Category Archive: All things email marketing
The results of Emma’s holiday survey
How you responded & what we've got in store. Plus, we announce the winner!
Last month, we asked you to take our holiday survey and tell us a bit about your email marketing goals, habits and interests — especially as they relate to your holiday marketing plans. We were thrilled to receive so many thoughtful responses, and I’d like to share the results with you. Some of the answers really surprised us, and the experience highlights just how important it is to eliminate assumptions and ask your audience.
Take a look at how you answered below, and hear what we’ve got in store this season to assist you. Plus, find out a few tips for creating your own surveys and the winner of our survey prize!
1. Choose 3 things from the list below that you’d like to learn more about.
Since we asked you to pick three answers, we knew there’d be a healthy split among them. And we’re already thinking of ways to provide quick tips and to make your holiday emails look as fresh and festive as possible. Take a look at Mary’s five tips for retaining and attracting subscribers. Then, head on over to Emma’s 2011 Holiday Design Spectacular, and check out the holiday templates we’ve designed for your seasonal invitations, promos and greetings.
2. What article types on the Emma blog are most beneficial to you? Choose all that apply.
We’re glad to know that you continue to find value in our posts with email best practices and tips, and that you like our design showcases as much as we do. Throughout the holiday season, we’ll provide even more, including this recent holiday design showcase.
3. Where do you most often read your emails?
There’s lots of talk about designing emails for mobile these days, and with good reason — nearly 31% of mobile users in the U.S. access email on their phones. But, it’s also important to remember that the vast majority of subscribers haven’t booted email activity on their computers in favor of their phones. If we’re ever in a pickle where we must decide between how an email looks on a desktop computer versus a mobile device, we can make a case for designing for our desktop readers.
4. How many email inboxes do you manage? (Choose closest answer.)
This response surprised us more than any other. Boy, you guys are busy! Three inboxes is a lot to manage, and 14% of you manage even more than that. Your responses encourage us to keep our Emma Roundups packed with solid offerings each month — we want to make sure ours is an email worth opening.
5. How many emails do you send out from Emma on a monthly basis?
These results are a fairly close match to the sending behaviors of our entire customer base; in fact, more than 60% of our customers send 5,000 emails or less each month. In an industry where it’s easy to get hung up on list size, remember that it’s the quality of your list, not its size, that matters.
6. Which social network do you use most frequently?
Another surprising answer. We expected Facebook to lead the pack, but we didn’t expect it to lead by such an overwhelming margin. Perhaps it’s a false consensus bias of mine: I use Twitter so frequently that I wrongly assumed that more of you did, too. This becomes a question that could launch a separate survey. We’d love to know more about why you use Facebook most frequently, if you manage a personal or business account and, if you use multiple social networks, how you differentiate your usage. And do say hi to Emma on Facebook, too!
7. What sites, blogs and resources do you use to improve your email marketing?
We had two motives when asking this question: to find out which sites you find most useful and to add some new sites to our everyday reads. We received too many great answers to list them all, but here are some of the sites that came up again and again (go ahead, add ‘em to your Google Reader): Mashable, HubSpot, Email Experience Council, iMedia Connection, MarketingProfs, Marketo, Inc., Fast Company, ClickZ, CMO, Which Test Won, American Marketing Association, Sender Score, Open Forum, Marketing Sherpa, Seth Godin’s blog and eMarketer.
8. Fill in the blank. When it comes to my holiday emails this year, I’m most concerned about ______.
Based on your response to this question, we’re excited to be planning some style-specific articles for your holiday email campaigns. Stay tuned, and in the meantime, check out these articles:
- 5 tips for better-looking campaigns
- Stylishly formatted campaigns, parts one and two
- How can I make my plaintext pretty?
- Building a slice and dice campaign
9. Say that Santa has a magical elf who only answers North Pole mail dealing with email marketing questions. What would you ask him?
This was a fun one! We received so many excellent questions — some serious, some a bit silly — and we’ll be featuring the most common in a series of Q&A posts this season.
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Want to send a survey to your customers? Here are five tips:
- Provide some intro text to explain the purpose of the survey, how long it’ll take to complete and what respondents should expect to get out of it. If you neglect to provide this information, why should anyone respond? You’ve got to know your purpose first, then design and promote the survey.
- Start with a few fun, engaging questions. This helps to hook respondents and set momentum right off the bat.
- Design questions that get at what you really want to know. When I first designed our survey, question #6 asked, “Which social network is your favorite?” A colleague pointed out that it’d be a difficult question for respondents to answer — Favorite right now? Favorite of all time? A network I like the most but maybe don’t use a lot? — and that it wouldn’t provide information we’d be able to draw reliable conclusions from. So, instead, I changed the question to “Which social network do you use most frequently?” This more clearly gets at what I want to know — where folks spend most of their time.
- Save demographic questions for the end — and make them optional. Putting your demographic questions at the beginning is boring at best and alienating at worst. Leave them for the end, and give folks the freedom to answer some or none of them.
