Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

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 / messaging’  – readers catch onto it immediately and you’ll lose credibility and trust with your audience.

Connect and relate with your subscribers and be approachable. Of course, you can overdo it with the personal information, but too often email marketers underachieving here.

Network with other writers and potential content creators

Networking with others with similar interests is natural on a social networking platform. It’s not necessarily so with email, when we’re focused on getting our newsletter out on time with relevant content.

Still, there are many potential benefits to linking up with non-competitor authorities in your industry. Think: ideas for content to fill your newsletters with, possible guest writing opportunities that help build your list, and a word of mouth campaign that builds your authority and rapport (with real live, humans… and robots, like Google).

Start a a social networking group that your subscribers can join

Email, by nature, is a one-to-one communication tool. Even when you send to thousands of people, it’s still important to write your copy as if you’re talking to one subscriber personally.

Social networking, on the other hand, is a many-to-many communication tool, which differentiates it from the conventional web and email experience and contributes to its popularity.

Would your subscribers be even more engaged with your content if they could discuss it with one another? Would they then share it with their friends on the social networking sites they use? Having your subscribers communicate with one another may get them more interested in your content without you having to do any more work.

LinkedIn Facebook and MySpace are good starting points.  Want to see a good example?  Check this company’s Facebook profile out – they’re pros: HubSpot on Facebook

Use Twitter

We made this a separate item because truthfully, it is so frigging simple that anyone can and should be doing it.  if you stumble upon an interesting and relevant article – tweet about it.  Just added a useful Blog post on your blog?  Tweet about it.  1 sentence and a link to your site.  How simple.  Read more about Combining Email Marketing and Twitter.

Interact with your subscribers

Just because email is one-to-one doesn’t mean it has to be one way. People can always hit reply to anything you send them. Take advantage of that fact. Ask them for feedback. Use polls and surveys, and include the results and subscriber feedback in your future messages. TV and radio programs do this to keep you tuned during commercials. Even though your email might only capture the recipient for 30 seconds to a few minutes, this is a great way to keep your subscribers “tuned in”.

Link up your social networking profiles

Are you a social networking addict yet? Do you have a Facebook account or share pictures related to your website or business on Flickr?  Unless you have some serious skeletons in your closet, try making use of your email newsletter’s sidebar, signature, or footer and throw in a few links.

If you write your content like someone your subscribers can get to know and trust (see note above) and someone they want to be associated with, you just might make some new friends (and get exposure to friends of friends, and friends of their friends, and so on…

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 giving domain owners a way to say which mail sources are legitimate for their domain and which ones aren’t. While not all spam is forged, virtually all forgeries are spam. SPF was created in 2003 to help close loopholes in email delivery systems that allow spammers to “spoof” or steal your email address to send bzillions of emails from another company’s domain (like yours). 

SPF is an open standard – it isn’t owned or controlled by any one body or company.  More information about SPF can be found at:

• http://www.openspf.org/Project_Overview
• http://old.openspf.org

Why do I want to have SPF records for my domains?

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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 have seen that using a specific personal name vs. a general email address as the send-from’ address can improve the net open rate by 15% – 35% (or more), with a similar coresponding lift in click-through rates.

RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) is an excellent tool to help you ‘push’ relevant content to subscribers who want to keep up with your latest blog entries.  For example you can subscribe to Pinpointe’s Blog RSS feed here.

Why should you care about RSS and how can you use it?

• Keep you pulse on your market.  Say you stumble across a website or blog that’s interesting and relevant to you.  You can bookmark the site, and stumble back onto the site every now and then.  Or, you can subscribe to the site’s RSS feed and get the latest updates ‘pushed’ into your RSS reader, real-time.
• Keep your customers / prospects informed.  Get ‘em to subscribe to your RSS feeds and your blog entries and posts will pop out onto your RSS feed and into their reader inbox instantly.

Why use RSS AND Email Marketing?

Give your customers and prospects multiple ways to stay in touch with you.  Some people prefer email.  But many people may prefer to get your latest tips and updates via other channels – so use them.

RSS is a great complement to Email marketing.  Use RSS to make high value content available and develop a trust level with your prospects, but reserve some of your highest value content for subscribers only. After developing a rapport with prospects you’ll find that many will be willing to subscribe to your newsletters once you ‘prove’ your  content is worth registering for.

This short and funny video clip explains *exactly* how to subscribe to an RSS feed, like Pinpointe’s RSS feed.   It’s the best RSS overview we’ve run across on the net.  If you don’t know of RSS, take a moment to review this video by the Common Craft Show for an explanation of what it is and how to use it:

According to new marketing data from MarketingSherpa, 64% of key decision makers are viewing your carefully crafted email on their BlackBerrys and other mobile devices.  Chances are, your email looks downright awful when viewed on a Blackberry or similar.

