Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

(Updated March 6, 2010) This is our fourth in a series of educational webinars covering topics to help improve email marketing response rates.  Pinpointe is joined by NetProspex to present ”Writing Tips to Improve Email Response Rates.”  Based on analysis of millions of B2B emails that have been sent through Pinpointe’s email marketing platform, this Webinar provides real examples of the best and worst performing emails, and specific writing tips to help improve email response rates.  Join us for this 50 minute on-demand Webinar (you can also download the slide deck), where we’ll cover:

- The Top 10 Best / Worst Performing Email Subjects
– Writing Tips to Improve Email Response Rates
– B2B Email Content – How to Structure Your Email Content
- Analysis and Tips for Effective Link Usage

You can download the on-demand version and slide deck below… . And hey, please Diggit, Fave or Tweet about it!

		Download the Windows Media (.wmv) on-demand presentation (55 minutes / 28 MBytes)
		Download the Apple QuickTime (.mov) Downloads presentation (55 minutes / 21 MBytes)
		Download Slide Deck: “Email Marketing – Writing Tips to Improve Email Response Rates” (.pdf format) / 2MB”

If you’re interested in more advanced topics – check out Email Marketing 201 Webinar (aka “Why Good Emails Go Bad“) where 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.

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.

(Updated 28-January 2010)  Our first webinar ‘Email Marketing 101′ was focused on basic tips to improve delivery, with a concentration on email content – the easiest component for most of us marketing folks to control.

Once challenge many Email marketers face, is knowing  for sure which variation of their given email will deliver the best results.  Different strategies for headline text, body copy and overall design can dramatically change the response rate.  This Webinar covers several case studies on “Using Split Testing to Increase Response Rates”.  This interactive webinar includes interactive questions and a Q and A session, and presents several case studies that cover the following topics:

• Testing Subject Lines – What’s the best Subject Line length?
• Is it better to send from a Company name or a person’s name?
• Do special offers work?
• How does personalization impact email response rates?

You can download the on-demand version and slide deck here:

		Download the Quicktime (mpeg 4 / .mov) on-demand presentation (57 minutes / 17MBytes -downloads before playing)
		Download the Windows Media (.wmv) on-demand presentation (57 minutes / 21.5MBytes)
		Slide Deck: “Case Studies Using Split  Testing to Improve HTML Email Response Rates” (.pdf format)“
		Q and A summary (10 pages, .pdf format) We’ve summarized and answered several dozen questions that arose during the event, and dozens more that we weren’t able to get to live.

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.

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:

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.

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…

Read the rest of this entry »

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 not lawyers,  but following these recommendations will definitely keep you clear of the 100 known SPAM operators list.  Here are the requirements:

Read the rest of this entry »

Click tracking and Link tracking are built in to Pinpointe, so you don’t have to do anything to generate nice campaign reports to show these results, but it helps to know how these features work.

Tracking Opens

To track an “open” in an HTML email, we embed a tiny, 1×1 pixel transparent .GIF at the bottom of the message – it’s called a “tracker image” or “web beacon.” Whenever your recipient opens their email, the tracker image is downloaded from the Pinpointe servers, and this is instantly tracked as an email Open.  That’s the way things are supposed to work.  There’s one glitch here though.  Nowadays, thanks mostly to massive amounts of graphic porno spam, as many as 40% of recipients now, by default, will *disable* image displays.  Since the beacon or tracker image is just another image, if images are disabled and the recipient actually opens the email but doesn’t enable image viewing, then that open is not tracked.  As a sender – encourage your recipients to white list you (or add you to their address book) – this ensures your email gets delivered *and* that images will always be displayed.  This is why most people will tell you that you can’t track opens unless it’s an HTML email, and why open tracking results should be taken with a grain of salt. That’s only partly true.

Another tracking phenomenon is … Read the rest of this entry »

Our first series of webinars – starting with ‘Email Marketing 101′ focus on straight-forward tips to improve delivery with a concentration on email content – the easiest component for most of us marketing folks to control.  The followup webinar can be downloaded here or at the bottom of this post – “Email Marketing 201: Advanced Email Delivery Issues“.

In this Webinar, (aka “How Email Delivery Works“) ProspectDB and Pinpointe 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 – you might want to point your IT team to these slides. 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.  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

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…

Read the rest of this entry »