- Keep it short. Appreciate that your customers are busy, and they’re probably not inclined to take a survey that requires more than five minutes of their time. You can still collect very valuable information in 10 questions or less. Giving yourself a limit also forces you to cut out the fluff and make each question matter.
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Who won the survey prize, you ask? We used random.org to pick a winner at random, and the winner is … Lauri Young of Quantum Bank. She’s won a month’s worth of free emails on us. Congrats, Lauri!
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Get into the holiday spirit. Request a Readymade design from Emma’s design team.
Trick-or-treat, email marketing style
With Halloween around the corner, here are a few sweet moves to try & a few sticky situations to avoid when it comes to your emails
With Halloween just three days away, the holiday season is officially upon us, and we’re kicking things off with an email-friendly set of tricks and treats. As you prepare your fall- and winter-themed campaigns, consider implementing the three treats below — and avoiding the three tricks. Your campaigns will bewitch your subscribers (in a good way).
And, remember, if you’re looking for some design inspiration, you can request a $25 Readymade holiday design from our design team all season long.
TREAT: Birthday triggers that turn a profit
If you’re capturing your subscribers’ birth dates, consider sending birthday coupons by way of an email trigger — it’ll increase engagement and profits, especially in the months leading up to Christmas. And it may have unexpected bonuses. Take this, for example: I recently received a birthday email with a coupon for a free breakfast sandwich from Star Bagel, a bagel shop here in Nashville. It’s one of my favorite places so I was thrilled about the email. While I was busy running a few holiday errands (I’m starting early this year!), I redeemed my birthday coupon, and then I ended up purchasing more. (Nice work, Star Bagel.)
Read more from Clickz about birthday triggers bringing in the business.
TRICK: Not taking advantage of social media
Are you interacting with fans and followers on social media sites? If not, you could be missing out on an opportunity to boost customer loyalty and increase customer spending by 20%- 40%. Starting conversations on Facebook and Twitter is likely to increase the engagement of folks who may not engage with you in other ways (on the phone, for example), and as the become more engaged, they’re likelier to turn to you for your expertise. (Engaged customers also spend more. See that bit about me and the bagel shop.)
Check out a solid 12-step social media plan by MarketingProfs here. And if you need a hand getting your email and social media working together, stop by to ask us on Twitter and Facebook, or send a note to our friendly support team.
TREAT: Using video to mix things up a bit
We recently posted a video blog, and we recorded and produced the whole thing with just a laptop and iMovie. Have your own computer camera or smartphone handy? Give video a try. It’s a great way to add a human touch to your posts. And there are lots of helpful how-to’s out there. Our friend, Tom Martin, shares 8 tips over on Social Fresh for creating a video with an iPhone alone.
Read how one online floral retailer boosted response metrics and conversions just by adding video to email campaigns.
TRICK: Forgetting your images’ alt text or creating image-only campaigns
I recently got an email in my inbox with the enticing subject line “Get Dressed.” I clicked to open, and to my surprise, I landed on a blank white page. If your campaigns are filled with images, make sure to include some alt text. (If you fill out all of the fields when adding your image to an Emma layout, alt text will be automatically generated.) Alt text ensures that you’re providing some context to readers who don’t have images displayed by default. It’s much better for them to see “Click here to view our gallery of outfits,” than nothing at all.
And make sure you’re designing your campaigns to render beautifully without relying solely on images. Marketing Sherpa found that click-throughs increased over 83% when tables were used to add color and design to emails that had images blocked.
TREAT: Enable Social Sharing to grow your audience list
This might just be the easiest treat of all. With a simple click of the Add Social Sharing button atop your email campaign (in edit mode), you can add the ability for your subscribers to share your email on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Oh, and in doing so, you could be increasing your campaign’s click-through rate by 30-55%. Not too shabby.
Want a refresher on how to enable your subscribers to share the love? Grab our Social Sharing how-to here.
TRICK: Sending your campaign to your audience without testing
Giving your campaign the once over and clicking a link here or there in preview mode might seem like sufficient testing when you’re pressed for time, but it’s not enough if you want to ensure a solid delivery. Your emails will render a bit differently in the major email programs, and it’s a good idea to test all links from the inbox. Plus, getting another set of eyes on your email’s content and formatting will help you spot typos and formatting inconsistencies. Emma makes comprehensive testing easy by way of your free Test Group. Store up to 10 addresses there — try to represent a mix of different email programs — and send unlimited campaigns without affecting your monthly sending total.
If you need a hand getting your Test Group set up, visit our Help Guide.
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I hope these treats and tricks have sparked a few ideas of your own. Please share your tips with our community in the comments here. And if you’d like to show off your holiday-themed campaign, share the link, too. We’re ready to see the spooky and the spectacular. We may just feature yours in an upcoming post!
Liven up your email with animated GIFs
The '90s web animation staple isn't just for dancing babies - it’s perfect for spicing up your email campaigns
There's nothing stopping you from featuring this jaunty fellow in your email campaigns. Click on the image to view the animation.
If you ever want to get a little perspective on how far web design has come since the ’90s, pay a visit to Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and pull up Best Buy’s home page from December of 1996. Yikes, right? Was there really a time when a well-heeled electronics megastore used an animation of a turtleneck-wearing, gift-giving pig on its homepage during the holiday season?
