Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

Want to know how a SPAM Firewall works?  Cisco, who makes the IronPort Email appliance, has also put together a short, 8 minute video that explains how their SPAM firewall works.  It Cisco-specific of course, but does a great job of providing an overview of operation.  http://www.ironport.com/products/how_it_works.html

Once you’ve got the basics under your belt, check out our Webinar: Email Marketing 201: Advanced Email Delivery.  its about 55 minutes long and explains in detail how an email is delivered, and explains Email Firewalls in more detail.

There are two ways one of your campaigns can get forwarded.

The first is simply that an excited recipient thinks your email is useful, they forward it directly onward.  In this case, the entire original email along with the trackable links and embedded ‘beacon’ image that is used to track HTML email opens are forwarded to the recipient in its original form. When the recipient 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 (or clicks) registered for the same recipient.

Here’s an example from Pinpointe’s reporting:

The second way an email can be forwarded is when the email includes an embedded ‘forward to a friend’ link or form.  The recipient clicks on ‘forward to a friend’ and is then asked to input one or more recipient addresses.  Once entered, the email is forwarded onward, and each individual recipent can now be tracked separately.  Only problem is, most people who find your email interesting enough to forard, usually just forward it with a note like  ‘Yo Bob – this looks interesting’.  ‘Nuf said.

Every copywriter and journalist knows the importance of a powerful headline. The same applies for email subject lines, because as much as 40% of a recipient’s decision to open an email is based on the email subject (and sender).  Despite that, many still underestimate just how important the email subject line is. So here are some anecdotes, facts, and guidelines that can help you write even better subject lines (and remind you how much you should focus on them.)

The 50/50 Rule of Email Subjects

According to some of the best copywriters of all time, you should spend … Read the rest of this entry »

We ran multiple experiments on subject lines and summarized one particular case study example in our recent webinar: “Use Split Testing to Improve Email Responses (you can download the slides and view the on-demand version).

Here are the email subject variations:

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We already covered the top 10 Best performing headlines – so read, review and emulate.  Since no top 10 ‘Best’ list would be complete without the corresponding ‘10 worst’  list, here are the subject lines associated with the 10 worst performing emails campaigns, along with our opinion of what the recipient may have thought when they skimmed through their inbox.. and decided to delete the email instead of open it.

Join Us for a FREE Webinar on April 2 2009!

- Webinar about what? Why? From Whom? Aren’t most Webinars FREE?

Shop Early and Save!

- Oooh. Yet another promotional email. I’ve only received 219 of these today.

- What will I be shopping for? Early for what? Save how much?

Register to Win Your FREE iPod!!

- I already have 4 iPods.

- BTW, “Free” and “iPod” caused some of the emails to be filtered
(the email content for this email didn’t help either).

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Our customers ask for advice on how to write killer email subjects. We point them to our advice here “Tips for Writing Email Headlines That Work” where we explain the different approaches to an email promotion and describe top strategies for crafting winning email subject lines. This is an excellent starting point and anyone who takes the 20 minutes to read and apply these common sense guidelines will improve results.

But ‘guidelines’ – whether for email subjects or any other topic – are meant to be a first step to point you in the right direction.  Never underestimate the importance of measuring your campaigns in order to fine tune results. Split testing with a few variations can easily help you double the final response rates. In this entry, we look at empirical data from email campaigns to see how the top strategies match up against actual results and discovered some interesting data points.  In all we reviewed hundreds of campaigns and tens of millions of emails to see how customer campaigns measure up. In general, the advice and guidelines are spot on, but we also found that for every rule, consistently there’s an exception.

Our recommendations?

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