Tuesday 5 June 2012

Are you following 1999 email writing style, still?


Email Marketing Changes Ahead


We all know internet is spreading like wild fire in the forest. There are many developments in the internet and changes in style of email marketing. Now, the best practices are no best and not even evergreen. When email marketing was a dude then the strategies followed will not work now, they are outdated or woeful.

To analyze where you land on the strategies, we have laid compare and contrast point:

Ñ    List Building: In way back 1999 opt-in list but not CAN-SPAM policy. It was only about quantity and not the quality in those years. Marketers grabbed the contacts from everywhere they could. But, today we look more of quality than quantity. The contacts are not grabbed but they are verified at every stage. We are careful about the content we send to our clients because of spam threats.

Ñ    Subject Lines: The important aspect of email marketing is subject line. The creative and catchy the subject line the more the open rates. If the subject line includes words like Discount, Free, Offer, Important, etc. will mark your emails as spammed and thrown into the trash box.

Ñ    Measurement and Analysis: Earlier basic metrics like open, clicks, conversions and unsubscribe ruled our analysis. But now our metrics have dived deeper with metrics like reach, average order value (AOV), and revenue per email address (RPE). 










Sunday 25 March 2012

Make your Email Marketing Newsletter Useful


The best thing amongst all for email marketing campaign work is with the right content. Think about writing your content so that it does the ‘work’ for someone else.

In any case, that work should relate heavily to a product or service that you provide. It acts as a subtle resource for someone who may be debating on whether they should be your customer.

For instance, you are seller for AB&C company write a newsletter about their qualities in which one looks for if the company is selling to AB&C Company.  Talk about nitty-gritty details of how important a high-res photo is in confirming the validity of an item.

Provide useful resources that back your claim, and make your newsletter reach out to offer them advice.

By using this type of method, you can easily highlight those strengths that your company has while providing a very informative newsletter for your subscribers.

While newsletters can be a great way to feature to promote new products or services you offer, you need to think about what makes it worth reading, and more importantly, how can it make you stand out as an authority!

Thursday 15 March 2012

5 Best Practices of B2B Email Marketing



Business to Business (B2B) email marketing is an extremely effective marketing practice. Just like any other online marketing strategy, understanding what the industry best practices are will separate your latest campaign from all of the others.  

The five top most B2B email marketing best practices are:

·         Know Your Audience: If you are mailing to IT network administration image-heavy newsletter probably will not be received. Instead, send a text only message. Follow the cues of what your audience is like and don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach.

·         Make it easy for mobile audience: Click here to read on your mobile phone is becoming more commonplace on B2B emails and may help you escape mobile email rendering holdups.

·         From & Subject lines: Emails from CEO to a fellow executive tend to resonate. Ensure your From line is from someone who matters. Combine this with a short Subject line that can break through the clutter while demonstrating a reason for the user to read this email.

·         Short and Sweet: Whether read on an iPhone or laptop, make your message count. That means make sure it gets read. Long emails without clear calls to action will get skimmed and deleted.

·         Remarket: Create follow-up campaigns based on how each user responded (or didn’t) to the initial campaign. Using your metrics can guide you to a better and more relevant strategy. 

Thursday 2 February 2012

Understanding the basics of Email Appending




What is Email Appending?

It is the process of matching a customer database that lacks e-mail addresses with a third party’s address database with a view to append the missing information to the client database.

How is Email Appending done?

Email Appending is done when an organization that has a customer database containing names, postal address, or telephone numbers wants to kick-off email communication with its clients.

The organization hires an email appending services provider, who owns a huge database, to append the email addresses to their database.

The third party email appending services will match the prospect list with their database and add their accurate email address to the database. Appending involves manual and automated process.

After the appending process, permission is sought from the prospects to send emails to them, also known as opt-in emails. The purpose of permission is to make sure the email address is active and the prospect is interested to receive emails from the organization.

Why Email Appending is done?

1.      To make the email campaigns faster and crisp
2.      To reduce the cost of lost data
3.      To reach wider audience
4.      Better marketing results
5.      Enhanced customer service.

Wednesday 7 December 2011

3 Must-Avoid Email Marketing Mistakes




1.     Requiring too much information while signing up – Make most of the information optional; the only mandatory information required for email subscription is a valid email id. First names make the emails more personalized but should be made optional. Phone numbers and other redundant information will surely cut down on the sign up volume

2.     Not entertaining unsubscribing requests – Please entertain an unsubscribe request at the earliest. Customers are least likely to do business with vendors who keep sending them emails even when they have not asked for 

3.     Sending emails too frequently – It is really irritating for customers to keep receiving emails each single day with long product descriptions and promotional offers. If you wish to send out daily updates at all, let your customers tell you how frequently they would like to receive them