The Wayback Machine doesn’t lie; back when the Internet was undergoing its awkward adolescence and everyone was infatuated with moving pictures, the animated GIF was king. It was a time of dancing babies, twinkling lights and bouncing smiley faces, all playing on endless loops. Not coincidentally, it was also a time of web-induced headaches. As the technology and language of Internet styling evolved, the bulky, simplistic animated GIF gave way to more sophisticated Flash- and Shockwave-based animations. Like the 8-track and the VHS tape, the once-revolutionary animated GIF became the butt of jokes (like this one, sneakily tucked away on our site).
Still, every format has its champions. Just as some filmmakers find inspiration in VHS camcorders and some diehard music geeks still make mixtapes, there are artists and designers who welcome the challenge presented by the animated GIF’s endless animation loop, limited color palette and potentially restrictive file size. When the stunning GIF-based artwork of collaborators Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg caught my eye earlier this year, I began to wonder if the email marketing world was due for a GIF animation revolution. If it is, it’s hard to imagine a better medium.
The Internet has evolved a great deal since the age of the four-frame animated firework. However, as our own Taylor Schena outlined in an earlier blog post, the countless display variations between email clients has kept email design frozen in a time before Javascript, Flash or CSS. Fortunately, animated GIFs’ early web prominence means that, unlike Flash and most other animation styles, they’re almost universally recognized (and correctly rendered) in the inbox.
If you’ve been wondering how to jolt a little life into your email campaigns, a moving element may be just the thing. But before you lay your newest email campaign on the slab for re-animation, there are a few things you should be aware of.
Not everyone will see your animations. When I say that GIFs are almost universally recognized, I mean that they’re recognized by every major email client except for Outlook 2007. Holding true to its reputation as the bane of every HTML designer’s existence, Outlook 2007 will only display the first frame of an animated GIF. While this is hardly a deal breaker, it does mean that the first frame of your animation should communicate your intended message clearly for Outlook users. So if you were planning a fancy reveal in the animation’s final frames, you may want to think through your animation carefully to make sure the takeaway isn’t lost on Outlook users.
Your animated GIF should be more Popeye than Pixar. Since every frame in an animated GIF can introduce a new or altered image, these files can get very large, very fast. If your image file size is too large, it could affect both your email’s deliverability and the quality of the display, especially on mobile devices (only a couple of Beck and Burg’s designs would be truly email-friendly). Limit your color palette and stick to basic movements with a limited frame rate, and your GIF will travel and present itself well.
Be bold, but don’t go crazy. Hipster clothier Urban Outfitters has a long history of incorporating animated GIFs into their campaigns in a way that’s both sophisticated and, sometimes, charmingly retro. When the design comes together well, like this spring campaign spotlighted by Email Marketing Voodoo, it makes for a fun, eye-catching email, and it’s an excellent use of the format’s limitations. When it goes too far, as many think this divisive psychedelic campaign did back in 2009, readers’ first reaction may be to get away from it any way that they can.
Make your animated GIF updates before you upload your files to Emma. Emma email campaigns will treat your animated GIFs like any other image file, with one exception: you’ll need to have your GIF file ready exactly as you’d like it to appear before you upload it to your account. Once it’s in your Emma account, you won’t be able to resize the image or rename the file.
If you’re ready to experiment with animation in your email, but aren’t quite sure where to start, Style Campaign has a terrific guide to creating animated GIFs in Photoshop.
Have you had any interesting adventures (or misadventures) with animation in the inbox? Share your story in the comments section.
Behind the scenes of the Atlanta Falcons’ interactive marketing team
We talk email marketing, social media strategy and staying focused during the holidays with Dan Levak, Director of New Media for the NFL's Falcons
Meet the Atlanta Falcons' New Media Group. Dan's on the left.
Read on for a glimpse at the Falcons’ fine-tuned approach — you’ll be as impressed as I was.
How do you use Emma to reach your fans, and how often do you send emails?
We understand that people have more email than they know what to do with so we try to be very disciplined about limiting and consolidating our messaging. We send a weekly e-report that’s a digest of significant events, stories and news. We also send a “pre-game” season ticket holder email filled with useful game-specific information relevant to folks attending the game — such as when the tailgate lots open that week, pre-game entertainment options around the Georgia Dome, etc. We also send various one-off emails to fans that opt in for various value propositions: ticket specials, third-party offers, etc. Again, because of the avalanche of email people face today, we are very selective of these third-party offers — there has to be true value to Falcons fans, or we won’t send it. On occasion our senior leadership team needs to directly address our fan base, and we use Emma’s platform to send out “Letter From…” emails crafted to look like they’re on Falcons letterhead. And we also utilize Emma for what we call operational purposes: season ticket renewal information, reminders for deadlines, applications for season-long parking passes, etc. It sounds like a lot – and in the aggregate, it is — but we are very conscious of timing and frequency of our mailings.
Who works on the Falcons’ email marketing strategy, and how do you set priorities as a marketing team?
