Email by itself is kind of like… a one legged stool. It can’t stand on its own. To be effective and useful, combine email marketing with search, social marketing and blogging. Most Business-to-Business (B2B) marketers are still trying to figure our how to apply social marketing techniques to their business. Here are 5 tips to get started. We’ll dive into more detail on each of these in coming weeks. Best tip? Just start! Don’t worry if you don’t have a ton of content for a blog, or bzillions of prospective subscribers. Take the first steps: Write like you talk Write like a real person and write the way you would talk in every day conversation. Try to avoid ‘marketeer / [...]
Archive | March, 2009
Install an SPF Record to Improve Email Delivery
This entry applies to anyone who will be outsourcing any of their outbound email sending from servers other than their corporate email servers. You are likely an IT person who had landed here because someone from the marketing department said ‘Hey IT dude – we started using an ESP and we want to maximize email delivery’. If you are using an Emails Service Provider (ESP) like Pinpointe, Constant Contact or Exact Target, then this applies. If you are just sending outbound emails from Outlook, then this does not apply. What is “SPF” and what does it do? SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework”, and helps to control forged e-mail. SPF is not directly about stopping spam – it is about [...]
Which is Better: Person’s Name or Company for Send-From Address?
Our goal as marketers is to develop a ‘relationship’ with our audience. Generally speaking, people respond to people better than they respond to ‘things’ – like your company. Based on our split testing, we’ve found that in most cases, you’ll see better results by using a specific contact person (yourself for example) vs. a general address like ‘support@’ or ‘sales@’, or just using your Company name. Your recipients take only a second or two to decide whether or not to open your email. If they do not recognize your company, they are likely to skip over the email. Also, general addresses are less personal, which reduces open rates. Actual Results Based on analysis of various campaigns across our system we [...]
Tracking Statistics for Forwarded Emails
There are two ways one of your campaigns can get forwarded. The first is simply that an excited recipient thinks your email is useful and they forward it directly onward. The original email along with the original, unmodified trackable links and embedded ‘beacon’ image (used to track HTML email opens) is forwarded. When the *new* recipient (person email was forwarded to) opens the email or clicks a link, this will register as an open or click for the original recipient. When reviewing statistics, what you’ll see is repeated opens/clicks registered for the same recipient. Here’s an example from Pinpointe’s email open reporting. Maybe this person was click happy. Maybe their cat walked across their keyboard a few times and stepped [...]
Using ALT Text Tags in HTML Email
What is ‘ALT Text’ and why should you care? As most of us have now experienced, many email clients now DISABLE graphics images by default. We haven’t seen specific metrics on what % of email inboxes have images disabled by default but general consensus seems to be in the 50% range, and increasing. So, if your email includes images, the recipient will see only a box with a red ‘X’ where the image belongs, until they manually enable ‘display images’ in their email client. This has implications with respect to email design. To demonstrate exactly what we mean, here’s what your well-crafted, graphically pleasing email looks like in an Outlook preview pane when image display is disabled: This doesn’t exactly [...]
11 Common SPAM Content Mistakes
If you send email campaigns long enough, you will run into spam filter issues. As a legitimate email marketer you can still expect 20%+ of your emails to just get lost in cyberspace, mostly due to overzealous spam filters. SPAM filters / firewalls use multiple techniques to determine whether your legitimate business email is SPAM . Today’s filters rely heavily on your domain and server reputation, but most filters still factor in your email’s content, and are based on the spamassassin engine. Content-based filters review your content and assign points each time they see something that looks like a spammy phrase, and certain criteria get more points than others. If your campaign’s total “spam score” exceeds a certain threshold, your [...]
CAN SPAM Act: Update
During each of our Email Marketing Webinars, we get questions about CAN-SPAM regulations, so I thought it would be useful to review the CAN SPAM laws. You will note in this post that, contrary to popular belief, ‘opt-in’ is surprisingly not a legal requirement. Offering additional impetus for the timeliness of the topic: we just passed the five-year anniversary of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act becoming official. It boasted overwhelming approval by the U.S. congress after six years of debate, creating the first federal law regulating spam. The CAN SPAM law went into effect January 1, 2004. Here’s a quick rundown of the law’s main provisions to keep in mind while sending out your email marketing campaigns. We’re [...]
How to Find Us
Stay in Touch... Subscribe to monthly Tips
