I regularly receive emails from a company called MandM Direct and here is an example of one of their campaigns and below I have listed the elements of the campaign that make it work.

1. Pre-header text: This text often appears as an extension of your subject line in many email clients. The pre-header text is also the very first thing readers see after opening an email so it draws your recipients attention, helps you get more opens and is very important if there is any image blocking.

2. Logo and brand: Brand consistency is essential when creating a product email. Brand recognition generally provokes a certain amount of trust, thereby reassuring your audience that the email they have received is legitimate. It is also worth remembering that ‘brand’ is more than just having a logo. Ultimately it’s everything in your email, including the colours, imagery, language and tone that you use.

3. Navigation Bar: The navigation bar assists in driving traffic to your website or shopping cart. They also provide important signposts for recipients who may not be interested in your email but would like to visit your website. Remember that you don’t want to detract from the main focus of your email so subtlety is key.

4. Urgency: Creating a sense of urgency is a very good technique to help in closing a sale. I’m not just talking about the good old CALL IN THE NEXT TEN MINUTES ‘shouty’ sense of urgency either. It’s more about reminding recipients when sales end, when stock is running low or sharing the benefit of making a purchase sooner rather than later. Creating a sense of urgency can encourage recipients to act rather than setting the email aside.

5. Call to action: This is the most important (and unfortunately the most overlooked) part of any sales email. Make it easy for recipients to purchase your product or service. Don’t make them go hunting for an option to buy. Include buttons that take them straight to a shopping cart. Or if you don’t have a shopping cart, make sure you provide them with a stockist (commercial retailer or wholesaler that stocks merchandise), store locator or an option to buy via mail or phone.

6. Relevant/tailored content: Make sure you are in-tune with the audience and environment in which you are selling. For example, this email highlights what items are hot, new and selling well. You can also tailor content by using event-related news, fashions, trends and your audience’s specific interests and preferences.

7. Catalogue imagery and information: Like a print catalogue, a product email must showcase your ‘hero’ products and offers. There should be adequate information to prompt a purchase but keep it punchy enough to avoid clutter.

8. Incentives: Providing recipients with free shipping offers, small discounts on future purchases, or the chance to enter a competition can spark their interest and also form a positive brand connection.

9. Social sharing: Use social media to help spread the word about your product. As well as including links for pre-filled tweets and status updates, you could offer an incentive, such as a discount, in an attempt to encourage your audience to promote you.

Think about your prospects and customers. What are their tastes and preferences? What are the sorts of things they really care about? Do they have a lot of time to go through a long email or do they just want to know about any sales or specials? Always remain focused on the needs of your audience and let this guide you when designing your product emails.

There are many email programs available and with the advent of Smart Phones, the playing field becomes even more confusing. This all makes it very difficult when creating content to test your email effectively. You may not even be aware of some of the email programs available.

This issue is further complicated by the fact that email programs are often upgrading the way they render HTML code. This is a particular problem with regard to web-based email programs such as Gmail and Hotmail who often make updates without any notice.

To make this a whole lot easier we’ve decided to update our compatibility reporting tools. This should make the process much easier and more accurate. We’ve teamed up with Email on Acid to deliver this new tool. We’ve nearly finished this and in the next few days you should notice this functionality in your accounts.

So how does it work and how do you use it

When you are editing a campaign, you will now find a new button under the Email Validation section. Ensure that you have saved you campaign by clicking Save and Keep Editing and then hit the Run Test button.

This will open the testing window and will start running the test automatically. It may take some time to process the results of all tests. So you may need to wait for a few minutes before all the tests have been completed.

Simply click on the icons to show the details of the test in the various email clients. In order to navigate to a preview in another email client you should click on the ‘Email Previews’ tab and navigate to the preview you want to see.

When viewing a preview, you can also switch to Code Analysis. If you have coded the HTML yourself, this will be useful in identifying what may be causing an issue in the presentation.

This is a great tool which we hope will improve your email campaigns still further and ensure you achieve the best engagement rates possible.

However, daily deal company Groupon do things a bit differently with an unsubscribe page that might possibly make you stop and think before finally confirming your intention to opt out. Groupon have treated their unsubscribe process to a little humour by including a couple of photographs of ‘Derrick’ who according to them is the person who thought subscribers would enjoy receiving their emails and because someone has unsubscribed they are going to punish him.

The image is accompanied by a clickable button saying ‘PUNISH DERRICK’ and I suspect most unsubscribers will be compelled to do so just to see what happens. After clicking, a video shows one of Derrick’s colleagues haranguing him before throwing a drink over him.