We work under an empowerment philosophy. That’s one of the main reasons we’re with Emma — the ease of use of the platform. I’ve used several large enterprise email marketing platforms throughout my time with the Falcons, and many of them require two-day training sessions just to understand how to deploy a single campaign.
Emma’s platform was clearly designed with an emphasis on user interface — it’s so easy to learn and use. We’ve been able to empower various departments throughout the organization to deploy their own email campaigns. Our Ticket Office is a prime example. Folks generally aren’t experts using HTML or CSS, but we set up very flexible templates that allow them to enter their own content & graphics, schedule their emails, manage their own lists and even monitor their own analytics. It’s taken much of the burden off of our digital media group, and it allows them to be much more spontaneous when spur of the moment campaign needs arise.
What’s your most popular content, and how do you continue to come up with fresh topics?
We continuously ask the question: “If I were a fan, and I didn’t have access to our players, coaches and front office, what would I want to know right now?” It’s actually easy when you simply turn it around and always look through the fan prism.
You also use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to reach fans. What’s your social media strategy?
The $64,000 question. :) There’s so much focus on “social strategy,” and yes, we have a very specific one with very tangible strategic goals layered with discreet tactical measures geared toward achieving them.
Without going into too much detail, our social media strategy is centered around two things: be consistent in our interaction and be authentic. We are all bombarded by so much information in our lives. Social media platforms –- especially Facebook & Twitter –- along with the mainstream penetration of smartphones and tablets has created shorter and shorter attention spans among consumers. The mediums are so much more efficient, but this has paradoxically made it more difficult to get your message across. So when someone takes the time out of their busy lives to reach out to us –- via an email, a message board post, a comment on our Facebook page, an at-reply on Twitter –- then we OWE that fan a response. Even a simple acknowledgement that “yes, we heard you” goes a long way. Rewarding someone who invests their valuable and increasingly scarce time with our brand is one of the most important things we do.
A recent Atlanta Falcons Weekly E-report
Finally, we look at these social mediums as an extension of our online presence, and we’re not focused on our dot-com site’s major metrics the way we used to be. Uniques, page views, time-on-site is important, to be sure, but their significance is wrapped in the context of the overall universe — including social. I think making sense of social analytics and being able to derive truly actionable business intelligence from them is a major market opportunity.
This season, you’ll play New Orleans the day after Christmas and Tampa Bay on New Year’s Day. Any special tricks for maintaining focus around the holidays?
We never have issues maintaining focus. We’re all so passionate about our careers and pro football in general — this is what we love to do. What is difficult at times is not being able to spend traditional holidays with your family because the NFL schedule requires you to either play a game or be traveling to a game on major holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Everyone in this business understands that taking a few vacation days or a full week off around the holidays isn’t realistic. It’s what we signed up for, and it’s one small con in an industry that’s filled (literally and figuratively!) with pros.
Do the Falcons have any holiday traditions as a team?
Hopefully we’ll look back 10 or 15 years from now and say our holiday tradition each season was getting ready for the playoffs. :) Our owner provides a unique opportunity for all the business units that make up the Blank Family of Businesses to come to Falcons headquarters on a weekday for a mid-December holiday luncheon. It’s a great opportunity to meet and visit with folks who share your culture, but not necessarily your day-to-day experience.
We also partner with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta for an annual holiday ornament drive. Each year we design a unique ornament, and each one has the number of one of our roster players on it. We manufacture several hundred of each roster number, then the players get together and sign all of the ornaments with their number. Fans can then purchase the autographed ornaments (they’re tax-deductible). Because of demand for our highest-profile players, fans don’t specify which player’s ornament they receive — they’re randomly sent out, and it’s the luck of the draw. It’s a fantastic program that benefits one of the best nonprofit children’s hospitals in the nation.
The Falcons' ticket office sends game day emails to season ticket holders.
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Connect with the Atlanta Falcons:
+ Sign up for their email newsletter
+ Follow the Falcons’ main Twitter feed or any number of staff members, players and cheerleaders, including Dan Levak at @FalconsDLevak
+ Like them on Facebook
+ Check out the team schedule
Prepare your email marketing for the holiday season
Yup, it's time to start making your plan
It’ll still be a couple months before you’re dragging out tangled lights and sipping egg nog, but don’t wait that long to start planning your year-end email marketing.
Whether your goals are as simple as a thank-you email greeting or as involved as a tightly scheduled retail strategy, a little planning and strategy now will pay off when the busy holiday season rolls around. On the heels of our recent holiday survey, here are six tips to help you prepare in advance — and give you plenty of time left over for egg nog sippin’.
1. Craft a holiday story line. What’s the unique story you’ll tell this holiday season? It may not be wildly different from the story you tell all year long, but it should have its own angle or narrative. Spend some time figuring out how your audience will experience your brand in new and festive ways during the holidays. Pick a story line that surprises and delights you, and your audience is likely to feel the same.
+ Need more convincing? Read Susan Blue’s post on telling your brand’s story effectively.
+ Find inspiration in our video full of festive content ideas.
