Avoid Misleading Subject Lines

September 29, 2011 By

misleading subject linesPermission-based email marketing should be the foundation of your program.  Growing your list organically and without spamming is the best way to earn a great reputation as a sender and improve your sender score.

Part of increasing your subscriber trust is being straight in the subject line about the contents of your newsletter. Informative subject lines are the best route to go when sending your newsletter, misleading subject lines not only annoy recipients but are also illegal.

Email subject line: “You’ve won a free iPod!”
Email content: “Well, you didn’t really win a free iPod, but…”

According to the CAN-SPAM Act, misleading subject lines are illegal. Yes, email marketers, the above example is against the law. While you don’t have to summarize the entire email in your subject line, be sure you don’t lie or mislead subscribers.

If you’re having a tough time coming up with subject lines, there are many resources that can help you practice and improve.  Don’t send it and forget it but rather go back and compare subject lines to find the most profitable, the ones that got the most results/actions that you wanted out of your campaigns.

Lying, cheating, and misleading may lead to more deleted emails and subscribers marking your messages as spam.  Be clever, be funny, be informative, just don’t be deceptive in your email marketing strategy.

Have tips for writing a great subject line?  Share them in the comments!

Chel Wolverton
Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Content Marketing, Product Tips Tagged With: ,

Social Game Changes for Email Marketers

September 26, 2011 By

The past week or so has seen some amazing, whiplash inducing changes in social media marketing:

  • Google+ has opened up to the public and added 10 million new members in less than a week, bringing its total user base to 50 million people. (source)
  • Facebook has changed how it displays information on all its user profiles, putting more important items in the news feed and less important items in a ticker.
  • Facebook at its developer conference, F8, announced a series of major changes including its new timeline that will display content for a user’s entire life and Open Graph, which makes all applications inherently social.

Marketers would be forgiven for feeling a bit of panic and a sense of being overwhelmed about all of these changes and their vast, far-reaching implications. Email marketers have the added stress of wondering how these new changes in social media will impact subscribers and customers’ interactions with email itself. Allow us to share some insights and things you should be doing as an email marketer to position yourself for the advantage with all of these changes.

Google+

Google+ isn’t so significantly different an animal from other social networks that your practices need to change. Rather, simply incorporate it into your existing social media workflow.

1. There are no corporate pages permitted on Google+ just yet, so in lieu of that, work on having your staff set up individual profiles and promote your content. If you don’t have anyone on staff who is socially savvy, now might be the time to get that rolling. The more that your staff can share and +1 your content, the better it will perform.

Useful and powerful: post a link to your newsletter’s View in Browser version to Google+ when you publish it.

2. Incorporate share and +1 with your network snippets in all of your email content. Even if your email service provider doesn’t allow this, you can use third party services like ShareThis to create links in your email that will allow it to be shared. For WhatCounts clients on the Publicaster platform, Google +1 is built in.

3. Remember to segment out your database and promote Google+ content to anyone with a GMail.com address! Now that Google+ is open to the world, anyone with a GMail account is automatically eligible to participate.

WhatCounts, Inc.: Lists

4. With the new document sharing capabilities in Hangouts, consider creating a circle of customers or your top subscribers (by open rate and click through rate), then having a hangout with them to review your email marketing messages for impact and suggestions prior to sending.

Facebook

Facebook’s changes mean that simply “Liking” things will be significantly less impactful. By moving items such as likes to the scrolling news ticker, they’ll be much less visible to friends of friends as they’ll simply pass by.

Facebook (89)

Conversely, shared stories, links, and content live in the central timeline. As a marketer, getting people to share your content rather than press the Like button is far more important now.

Some things you can do as an email marketer:

1. Ask people to share newsletters on Facebook, rather than using a Like button. Sharing is the new Like.

2. If you want to drive a specific piece of content on Facebook, post a link to it on your wall and then send a followup email to your evangelists, asking them to reshare it on their profiles.

WhatCounts, Inc. - Enterprise Email Marketing Solutions (89)

3. When using Share/Like buttons or links in your email newsletters, track who clicks on them and segment them out into a separate list such as socially-savvy subscribers or influencers. You’ll want to be able to reach out to these influencers first any time you need to bring attention to new content or campaigns.