This is followed by the next image in which the reader is accused of being mean to Derrick and offers the option of making it up to him by resubscribing.

Whether this clever piece of humour persuades you to resubscribe or not, there’s no denying that Groupon have really given some thought as to how to get unsubscribes to rethink their decisions to opt out. It may work positively on some if not all but it certainly makes unsubscribing a far more entertaining and pleasant affair than is usually the case.

Groupon has been using this unsubscribe process for some time presumably with fairly good results and something other email marketers could learn from. Losing subscribers is never a good thing and making it easy for them to leave should be as simple a process as it was when they signed up but as Groupon has shown, there’s nothing to lose and possibly lots to gain by leaving them with a smile on their faces.

Until next time.  

The problem seems to be more prevalent in mobile emails than anything else with quite a few companies disguising the unsubscribe link or leaving it out altogether. It’s no secret that internet users are an extremely impatient audience and expect everything to work quickly and efficiently with very little input or effort on their part, so when they are forced to search a mobile email for a camouflaged or absent unsubscribe link they are quick to anger.

Losing a subscriber doesn’t mean they’re gone for good because for various reasons some choose to opt out but subscribe again at a future date so apart from the likelihood of being reported for spam the problem with making it difficult for them to leave is that they will think twice about rejoining your email.

For obvious reasons businesses don’t want to lose subscribers but denying them an easy exit especially on mobile devices only frustrates and angers them to the point that they start hitting the spam button every time an unwanted email arrives and those email marketers who hide or don’t bother with unsubscribe links in their mobile emails are being extremely naive if they think that subscribers will simply accept it and do nothing.

Because of the size issue, email marketers are forced to reduce and condense certain elements in their marketing emails to better optimise for mobile devices, but whatever else they choose to leave out, a highly visible unsubscribe link shouldn’t be one of them.

Until next time.

Creating something that users find interesting or amusing enough to pass on to their contacts might actually be the easy part, but successfully converting all or even part of that interest into sales is another matter.

Whilst your message should have a substantial reach, will users pass it on because they want to buy from you and perhaps recommend your product to others or simply because they find it funny, amusing, quirky or whatever? In other words; is your message persuasive or just entertaining?

If it’s persuasive it should generate sales; if not then it will probably circulate for time without any worthwhile results then disappear and be quickly forgotten. It’s a delicate balancing act to get the combination just right and made even harder because of fierce competition for the same audience.

Despite all the creative minds out there, coming up with something new is getting harder and harder to achieve with original ideas often in short supply, and as social network users are really spoilt for choice when it comes to products and services anyway, only innovative and extremely persuasive messages will do the trick.

I’ve passed on videos advertising various products to friends and colleagues because I’ve found them amusing, interesting or even downright clever but I couldn’t tell you what those products were because there was no persuasive language in their messages that caught my attention enough to want to buy what they were offering, and this is the point – your message should elicit positive responses and not be passed on just because it’s funny or entertaining.

Until next time.

According to an article that was written a short while ago, direct mail is alive and kicking; he stated that in the fund raising industry more money is raised through direct mail than email, in fact he says that email only accounts for 2 percent of the total funds raised. It is unknown why direct mail is such a heavy hitter in the fundraising industry but what is known is that is accounts for a substantial portion of all non profit donations.

However it seems that in the profit industry that email is holding its own, according to the DMA email generates over 21% of the total revenue of campaigns and 58% of marketing executives feel ‘Marketing ROI’ is currently the most important trend to which you should pay attention.

It seems that both email and direct mail have something to offer and while email marketing has one of the best ROI’s in marketing it’s also evident that direct mail is still in it for the long haul and using email and direct mail together improves response rates across the board when they are both combined in a multichannel campaign. They claim that if executed properly it should more than double and that by using these two media’s together will also strengthen your brand especially if your campaigns maintain a consistent look and theme.

Cross media advertising has always been suggested and something that larger companies have always participated in. The more ways you get your brand out there the better, and creating a multichannel campaign is not only effective for the current product or service you are marketing it is good for the long term marketing of your brand. So it looks like direct mail and email marketing can not only coexist but also work extremely well together.

Getting your emails successfully into subscribers’ inboxes is one thing, but once there, they are still up against fierce competition from all the other marketing emails that will undoubtedly join them. 