2. Schedule a list check-up. We say it often around here, but it bears repeating: If your members aren’t engaged, your efforts won’t be appreciated. Before your holiday email cycle begins, send a re-engagement campaign to get your less active members on board. That might mean a special email to folks who haven’t opened or clicked in the last three months or a holiday survey to find out what subscribers would like to hear from you this season.
+ See more details on list hygiene.
+ Read up on the “why” of customer surveys.
3. Consider sending frequency and timing. According to Experian, email volume increases 15-20% during the holiday season, and volume is at its highest of the year during August – December. Response behavior, too, shows some interesting trends. Total clicks for Christmas emails peak one week after the holiday, possibly due to interest in post-holiday sales, while transactions peak three weeks prior. Take note of Experian’s data as you plan this season’s email campaigns. Capitalizing on deal-focused subscribers after the holidays might serve you well, or you may want to plan campaigns during off-peak times.
+ Master the art of the short holiday email.
+ Looking to gain donations? Use our free “donate” buttons.
4. Get social. In the past year, according to Media Post, social networks have surpassed search engines as the most visited batch of websites on the Internet. So make sure your subscribers have an easy way to share your emails with their friends and followers by enabling Social Sharing, and add easy-to-spot links to your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn pages right on your emails. Moreover, think about how you’ll adjust your messaging for the various channels — and if you’ll run any channel-specific promotions or contests.
+ Do social media platforms have their own DNA? Read Grey Garner’s take here.
+ Add an Emma signup screen to your Facebook page.
5. Design for mobile devices. People stay busy during the holidays so it’s your job to find creative ways to reach them on the go. Small screens — and big thumbs — mean you’ll want to pay attention to your email’s width, its image sizes and the number of links. Include the most important content near the top of the email — even folks who choose not to scroll will see it. And if you’re sending coupons or discounts, consider allowing subscribers to use them right from their mobile devices when they’re in-store.
+ Want more mobile design tips? Take a look here.
+ Get all of the buttons in your email to look just right.
6. Make it memorable. Best practices aside, it doesn’t really matter how you do it, as long as you do it in a way that sticks in your subscribers’ minds. Have fun with a Thanksgiving-themed contest. Make a top ten list inspired by Santa’s reindeers. Include holiday photos in a standard Emma layout, or work with our graphic designers to come up with a fancy holiday campaign. However you slice it, if you present memorable content, you’ll stand out in the inbox.
+ See examples of our designers’ custom holiday work.
+ Request a seasonal design
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What about you? How are you preparing your emails for the holidays? What kinds of plans do you have up your sleeve? Let us know in the comments below, and here’s to holiday emails that spread cheer!
Illustrations by Emma designer Lee Floyd
Turning clients on to opt-in email marketing
For Emma agencies, educating clients on the importance of permission standards and list hygiene is critical. But that doesn't mean it has to be stressful.
Send great emails to people who want to receive them. That’s the phrase that rings in my head when I ponder how an agency speaking with a prospect might summarize the goal of permission-based email marketing. Pretty simple, right? The “great emails” part is easy to communicate, especially if they’ve seen samples of your work, or worked with you on other ventures. So now we come to the “people” part. Who are these people? Where did they come from?
This is where the conversation with a prospective client will turn to permission, and it’s one of the most important conversations you’ll have. Fortunately, our permission policy is pretty straightforward: To receive your emails, people on your list…
MUST BE:
+ Someone who is a customer, member or subscriber of your business or organization
+ Someone who has specifically asked to receive your emails by opting in or signing up in some way or
+ Someone who has bought a product or service from you in the past 18 months.
Emma’s permissions policy is in place to minimize the risk to our customers’ sending reputation, and to maximize the effectiveness of your email strategy. But the reasons for these standards may not be immediately apparent to a client who’s considering renting or purchasing a list, or attempting to send to an audience full of email addresses that they haven’t contacted in years. So when you’re getting to know a new client’s email list, it’s important to communicate the value of a healthy, permission-based list. Here are a few points to focus on:
A healthy audience means a healthy sending reputation: In the United States, anti-spam legislation doesn’t go as far toward limiting unsolicited messages as most email service providers (like us) do. It’s not illegal to send unsolicited emails as long as you label them as ads, include your business address and offer a way to opt out of your list. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea: Email traffic is privately monitored, policed and regulated well beyond the limits of CAN-SPAM regulations. Most email clients and servers have their own rigorous standards to protect their users’ inboxes from spam overload. And while your client may not realize it, their business builds upon their reputation with servers and spam blacklists with every mailing. Email campaigns to well-maintained, opt-in lists tend to yield high delivery, open and click-through rates, all of which look like little gold stars next to a company’s name. On the other hand, mailings to rented, purchased or outdated lists are pretty easy to spot. They consistently yield low delivery and open rates, and high rates of opt-outs and spam complaints. Servers and spam filters take notice — a company with a history of poor mailings will have a notably harder time reaching their audience’s inbox. In fact, they often have a hard time reclaiming their good name even after they’ve seen the error of their ways and changed their practices.