4. If you’ve got a Facebook app, consider having your developers integrate email marketing more tightly into it to encourage usage and participation. Facebook will be promoting the visibility of apps based on their Graph Rank algorithm, which effectively requires marketers to be constantly promoting an app in order for it to be found by Facebook users. By incorporating mechanisms that send email to app users, your app will rank better.

Social media is changing the game rapidly, and these latest network changes from Google and Facebook add additional challenges to your marketing strategies. The one commonality between them is that your email list is now more valuable than ever, as you’ll be able to highlight how you’re adapting to changes in social media to your subscribers.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Social media, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , ,

Getting Started With Email Marketing

September 21, 2011 By

As an Implementation Manager at WhatCounts, my job is to help you with technical configuration and provide platform training and support to get you started on the right foot, with the best email delivery possible.

In my role, I get asked a lot of questions about all aspects of email marketing. Because one size does not fit all, I often find it a useful exercise to turn those questions back around to promote introspection and brainstorming which will help you adhere to best practices and excel in your email marketing program.

Below are frequent topics that arise:

1. Subscription and permission

  • What is the sign up experience like for a new subscriber – clear and easy?
  • Are you truly asking for permission?
  • Are you setting expectations with regard to frequency and ANYTHING ELSE a subscriber should know about? (Tip: use a landing page, or a welcome email, or both.)

2. Privacy policy

  • If you don’t have one on your website – get one!

3. List Hygiene

  • Consider double-opt-in as the best way to get a clean list of addresses.
  • When migrating from another ESP, and exporting addresses, do you know which subscribers previously hard bounced, complained, or opted out so that you don’t mistakenly import them?
  • Do you know which of your subscribers are currently active and engaged?

4. Avoid SPAM complaints

  • How? Start by referring back to all points above. Also think about…
  • By definition, SPAM is unsolicited email. People will have different opinions of what they consider to be SPAM, even if they subscribed to it.
  • It only takes a small number of spam complaints for delivery problems to arise, so you need to look inward and figure out WHY someone would be complaining and fix it ASAP. (See next bullet points as a place to start.)
  • Will you send targeted/relevant/timely messages? At what frequency?
  • Is opting out difficult or not obvious?
  • Do you have a way to get feedback or ask for subscriber preferences?

5. Goals

  • Decide in advance what specific responses and goals you wish to achieve with each email campaign. Gauging your success on goals that are too generic, such as “be relevant” or “send compelling email” will be challenging.

For example, are you trying to:

    • drive customers to visit your site or store?
    • motivate purchases?
    • introduce a new product?
    • obtain registration for a service?
    • inform with a monthly newsletter?

Setting goals will not only help you be successful in the long run, but it will make an immediate decision such as “what should be in my creative template?” much easier to answer.

The above list is designed to make you think! If you’ve been email marketing for a while, perhaps you’ll use this as an opportunity to reflect on your existing program and make some changes. If email marketing is a new endeavor, then hopefully my list will lend focus to the things that you need to do in order to take that next step (with your other right foot) and jump into email marketing!

Liz Rosen
Implementation Manager, WhatCounts

Filed Under: Best Practices, Creative & Design Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

How to use Twitter to drive email subscriptions

September 19, 2011 By

Email + Social has been an equation that’s been loudly trumpeted by marketers for years, from the early days of Friendster and MySpace to today, but most email marketers and social media marketers are not effectively connecting the dots. Each channel synergizes powerfully with the other, but only if you have the foresight to tie them together at the hip.

Today, we’re going to explore how to tie together Twitter and email. Obviously, many of these suggestions apply equally well to other channels such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. so please feel free to adapt them to wherever your audience is.

Let’s start by talking about how to build and grow your Twitter audience. We’ll look back to St. Elmo Louis’ classic sales structure, AIDA:

  • Attention/Awareness: Is your audience even aware that you exist? Have you captured their attention in some fashion?
  • Interest: Is your audience interested in you at all?
  • Desire/Decision: Does your audience want to interact with you and/or make any kind of decision about you?
  • Action: Will your audience take the recommended course of action?