The ‘use scenario’ we are seeing is that people use their mobile devices / smart phones to do real-time checking (often skimming) of email, and make a quick decision whether to keep the email and read it in more detail later, or delete it. They then go back and review / act upon more important emails from their desktop.

The survey also indicates mobile email users don’t click on links from their Blackberry or PDA — only 54 percent have ever clicked on a link from their mobile device. Users don’t make online purchases via these devices either (well, not in the US anyway – Europe and AsiaPac are different markets altogether).

A Few Tips for Emailing to Blackberry Users

This is common sense stuff but follow these quick tips, and you’ll improve responses overall:

• Deliver brief, interesting messages in multi-part MIME (both regular HTML and text-only versions).
• Revise your Goal: Aim for the Follow-up.  Since Exec’s using a Blackberry are only skimming and not clicking – make sure the value proposition is concise, clear and uncluttered, and you might as well do away with the links.  Entice the reader to review the email in mode detail when they return to their desk.
• Don’t put links to graphic images at the very beginning of your email.  Depending on the device’s settings, the recipient may simply see an a bunch of links.  The recipient either has to scroll forever (a major source of thumb-cramp syndrome) or more likely, they’ll just delete your email.
• Include a link to the web-version of your email. Most ESPs have this feature – when you create an email, an HTML version is automatically created and hosted on the ESP’s website. Try sending a text-only email with a brief introduction and a link to view the message as a Webpage. This also allows users to view the HTML version when users later view the email on their computer.

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 on the wrong keys.  But most likely, they forwarded the email to a few people (might have been because we embedded a darn funny Youtube video):

The second way an email can get forwarded is with the Forward-to-a-Friend form, which is trackable.

Most ESP’s include a ‘Forward-to-a-Friend’ form or link within their email. Now if this link is used for forwarding, then the happy forwarded can enter the email addresses of multiple recipients in an online form (automatically generated and hosted by the ESP), and the individual forwarded stats can be tracked

If an email is simply forwarded, and the recipient opens and/or clicks on links, the open and click will be registered There is presently not a method to track email opens for text emails; however Pinpointe can track link clicks even if the content is 100% text.

Each Webinar series we run, we get questions about the difference between hard and soft bounces.

A ‘Hard‘ bounce is a permanent fatal error such as – the domain no longer exists (company went out of business), the email does not exist (the person retired / left the company / died). Most Email solutions, including Pinpointe’s on-demand email marketing, automatically process bounces and either remove them from your email list(s), or change the email status from ‘Active’ to ‘Bounced’.  Hard bounces are automatically flagged and removed from your list so that you do not ‘waste’ email credits sending to non-existent emails (doing so can also damage your email credibility).

A ‘Soft‘ bounce is an intermittent, temporary condition. For example, the recipient’s email server might be temporarily overloaded or offline; the recipient might be over their inbox quota size or there might be a temporary problem with the remote server configuration.  The most common type of ’soft’ bounce reported is ‘Blocked Due to Content’ – you guessed it – caught in a spam filter.  (Tip: Reduce Blocked Due to Content’ errors by running your online spam checker when editing your email campaign.)

Soft bounces are automatically re-tried up to 3 times over the next 4 days, per campaign. After 3 campaigns (a total of 9 retries), if an email is still undeliverable, it is then considered a hard bounce and the status in Pinpointe is changed to ‘bounced’.

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 jump out and say READ ME!

So how do you improve readability and and design if images aren’t going to be displayed?

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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 email is sent to the junk folder.

So “what’s the threshold I need to stay under?”

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Our first series of webinars – starting with ‘Email Marketing 101′ were focused on more straight-forward tips to improve delivery, with a concentration on email content – the easiest component for most of us marketing folks to control.  In this Webinar, (aka “Why Good Emails Go Bad“) we take it up a notch and explain in detail, the end-to-end trials and tribulations of an email message as it flows from your outbox to (hopefully) the recipients inbox. This webinar is more technical and ‘deeper’ than our previous webinars. Our goal was to not only leave you with a dozen or so specific tips, but to help you understand all the places where your email can get tripped up before finally hitting the recipient’s inbox. The topics include:

• Review CAN-SPM Requirements 
• Update: How current Enterprise Email Filters work
• Tracking an Email from send to delivery: possible pitfalls along the way
• Designing for the Inbox

You can download the on-demand version and slide deck at the bottom of this posting.  And hey, please Diggit!

Here’s an overview diagram – you can also download the slide deck and on-demand version of the presentation here…

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