This is why it’s as important to know your competitors as it is to know your subscribers and signing up to their emails would be a good move and a perfect opportunity to learn how they run their own email marketing campaigns. You can discover useful information such as how often they send, what their emails look like in terms of design, what they offer that you don’t and importantly, what they’re saying to their subscribers and more often than not; some of your subscribers as well.

Although signing up to competitors’ emails is a good idea, to be completely objective it’s important to look at them from a subscriber’s perspective and ask yourself some questions such as did the content engage me? Was the content relevant? Was there something in it for me? Did it deliver something of value? Was the design and layout pleasing?

You might also have other questions, the answers to which may change your views and opinions or highlight particular areas of how you manage your own campaigns, but it’s important to remember that the object is to learn how your competitors do things – not copy them!

It may actually surprise you to find that others are not doing anything  differently and possibly experiencing similar difficulties to yourself, and which for those very same reasons are signed up to your emails and watching you, so although you might learn a lot from them, there’s always the likelihood that perhaps you could be teaching them a thing or two as well.  

Until next time.

Choosing which particular area or areas to test shouldn’t be difficult because to get the most out of your campaigns it’s perhaps best to test as many as possible if not all but below are some of the more usual ones.

Subject Line

What you say in your subject line should persuade recipients that your email is worth opening. Try a few differently worded versions of your subject line and see which works best.

Sending Days

No hard and fast rules here except sending on a Monday is generally considered a waste of time with Tuesday only marginally better. Wednesday onwards is usually the best time to send, but again – testing may show that these two days are perfect for you.

Images

Keep a check on your text to image ratio. Some subscribers may have disabled their images settings so you should keep them to a minimum unless you know subscribers have you down as a safe sender. 

Call to Action

Your call to action is one of the most important elements of email marketing and should be strong and firm without being abrupt or sounding as though you are barking orders. It can be done, so experiment with the wording to see what works and what doesn’t.

Landing Page

Subscribers have clicked through for a reason, so for any chance of a conversion make sure your landing page has what they’re looking for because an irrelevant landing page is just a wasted opportunity. 

From Address

Using your business name may be the best option but sometimes an individual’s name works just as well especially if you are known to the recipient. As before, test which option works best.

Personalisation

This is best done by analysing your subscribers’ behaviour and preferences and tailoring your emails accordingly. Use subscribers’ first names if you have them and experiment with your wording. Remember to avoid any words that could be considered as spam 

Continuous testing may seem like a lot of effort and to be fair this is probably true, but then you only get out what you put in, and you might be lucky, clever or both and instantly hit on the perfect formula for success, or it may take some time before you start seeing favourable results, but only by testing your emails will you find the solutions. 

Until next time.

Today’s email marketing software does just about everything for the email marketer and one of its most helpful and useful features is the ability to allow marketers to compare data from every email marketing campaign they’ve ever sent: information that can be used to enable them to segment future campaigns more specifically and effectively.

Analysing and comparing results is not only an important part of email marketing but a necessity if you are serious about improving the performances of your campaigns. Just because a campaign has finished doesn’t mean its data is of no further use; it’s as valuable to you in the archives as it was when the campaign was running, but only if you make good, effective use of the available information.

Most seasoned email marketers know this already and enjoy regular successful campaigns, yet it’s hard to believe there are others who despite all the technology available still send out campaign after campaign and don’t have a clue how many emails were opened, blocked, bounced or even successfully delivered; they just keep sending and think their work is done.

This isn’t only unproductive; it’s also a total waste of time, effort and resources and you might as well not bother using email for marketing purposes if you don’t analyse and act on campaign results. It’s true that email marketing could never be considered an exact science, but with the powerful reporting and overall capabilities of today’s software at least there’s very little guesswork involved.

Analysis and comparison of campaign reports and more importantly, making the necessary adjustments and tweaks will have a direct effect on how well each campaign performs and only by doing this will you be able to effectively hone your next one.

Until next time.

In a couple of days’ time First Class stamps will rise from 46p to 60p and Second Class stamps will go up to 50p. Is it time to consider email as your main method of communicating directly with your customers?

Businesses that often use direct mailing as part of their marketing program will need to think carefully about budget when it comes to posting out.

Email marketing has for a long time been a cheaper method of getting your message out there. Now it has become even more cost effective. It’s important to also note that the major advantage of email over direct mail is the ability to effectively track and measure response to your campaigns. This is difficult to implement with direct mail.

Some will say that there is still a place for direct mail, sending out catalogues for example. Perhaps now is the time to reconsider. Email can be used to distribute e-catalogues and link to ecommerce websites all of which can then be tracked more effectively than direct mail.