Let’s now map the AIDA structure to your Twitter + Email efforts.

Untitled

Attention

Who should you be following? For the purposes of growing a customer-centric audience, follow people who are or could be your customers. For example, let’s say you were a coffee retailer selling coffee to restaurants. You might use a free tool like FollowerWonk to find restaurant owners:

Twitter users with "restaurant owner" in their bios

Once you’ve followed your target audience, add them to a Twitter list to tune into what they have to say.

Interest

Set up a basic listening dashboard using the Twitter tool of your choice for search terms relating to what you have to offer, such as coffee beans in our example above, then participate in relevant conversations about it. Separately, keep track of your Twitter list of eligible prospects and participate in conversations with them as appropriate.

Twitter / @cspenn/restaurant-owners

Desire

Remind people who you are on a daily basis; ideally, do so when they are most active in social networks. WhatCounts does a daily welcome message, but you can come up with any variation of your own:

Twitter / @whatcounts: Happy Chilly Friday from t ...

Action

You need an effective destination to turn social traffic into captured data. For example, on the WhatCounts web site, you’ll find a dedicated landing page introducing your company to your Twitter followers.

Welcome aboard, Twitter friends!

On that page is a contact form which also allows visitors to subscribe to our newsletters. It’s important to do at least minimal customization on the landing page that is focused on the audience you’re working to acquire. Sending traffic from any source to a generic website home page almost always converts poorly.

Closing the Social+Email Loop

Be sure you close the loop with your Twitter followers by showcasing some of your conversations with them (and ideally, answered questions) in your newsletters. Be sure to highlight not only conversations, but also give people obvious, bold calls to action to share your email with their social networks. Here’s an example from our weekly newsletter, the GameChanger:

GameChanger: Email Marketing News from WhatCounts for 9/15/11

Finally, ensure that you’re collecting Twitter handles with your email addresses. This is important as not everyone who subscribes to your newsletter will be coming from Twitter! By closing the loop this way, you can follow every subscriber from any source, ensuring that you’re building as complete a Twitter audience as possible.

Subscribe to our Newsletter!

Conclusion

Social media is a powerful channel for reaching customers and finding new ones to talk to. Email marketing is a powerful channel for reaching out to customers and staying top of mind. By combining the two together, you can take advantage of the powerful specialties of each and deliver great results with your digital marketing.

We’d be remiss, of course, in our own marketing if we didn’t suggest subscribing to the GameChanger, our weekly newsletter. Are you subscribed? You should be!

E-Mail Address:
First Name:
Last Name:
Company/Organization:
Title:
Twitter ID:

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Social media, Strategy Tagged With: , ,

Design Your Emails With or Without Images

September 14, 2011 By

Are you designing your emails accordingly? Probably not.

One of the top design mistakes email marketers make is creating an image-heavy concept or one that cannot be recognized unless images are turned on. If your call-to-action or primary message is embedded in an image, you are guilty of this as well! This means recipients could miss your email content and call-to-action, causing them to delete your email or simply unsubscribe (and you will be missing that strong return on investment that effective email marketing provides!).

When it comes to images in your email creative, at WhatCounts we recommend that you stray from having one big image make up your email template. Furthermore, we recommend that you include calls-to-action both in and outside of the imagery. Thirdly, should your design have many images or just one, be sure to include informative image ALT tags.

Image ALT tags can be designated within the HTML code and they serve as a description for the image that may not be appearing for all users. In the case of both examples above, if the images included descriptive/compelling image ALT tags, I may have an idea of what the image would include; I may be enticed to download the images.

Finally, another way to decrease the impact is to become Sender Score Certified by Return Path. The certification program allows images and links to be automatically displayed or “turned on” in Hotmail and Yahoo. This is a privilege which Jupiter Research says can double campaign response.

So, to recap, here are 4 tips to avoid the “white blah effect”:

  1. Avoid sending emails that are made up of one large image
  2. Include strong calls-to-action inside and outside of the email’s imagery
  3. Add an image ALT tag to every image in your design
  4. Become Sender Score Certified to allow for automatic images-on functionality in Hotmail and Yahoo

It’s as easy as that! Happy emailing.