Our own reputation as the “carrier” of your clients’ messages also comes into play. To maintain our exceptional delivery rates, we work vigilantly to ensure that all the emails we send are in line with our policy, so sickly-looking response rates are often a sign that we need to step in to diagnose the cause. In situations where we need to find out more about an email delivery issue, we always start by learning more about the email list. In most cases, the source of the problem lies with the manner in which the email addresses were gathered.
Smart list practices yield a higher return on investment: In the early days, a good deal of conversation around email marketing revolved around accumulating the biggest email address list possible. Growing your audience is still an essential piece of any smart marketer’s strategy, but in recent years, email marketing specialists have increased their focus on engagement over simple accumulation. A good subscriber’s initial points of engagement came before they saw their first email — they bought a product or service, or they asked to hear from you. There’s a connection to build upon. An audience that hasn’t made this connection, or made it so long ago that they’ve likely forgotten about it, won’t be as responsive to your message.
A good email list is naturally grown: There aren’t any shortcuts when it comes to building a healthy, responsive email list. But there are plenty of great ways to attract the right people to join your audience. Find the places where your intended audience makes contact with you, and make sure there’s an opportunity to sign up waiting for them there. For some businesses, this may be a fishbowl for business cards at the cash register. For others, it may be on your company’s homepage. If your client is a heavy emailer, have they considered including a signup link in their signature? As you grow your audience, find ways to enable them to help you find new subscribers. Tweet links to your email campaigns and post them on Facebook. Encourage subscribers to share your emails with friends. Give them options to choose to receive the content that they’re most interested in. There’s nothing like watching your email audience grow healthy and strong. If your client can get excited about that prospect, they’re already well on their way to finding the people who want to hear from them the most.
Behind-the-scenes of an Emma split test
Testing subject lines in our monthly newsletter
As the oldest of three girls, my childhood was evenly divided among three categories: eating, sleeping and Barbies. While my sisters acted out elaborate dramas (shocking revelations on the red carpet! a scandalous elopement!) and crafted decorations for our Barbie condos, I generally busied myself sorting, categorizing and organizing Barbie outfits and accessories. In fact, I became a lifelong sorter.
It’s served me well at Emma, where we do our best to practice what we preach, and that includes audience list segmentation. Sure, you can send a monthly blast to all the folks who have ever given you their email addresses, and some of our customers do just fine with this approach. But if you can target audience segments based on their interests, preferences or history with your brand, you’ll create a unique, personal relationship that may just result in brand evangelists.
We’ve got some big plans in the works for better engaging our current customers with variable content, based on their behavior within their accounts. And we send periodic, targeted content to different types of subscribers. At the most basic level, we segment our monthly newsletter list into current customers versus all other subscribers. Just tracking the response differential is really eye-opening. We use our CRM, Salesforce, to identify all of our current customers, then utilize the search and segment feature in Emma to sort out all the newsletter subscribers who aren’t in the Current Customers group — and we put them in a different audience group. Generally speaking, we see an increase in open rates when we’ve identified a reader as an Emma user; moreover, we see an average 10% increase in open rates with readers who are actively using their Emma accounts.
For our July newsletter, we took our response analysis one step further. In addition to splitting our campaigns up between Current Customers and Everybody Else, we did A/B/C testing to see how different subject lines played out. Take a look at the subject lines:
- Version A > An easier way to send campaigns, an email success story and more in Emma’s July Roundup
- Version B > Emma’s July Roundup: An easier way to send campaigns, an email success story and more
- Version C > Click-throughs 10 times the average? How one company did it + much more in Emma’s July Roundup
Before I reveal the results, can you guess which subject line performed the best?
Emma’s handy compare mailings feature made it easy to line up our various versions and see subscriber behavior. Interestingly (or bafflingly, depending on how you look at it), the results weren’t consistent between the two groups. Version A tested higher with our general subscribers, while version C got a better response from our customers. Version B, which was the closest to the standard format of our newsletter subject lines for the last several months, tested the worst with both groups. Perhaps our readers are trying to tell us to mix things up more often?
The only verifiable trend we saw was the one we were already expecting: current Emma users had much higher opens, click-throughs and shares. One version of the campaign showed a whopping 44% open rate. Our active customers were also interested in learning more; an average of 19% clicked through for additional content.
As a lifelong sorter, let me assure you: data and analysis are your (marketing) friends. Use your response statistics and adjust your communications to suit your readers’ interests. Test out different approaches and see how your subscribers respond. And pat yourself on the back when you see your response numbers improve because of segmentation and targeted messaging — that extra works pays off.
Coming soon, we’ll be excited to reveal split testing as a feature right in your Emma account. It’ll make A/B/C subject line testing even easier. Stay tuned for more info on the Emma website and here on the blog. And if you’re just dying to hear more about my childhood adventures in Barbie organization, you’ll have to track me down.
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New to Emma? Give us a try for free.
Email strategy with Ashley Knecht
Mountaineers Books' digital media manager talks about audience engagement, triggers and more
Just another day for Ashley in Seattle's "backyard"
We are a nonprofit book publishing company, which is pretty unique. We were started by our parent company, The Mountaineers, an outdoor organization/club in Washington state. We have been dedicated to creating outdoor titles for over 50 years, and have grown to include two imprints, Skipstone Books (green lifestyle) and Braided River (conservation advocacy). In a time when publishers are scrambling, we’re working on mastering social media, redesigning our website, offering the most digital content of any outdoor publisher and becoming an email marketing super power. Plus, we’re crazy about the outdoors, which makes us super cool.
