Pinpointe - Business Email Marketing Blog » Best Practices

Dealing with CSS Styles in Email

Pinpointe — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 07:46:07 +0000

As an email marketer you have probably already discovered that getting your newsletter or email campaign to display as you intended across the main email clients can be a challenge. The most popular email clients in business for example – Gmail (including Gmail for Businesses) and Microsoft Outlook 2007 / 2010 are pretty restrictive and only support about 40% of HTML / CSS styles. Even more challenging for email marketers – HTML ‘Best Practices’ for designing Websites are unfortunately often ‘Worst Practices’ for designing email campaigns, so your most experienced website designer / coder is probably designing email campaigns that won’t display right in a lot of email inboxes. (Hint: Always use the Pinpointe email campaign preview tool to see how your [...]

Top 10 Email Marketing Mistakes

Pinpointe — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 08:39:33 +0000

At Pinpointe, we see very smart customers make mistakes that cause their email response rates to suffer. Here are the most common mistakes we see our new customers make: Not running the SPAM checker Pinpointe has a built-in email SPAM checker that evaluates your email content using the popular spamassassin spam engine, gives you a spam score and provides suggestions to help get your email to the inbox. Wise customers use it before sending any email campaign. Yet some customers don’t run the spam check and confidently send their email campaign to thousands of recipients, only to learn that 25% of their emails were blocked or filtered by spam filters because their spam score was too high. In the Pinpointe [...]

Webinar – Use Split Testing to Improve Email Responses

Pinpointe — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:43:12 +0000

Watch Webinar This is our third in a series of webinars for your business email marketing. Based on analysis of thousands of Business to Business email campaigns and a few hundred million emails that have been sent through Pinpointe’s B2B email marketing platform, we share results of several email split tests to help you improve your email marketing results in a business to business (“B2B”) environment. Join us in this interactive webinar session that includes question and answer sessions throuhhout. Topics covered include: Which is better: Sending from a person or from your company address? Can you lift response rates using personalization? What does subject line length have to do with response rates? The accompanying slides and Q and A summary [...]

Webinar: Writing Tips to Improve Email Responses

Pinpointe — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 05:44:08 +0000

This is the SECOND in our series of Webinars on Email Marketing deliverability. Which is more important - a great subject line, or a fantastic graphic design and witty content? Will having more links in your email increase your email response rate, or decrease it? We'll explain in this 'Email Writing Tips' webinar .

Based on analysis of 100's of millions of B2B emails and thousands of email campaigns that have recently been sent through Pinpointe's email marketing platform, we'll cover specific writing tips that will help you to improve email response rates. First, we'll break the email down into sections, including the subject, send-from, introduction, body and signature. Then we'll cover email writing tips for each section to explain what you can do to maximize responses.

Join us in this 50 minute on-demand Webinar, where we cover:

The Top 9 Best / Worst Performing Email Subjects
What content should all good emails have in common?
Optimizing your Subject Line
Embedded Link analysis - how to optimize links in your email

The accompanying slides and Q and A summary are below... And hey, please Diggit, Fave or Tweet about it!

Webinar: Tips to Improve HTML Email Response Rates

Pinpointe — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 02:00:08 +0000

This is the first in our series of Webinars on Email Marketing deliverability. The interactive session demonstrates tips to improve delivery and email response rates for your well crafted HTML emails. We also cover tips to help ensure your email gets read once it actually makes it to the inbox. Email Marketing 101 focuses on email content and covers the following topics: Designing for the Inbox: Think "Above the Fold" 21 DOs and DON'Ts - Tips to Improve Email Delivery The on-demand version, accompanying slides and 10 page Q and A sumamry are included.

7 Quick Tips to Improve Email Results in 2011

Pinpointe — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:49:27 +0000

With 2011 on the horizon, email marketers can take this time to prepare successful strategies. Here are a few tips to improve performance and increase ROI for a strong new year:

The Ideal Email Subject Line Length

Pinpointe — Thu, 07 May 2009 06:23:00 +0000

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: 1: %%First%% – [Webinar] Split Test Case Studies (Feb 4) 2: %%First%% – [Webinar] Split Test Case Studies (Feb 4) *Note 3: [Webinar] Case Studies Webinar: Using Split Testing to Improve HTML Email Response Rates (Feb 4th) – Please Join Us 4: [Webinar] Split Test Case Studies (Feb 4) Notes: In version #2 we personalized the email introduction and used the recipient’s first name in several parts of the email. In the subject lines that have squarre brackets – [...]

Install an SPF Record to Improve Email Delivery

Pinpointe — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:10:27 +0000

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?

Pinpointe — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:39:02 +0000

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 [...]

11 Common SPAM Content Mistakes

Pinpointe — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:15:07 +0000

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

Pinpointe — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:24:53 +0000

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 [...]

Create “Ambient Awareness” with Twitter

Pinpointe — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:15:06 +0000

We just started using Twitter - our page isn't too impressive yet, but you can find us at www.twitter.com/Pinpointe. Twitter is among the fastest growing social networks. Nearly 4 million times a day, the 140-character limit “tweet” attracts some percentage of Twitter’s 200,000+ weekly users. According to TechCrunch, Twitter has 1 million total users. And Popacular.com runs a GigaTweet counter, claiming over a billion tweets and counting since Twitter launched in 2006. Here are a few Twitter tools you might find useful:...