Lindsay Clark
Senior Services Account Manager, WhatCounts

Editor’s Note: We have changed the title of this post after a bit of confusion over the stats included in the original title.

[cta1]?
Filed Under: Creative & Design, Strategy Tagged With: , , ,

How to turn email marketing metrics into insights

September 9, 2011 By

We sat down with Tom Webster, Vice President of Strategy at Edison Research (a WhatCounts client) at the Social Fresh Charlotte conference to ask him about how he transforms marketing metrics into insights. Gain some valuable tips about testing, data, and understanding what counts in this short 4 minute video.

Thanks, Tom, for sharing your insights with us!

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Metrics, Strategy, Video Tagged With: , , ,

Surveying Your Subscribers who Leave

September 8, 2011 By

We’ve all been there, losing readers to our blog, losing subscribers to our newsletters. When this happens consistently we sometimes tend to panic, analyzing the numbers resulting from each send. Open rates, click rates, and so on.

We can estimate what the problem may be, however the only way to resolve the underlying issue is to go directly to the source. Ask the question and get some real answers.

  • Is it your content?
  • Are you sending too often?
  • Are you sending timely information when it matters to the subscriber?

It may seem counterintuitive to survey those who are opting out. However, the responses will help with understanding what variables you should test in order to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy.

Here are some tips for surveying:

1. Check what data is already collected by your Email Service Provider before replicating the effort, data and ask more questions that are unnecessary.  Some ESPs will ask the subscriber why they are leaving.

If your ESP doesn’t provide a survey for those unsubscribing, here’s what you can to do to make it short and painless and still get the information you need to adjust your strategy if necessary.

2. Make the survey short. Try to keep it to 1 burning question. (Have more questions? See the next suggestion.) Don’t ask 10, 20, 50 questions or you risk losing the survey results.

3. Ask the most important and very targeted question first. “Can you please take a moment to tell us why you’re unsubscribing?” should be at the top of the list with a paragraph form box for a detailed answer.

4. Collect data for more than a week or two. Before making changes to any email marketing strategy, making a decision quickly because panic is inspiring action is not the way to go. Collect the data for at least 6 weeks.

5. Do something with the data collected (do the work). One idea? Feed all of the long form answers into a word cloud generator and see what stands out. Then dig into the answers for more detail. Collecting is only the first step, analyzing the data is the part that helps you make decisions.

6. Test one variable at a time. In order to determine what changes are actually influential to your email marketing, testing one variable at a time is vital. If you change a bunch of things at once, you’ll never know which of the changes truly moved the needle.

7. Ask subscribers to change their frequency preferences or to subscribe to other lists that may be relevant to their needs. If the monthly newsletter isn’t working for them, tips and tricks on email marketing for instance may be a better fit. Make the choices clear and state exactly what’s to be expected in terms of frequency or information.

The survey is the best way to start asking better questions. It isn’t necessarily going to give you instant, game changing answers but it will start you down the path of creating more fulfilling, more valuable emails that will retain current subscribers and attract new ones.

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Best Practices, Strategy Tagged With: , ,

Email as sales: prospecting with email

September 6, 2011 By

The entire function of sales prospecting is closely related to its gemological roots: find the gems from your raw ores and otherwise uninteresting rocks. Sales prospects, loosely defined, are those individuals who are qualified to buy and have expressed at least a minor amount of engagement with you.

For example, someone who searches for email marketing in Google and arrives at the WhatCounts web site via that search would be a prospect. Someone who signs up for a newsletter might even be a prospect, depending on your sales process.

What sort of information would be useful to a salesperson specifically interested in prospecting an email list? Here are three key areas to look at:

1. User-submitted information. If you have the ability to collect job title and company name, you’ll get far more mileage out of your email list than a list that is email address only. User-submitted information fulfills two important indicators for sales prospecting: first, the person is interested enough to fill out a form that’s longer than just an address, and second, the job title and company help assess authority to buy.

2. Users who have opened your emails more than once. Ideally, if you can separate out people by the number of different messages they’ve opened, you’ll see clearly who is the most interested in reading what you have to say. In turn, these folks may likely be more receptive to selling efforts.