How long have you been using Emma, and how has the size and composition of your list changed?
We began using Emma in December of 2010. Our list started with people we’d gathered over the years with our old system. Using Emma, we created a mildly complex signup form that asked for name, email, state and outdoor interests. This way when we have a book coming out about stand up padding, for example, we can send our email only to the people who identified that they enjoy water sports. This has kept our open rate around 30-40%.
With our homepage signup form, we’ve only gathered 130 new names since December. But, in early March, we began offering small sections of our books to people using custom signup forms and triggers containing downloadable content, and we’ve gathered 1,409 (over 900 coming from one single download promotion) new names since the program began. With the hiking season in full effect, I’m creating downloads of free hikes like crazy, and the signup numbers have continued to rise!
We recently partnered with the Washington Trails Association, offering people who visit their site a free hike from our Backpacking book if they sign up for the Washington Trail Association and Mountaineers Books newsletters. Using our Emma signup form and a trigger, we gathered 956 brand new email subscribers in just five days. Five days!
I want desperately to learn the interests of our original subscribers (who we don’t have that info for). I even offer people a discount each quarter for updating their preferences and telling us their interests.
Using custom signup forms and triggers to offer content from your books is a fantastic idea! Tell us how you set this up and the kind of content you create.
We publish hiking guides, narratives about climbers, how-to books and more, so we have a lot of great content that is easy to piece out in small sections without losing the feel of the whole book. I ran a report of our top selling web titles of 2010 and began making small downloads for each book. Take our book, Day Hiking Snoqualmie Region, for example. From the digital book version I created three individual hikes people could download. I created three different signup forms in Emma, each with the name of the hike I would be offering. So, I made a PDF of the Twin Sisters hike, then made a signup form called Twin Sisters and then an email campaign called Twin Sisters. In the email campaign, I included the book cover, details about the hike and a link to download it for free. When someone submits their info to the Twin Sisters signup, they receive the Twin Sisters email with the download link. I place the signup forms on our book product page, as well as on our Freemium Download library for maximum exposure. I tweet about new downloads on Twitter and then repeat this process for all the books I can.
I’m gathering names like crazy. People are happy to subscribe to our newsletter if it means they can check out a free hike/route/content/how-to. Trying out the free hike usually leads them to buy the book. Plus, they already like what we offer, so the unsubscribe rate of our 2011 signups is amazingly low.
Some folks might say that this kind of customization is too time-consuming. How would you respond?
It is time consuming. Very much so. But things that work well that come easy just don’t really exist. If gathering engaged signups in large numbers was easy, none of us would be reading the Emma blog! For a book publisher, getting our content online is critical. So I’m dedicated to doing the work that I need to to ensure that we get new subscribers that are interested in what we have to offer. The turnaround is worth the work.
Are there additional Emma features you use to reach your audience on a personal level?
I live for search and segment. And triggers. Those two features sold me on Emma. We try to mass email our list only about four times per year. The topic has to be broad enough to ensure we don’t lose a bunch of subscribers, or I wont send it. Beyond that, I love using search and segment to find all of the people who live in WA and enjoy hiking, for example, so that when I have a new Washington hiking title coming out, I know just who to tell in our next email. That keeps my unsubscribe numbers low, my click-throughs high and my open rates skyrocketing!
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Give trigger emails a try for yourself. Read how-to steps in Emma’s Help Guide.
Get your marketing ready for fall
Tips for updating your audience lists before the end of summer
Ilise is the founder of Marketing Mentor.
But this is actually the absolute best time to focus on your own agency’s marketing and to prepare for the post-Labor Day blast of energy most people and companies have.
So, here’s the marketing project that will prepare you for your own marketing blast. It’s the perfect way to spend the last days of August, while it’s still quiet.
Clean up your lists – all of them. You’ve been meeting people all year – online and off, at networking events, trade shows and online, too – but I’ll bet some of them haven’t made it onto your mailing lists.
Which lists? Indeed, there are so many different types of lists these days that “cleaning up” your list isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. Between the various social media, you’ve probably got contacts scattered everywhere, which is good and bad. Whether they follow you on Twitter or have friended you on Facebook, you still need a reliable and easy way to get your message to everyone in your network. And you need them all in one place so you can reach out to them proactively with your targeted messages.
This week, do any and/or all of the following:
- Get everyone into Emma. Take all those scattered business cards and miscellaneous email messages piled in your inbox and import those valuable email addresses into your Emma mailing list.
- Find those same people on LinkedIn and invite them into your network. This way, they’ll see your updates too. Be sure to personalize the invitation message, reminding them where you met, especially if it’s been a few months. Make it short and sweet, but personal.
- See what LinkedIn groups those people belong to, especially if they’re your prospects. Join those online groups to see what issues are on their minds and in their discussion threads. Could be fodder for content strategy (which I’ll be writing about later this fall right here on the Emma blog).
