 3.5 Email Marketing
Email is something that everyone who uses the internet makes use of, although not everyone browses. Email is the best tool for keeping in touch with the customers you have and those that have shown interest, but haven't visited.
Permission Marketing:
It is important to create opportunities for visitors to your web site to stay in touch with you. You work hard to create content that scores well with search engines, and you may even pay to have people click through to your site. Once they are there, get permission to send them communications that match their interests from time to time.
Make it easy for them to stay in touch: "Subscribe to receive...." "Become a member ..." “Click here...”
Give good reasons for joining: special offers, news, updates, fast track booking.
Three types of permission:
Opt out: You create the list and email anyone you would like to, they have to click on a hyperlink in the email to opt-out. Make it easy for the Opt-out person by not making them complete a form or respond to another email from you to opt-out. If they hit the link in the email, Opt them out. Simple.
If you have a database that has not opted in, send out a one time mass email telling everyone that you would like to provide regular valuable information (specials, updates, etc.) and that if they would not like to receive this information, they should opt out.
Opt in: Provide a short form for the person to give you their email address and their name. Then send them your regular email updates. Always include an option to opt out with any email correspondence.
Double Opt in – As with Opt-in the person’s name and address are added to your database. The difference is that the Opt-in person receives an automated message written by you to confirm that they want to be included in your list. The last thing you want to do is pester someone who has opted in, but you do want to confirm that their email address is correct, so your communications don’t end up in bounce-land. Most internet experts agree that a double Opt-in is most responsible way to generate new email contacts.
Email Content – Getting your mail read
Subject line – most people receive more email than they want. The most important considerations in determining what gets deleted and what gets read is the Sender Address and the Subject Line.
- Make your subject line brief, include keywords early, grab reader attention
- Keep your subject to one topic
- If your subscriber uses an email spam filter, ask your subscriber to add your domain to their "white" or "friend" list.
Content –
- Proofread your email by sending a test copy to yourself. Look for typographical and spelling/gramatical errors. Be professional.
- In the 1st sentence: remind the recipient who your are and establish rapport. Focus on the frame of mind of our audience and write in a way that appeals to that frame of mind: have empathy
- Keep your paragraphs short and spaced to make your email easily readable. Avoid fancy formatting.
- Stick to a single message
- Write the way you speak, don't be too creative or formal.
- Use inverted pyramid format and make your point in the first paragraph. Give the details further in the email.
- Provide value, include benefits, and make your offer targetted to your audience.
- Give readers a call to action. “Please respond by . . .” Placing a deadline in the call to action has been shown to increase click throughs and response rates.
- Never send unsolicited attachments. Keep in mind your recipient may have a dial-up account and/or a limited size mailbox. Attachments make people anxious for fear of viruses.
- Each hyperlink in your email should spell out the direct address to the content whenever possible: ie: http://www.mysite.com/thispage.html . Many people print email and go to another computer with the information.
- Track the hyperlinks in your email to learn what kind of content generates clicks.
Use a signature: Your signature line is your e-business card, take time to create it and use multiple signature lines for specific clients: ie: tourismkeys.ca
Your sig file should always contain all the possible ways to reach you including mailing address, phone, toll free phone, fax, email (formatted “mail to: ” , Website (formatted http://www.domain.com). Add a tag line to your email which directs recipients to your web site. Change your tag line often and refer to something new and exciting to get your recipient to consider moving their index finger and clicking through to your site.
Determine organizational procedures to make the most of the tag line. Ie: everyone use the same promo and change it at the same time.
SPAM Labelliing - Be sure it's not you!
Email filtering for spam is being conducted on many levels. Each user can define settings to exclude certain email from their inbox for containing spam-like content. As well, internet service providers (isp’s) use software to identify spam email and prevent it from reaching your inbox. Some isp’s delete the email for you without your knowledge or permission., others let it through and pre-label the subject as spam. Spam assassin is a web antispam open sources client that some ISP’s use to delete SPAM. Use an email tool to assess the possible identification of your email as SPAM.
It may be difficult for you to avoid all of the keywords and phrases in Microsoft's spam and adult filter list, but here are the current words or phrases that might set-off the MS Outlook Spam Filter.
Pretest messages for potential spam-oriented content to help minimize rejections by ISP and corporate spam filters. See Lyris's Free Spam Checker Below.
SPAM and the Law
PIPEDA- (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act)
Under this Act, as of January 2004, commercial bulk e-mailers who establish or acquire lists of e-mail addresses must ensure that recipients have given some form of consent to commercial solicitation. This law also specifies that e-mail addresses can only be used for the purpose for which they are collected, and that the owners of these e-mail addresses must consent to any secondary use.