3. Users who have shared your emails with their networks. Sharing takes engagement to an entirely new level for your prospects because sharing is a public endorsement that the prospect thinks what you have is of value.

Finding each of these metrics in your email service provider is fairly simple. To amplify their power (particularly on large lists), take the time to blend them together. Instead of just looking for people who have opened your messages, look for people who have opened your messages AND who have provided a job title or company in their registration. Instead of just looking at share with your network data alone, look at people who have opened and shared the most.

Publicaster: Segmentation Manager

Once you’ve identified the specific micro-segments in your list – and out of 10,000 people, they may only be a few dozen – send them highly targeted, highly focused messages that acknowledge their level of engagement and invite them to speak with you, perhaps offering special incentives that normal prospects don’t receive.

Most importantly, look for changes in your data. If your open rates and data completion rates start to rise, take a look at your previous year’s data and see if the increase in rates correlates to an increased number of sales in however many days your sales cycle is.

For example, if you notice a sudden spike in open rates on the first of April and you have a 30 day sales cycle, see if, in other years, the spike occurred and if sales 30 days later increased. If so, you can get a head start on prospecting your database prior to April to hasten that cycle and present buying opportunities to people in your email list before your competition does. If you are exceptional at email marketing, you may even get your qualified prospects to complete the sale before the peak of the cycle occurs, effectively shutting out any competitors.

Try prospecting your email list with the suggestions above and sending very focused messages to see if you can hasten your sales cycle with effective email!

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Using Video In Email to Increase Sales

September 1, 2011 By

I imagine that many of you reading this post are, in some fashion, responsible for attracting clients to your product or solution, then turning that prospect into a client. I also imagine that you have most of this process down to a science. But you are here because you are looking for more; an edge; a new practice to attract more prospects and close more deals. As a business development manager responsible for these things as well, then I would say we are all in good company.

With that, let’s focus on one practice in the marketing world that is completely underutilized where you can gain an edge on your competitors: delivering video-in-email to your customers and acting on their engagement. (Before you jump off the rails about video being delivered in email, take a look at this… I will wait.)

Let me repeat myself: deliver video in your email messages and then act on their engagement. Failing to take immediate action based on user engagement is energy spent in vain. Studies have shown that the impact a video message has on its audience is much greater than that of a text version. While many companies simply link to a video page (or worse, a YouTube page) many more miss the boat all together and do nothing with video messages.

Let’s be clear: you do not need a huge video budget or some major production to use video effectively. Like any other marketing tactic, you need content that brings value to your readers, passion about providing that content, and a plan to do so. So grab your phone or an inexpensive handheld and start shooting!

“But what do I send,” you ask?  Who is your audience? Take a quick video of the newest employee you hired and put it in your monthly newsletter; deliver a short commercial in your next lead generation campaign with a precise call to action; send how-to’s, tips, and tricks about using or maintaining your product or service.  Most importantly, deliver what you feel would bring value to your audience… and don’t forget to manage their engagement.

With the WhatCounts email marketing platform you can not only send videos embedded into your email message, but you can build automated rules that trigger follow-up campaigns based on the user’s actions.

Screen capture of our recent email newsletter with video

Click to enlarge our example email with video

For example, let’s say you are sending a promotional email or daily deal to your subscribers so you are showing a product highlight video. When a user watches 25% of the video you can trigger a message that thanks them for watching and gives them a 10% coupon to use on their next purchase. If they watch 100% of the video you could send a follow up email that not only gives them a 20% coupon, but asks them to share it with their friends on Facebook.

For those in the B2B space, you could deliver an alternate video message to the user if they did not watch the original one, or send “Part 2” if they watched all of it. Understand that it does not have to stop with coupons and sharing; deliver training videos, tips on upkeep, product comparisons, employee of the month… the list is endless.

The impact video has on a user is great, but the follow up actions you take as a marketer are crucial! You are interacting with them on a one-to-one level and asking them to take action in the form of a purchase, sharing the video with friends, or simply watching another video. You are keeping the attention on your brand for a longer period of time. All of which has an impact on generating new leads, nurturing prospects, and increasing revenues within your client base.

Chris Lusk
Business Development Manager

Filed Under: Strategy, Video Tagged With: , , ,