and think of it as a guide, and an aid to measuring the trends on your email campaigns.

What is a typical open rate?

Unfortunately there is no typical open rate to compare your campaign to. The rate obtained for any list, or group of lists will depend on how it was measured, when it was sent, the size of the list and a zillion other potential variables. Sure, there are benchmark numbers, but even between benchmark figures you will find big variation in the reported open rates.

So instead of giving a specific percentage, it is easier to demonstrate some typical ranges using the following chart.

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Some broad trends apparent in open rates

  • As list size goes up, the open rate tends to fall; possibly because smaller companies are more likely to have personal relationships with their list subscribers.
  • Companies and organizations that are focusing on enthusiasts and supporters, like churches, sport teams and non profits see higher open rates
  • More specific niche topics, like some manufacturing areas also typically have higher open rates than emails on broader topics

So what should I be achieving? Give me a number!

It’s hard to know what rates are good rates, but the bottom line is this:

if you are getting an open rate between 20% and 40%, you are probably somewhere around average.

Very few lists of reasonable size are getting much above 50% open rates from normal campaigns. Your list may have some specific factors that give you higher rates; if so, well done.

However, don’t expect to be getting 80% open rates.  People are busy, they’re probably getting hundreds of emails every day and measurement methods are technically limited. 

How can I increase my open rate?

There are a ton of elements you can vary to try to entice more of your subscribers to open up your emails. Here are just a few things you could try:

  • Experiment with your subject lines: Try including details about the content of the email right in the subject line, instead of using your standard subject.
  • Send on a different day: Are your subscribers too busy on a Wednesday morning to read your email, leaving it languishing down the inbox? Maybe a Friday afternoon email would be welcomed.
  • Get the important content up the top: Remember that many people will see a preview of your email before deciding to open it or ignore it. Make sure your email is recognizable, and that your key points are in the top third.

20 HTML Email design tips

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Designing HTML emails can be tricky. Some great tips and best practices can be found here

  * Keep the Design Simple
  * Sign Up for all the Major Email Clients
  * Give all Images Alt Tags
  * Do not Set Widths or Heights to Images

Its a bit of a minefield, and several of them contradict good design practices, but worth studying if you're serious about creating great, branded HTML emails.