When to Send Email:
Most Web-based email solutions allow you to choose the time to send email. Consider the best times to send your communication based on the circumstances:
Business to Business: first thing in the morning, not after 2 pm on Friday, not after 12 pm on Friday in summer. Lunch is perhaps the best time to send your communication B to B as people returning to their desk often begin by checking their email.
Consumer: Consider sending consumer email in the early evening, when the consumer will be relaxed and more likely to entertain a non-business email: 6-7 pm.
Choosing the Best tool to Send Email:
With Email Marketing you need a system which:
- Identifies undelivered email (both hard and soft bounces)
- Easily adds and removes people from your list.
- Is easy to use.
For bulk e-mailing use mail list software instead of your conventional email client –ie Outlook. Your best bet in terms of expense of use, ease of use and automation is an online version. Many people mistakenly use Outlook to send mail to their list, because they don’t have to pay anything extra to send their email. They take care to protect their mailing list by placing everyone in the bcc section of their email. Since many spammers use bcc to send their email some isp's consider heavy bcc as spam and your recipients will never see your communication.
Benefits of owning email software:
- Low cost
- Run from your desktop
Drawbacks from owning your own email software:
- Can't easily segment customers and personalize or track email.
- Administrative issues adding and deleting subscribers may make the cost very high.
Benefits of outsourcing to a web-based email solution:
- always new software for a monthly fee
- run from their server, not your email.
- can segment, personalize and track emails.
- Administration easily handled by software.
- When managed externally, database elements that you collect can be dropped into various parts of the email to establish a deeper customer relationship.
Bounce Management
A bounce is a notification that your message, for whatever reason, didn't make it to the recipient. Ideally, these bounces take the form of SMTP codes. Using these codes, ISPs can communicate the reason for the bounce.
Regardless of the bounce message's exact wording, there are two types of bounces: hard and soft. Depending on whom you talk to, they might have more technical definitions; but here is basically what they mean.
A hard bounce means either the receiving server purposely rejected the message or the receiving server doesn't exist. Examples of hard bounces are:
- The user doesn't exist at the domain.
- The domain doesn't exist.
- The message was rejected, possibly by spam filtering.
A soft bounce usually indicates a temporary error with delivery. Usually the email server isn't responding or the user's mailbox is full. An always full mailbox may be abandoned.
Why Process Bounces?
It's important to properly process bounces for a couple reasons. You don't want to pay for e-mail messages sent to nonfunctioning addresses. If you don't process bounces correctly, a mailing list's natural churn will result in large portion of dead addresses on the list.
Monitoring bounces can help show a potential delivery problem. Perhaps an e-mail domain that represents a significant portion of your list has stopped responding. Perhaps your messages are being rejected. By monitoring bounces after every campaign, you can quickly correct any problems.
Most important, ISPs look at bounce information when determining whether they're being targeted by a spammer. Spammers' e-mail lists are of very poor quality. If an ISP detects a large percentage of invalid e-mail coming from one IP, the mail stream may be identified as spam and be blocked.
Minimize Bounces
Here are some tips from ClickZ to help effectively deal with or minimize e-mail bounces:
- ISPs recommend retrying hard bounces no more than three times. In our experience, retrying a hard bounce only once after a period of two to four days is sufficient.
- Remove hard-bounced addresses from the list either immediately or after the retry attempt fails. Remove soft-bounced addresses from the list if the address repeatedly generates bounces over a period of four to five e-mail campaigns.
- Use a double or confirmed opt-in subscription process to minimize incorrect and false addresses from the start.
- Use an e-mail change of address service to help combat e-mail address churn in your mailing list.
- Add an e-mail address update link to your e-mail and a profile update form to your Web site, enabling subscribers to update their address and preferences.
- Consider contacting bounced subscribers via postal mail or phone (if you have contact information and permission) to obtain their new e-mail addresses.
- To ensure subscribers enter their e-mail addresses correctly, include a script that checks for proper formatting upon submission. Additionally, consider requiring subscribers reenter their addresses in a second box.
- Monitor bounce rates continually, and establish a benchmark. Analyze the cause, and take appropriate action when a message lies outside of the norm. Though average bounce rates can vary dramatically, if your rate continually rises above 5 percent, you may have list input or hygiene issues.
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Media Relations are most easily managed by email. Create a group mail list and forward your press release in plain text without pictures.