- Check out their Twitter feeds. Follow them so you can learn about their needs and be there in their “moment of need.”
- Update snail mail addresses, especially for your best clients and prospects so that when the holiday season rolls around, your list will be complete, and you’ll be ready to send them something real in the mail.
- Pick up the phone and call, especially selected prospects and past clients to remind them you’re here to help. Now may be the best time to ask if they have any projects coming up. Some people are more available to talk during August when things are quiet.
Devote an hour (or more) each day to this activity between now and when things start to heat up again. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll get done … and how good you’ll feel about it. And don’t hesitate to have your favorite poolside drink nearby. That can make the phone calls a little smoother.
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Ilise Benun is an author, consultant and national speaker, the founder of Marketing-Mentor.com and the co-producer of the Creative Freelancer Conference. Her books include “The Designer’s Guide to Marketing and Pricing” (HOW Books), “Stop Pushing Me Around: A Workplace Guide for the Timid, Shy and Less Assertive” (Career Press) and her latest, The Creative Professional’s Guide to Money (HOW Books 2011). She also developed the Start Anytime Marketing Plan + Calendar for the Marketing Mentor Toolbox. Sign up for her Quick Tips, a bi-weekly dose of marketing tips, advice and resources, here.
What is my email reputation?
What it means to have a reputation online and how you can start actively managing it
Reputation is a word that comes up a lot when you’re working with commercially sent emails. You have a reputation with Internet Service Providers, you have a reputation with your audience and, in some cases, you might even have a reputation with the company that facilitates your email campaigns (an Email Service Provider, like Emma).
But what does it mean to have an online reputation? And how is it measured? Do you know if you’re doing anything to hurt your reputation? And what can be done to repair the damage?
The answers to these questions aren’t always easy to come by — and they involve lots of pieces — but I’d like to focus today on subscriber engagement and how it affects your reputation.
You likely think about email as just another form of communication. You send an email because it allows you to quickly tell your customers, friends and subscribers something that wouldn’t be easy, or even possible, to convey in person. Within minutes, 1,000 people know about your upcoming event. Try doing that in person, and you’d spend weeks traveling door-to-door. Try doing that over the phone, and you’d waste precious hours that could be spent planning the event.
But let’s imagine for a moment that you decided to embark on that door-to-door adventure. What do you think you’d find? Hopefully, plenty of people would open the door, recognize you and welcome you into their home, happy to hear about your event. But you’d also find some people cooking dinner or chasing their kids around in the backyard; they might open the door, but they’re too busy to give serious attention to your message and don’t invite you in. Perhaps a few people would take one look at you, wonder why you’re there and dismiss you hastily. Others might not even know why you’re there, and wait for you to simply disappear.
In fact, your email campaigns have pretty similar patterns, and we call that subscriber engagement. Email responses parallel each of the above scenarios. You see people who open, click and act upon your email; people who open and skim; people who see it, register who’s sent it, but ultimately delete it; and people who ignore it altogether. These responses help define your reputation with an ISP.
Take a look at your latest mailing’s results. Compare your numbers against industry averages, like the information available at the Email Stats Center. You can get really specific, based on industry or type of email, but to simplify things, you could stick with the current overall averages of 23% for your open rate, 5.9% for your click-through rate and 96% for your delivery rate.
Maybe your open and click-through rates fall within industry averages. That’s pretty good, but don’t call it a day. Take a closer look at the people who clicked on your email’s links. Believe it or not, these people are very important to your success and are likely to be the cornerstone of your good reputation. How can you engage them further? Consider setting up link-based trigger emails, or, depending on the number of folks, this might be a case where personally reaching out is a smart idea.
And what about folks who aren’t clicking? Since we’re talking about your reputation here, the truth is that unengaged recipients could be negatively affecting it. Consider sending a special email to folks who haven’t opened or clicked in the last year. Ask them to confirm their opt-in, and remove them from your list if they don’t. That might be hard for you to do, but if a person hasn’t opened or clicked in the last 12 months — and if they aren’t re-engaging now — it’s time to let go. Sometimes it’s better to have loved and lost than to have sent people a bunch of emails they weren’t interested in.
Okay, some of you still aren’t convinced. I can hear you saying, “No! I’m not letting go of these addresses. I built this list from the ground up! These people signed up, and they’re mine to keep!” I’ve got to be frank: The days of list size determining your success are over. “Stale” audience members are setting a bad example for all of the really engaged people who also hold an address at that receiving domain. Think of it this way: You send to 10 people at a domain, one opens and nine ignore it, and this exact pattern occurs once a month for a year. What do you think your reputation is with that domain? Are you a sender of well-received emails, or do you send emails that the average person isn’t interested in? If you want your online reputation to be positive — and if you want to increase the likelihood that your emails will end up in future recipients’ inboxes — it’s time to let go of those old email addresses.
Focus on the people that really love what you do. If you do that, your campaign results will be better for it in the future. You’ll be sending to folks who are, well, inviting you into their homes, and your online reputation will get better, too.
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Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
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