Sitebrand | Persuasive e-Marketing

A very bright idea I found from a BlueHornet Communications email, at the bottom of the email was a line that read:

You were added to our database on May 24, 2006. Find out how.

So I clicked the link, and it brought me to a page that looks like this, which told me exactly how and when I opted in:

A great idea if you ask me!

This fabulous list is courtesy of Mark Brownlow at the No man is an iland blog. Have you been doing too much email marketing? Check the list to find out…

• you don’t end friendships or love affairs…you “opt-out” of them
• you can’t read any text wider than about 600 pixels
• you can think of 17 different ways to describe something as free without actually using the word “free”
• the shopping list you give your spouse has all the important items squeezed into the top lefthand corner of the piece of paper
• you look for the unsubscribe link in direct mail
• you reject birthday cards that don’t have the postal address of the sender printed on the reverse of the envelope
• your signature on checks includes your job title, address, phone number, fax number and website address
• you delete people from your address book if they fail to return your phone calls three times in a row
• when people accept your dinner invitations, you send out another invitation asking if they’re sure
• the photos in your wedding album don’t have labels…they have alt tags
• you send everyone two Christmas cards…one text-only, the other with images and colors

I will be on holidays next week, so I wanted to get this off my chest before I go! Since testing, measuring and refining is so important in email.. I thought I’d go over some of the most talked about email trends this year (that I noticed at least)

1. Spam: I think would always top a list like this one – I mean as email marketers, our job heavily revolves around NOT being perceived as spam. And with the rules always changing, it’s always going to be a hot discussion topic.

   Tips for avoiding being spam in the new year:

   • Have an explicit opt-in: The best way to not be perceived as spam is to not be spam! Make sure all your recipients have explicitly opted-in to receive your emails (no pre-checked boxes) And even better – have a double opt-in.
   • Avoid common spam triggers: ALL CAPS, excessive punctuation!! W3!rd $ymb@ls, etc.
   • Code your links with caution: if you want to have a link text as “www.mywebsite.com make sure you turn off the tracking code on that link: or you could not make it to inboxes.
   • Don’t send image-only campaigns – It’s a popular tactic with spammers!

2. Relevancy: Sending emails that are relevant to your recipients will always pay off: higher response rates and less annoyed subscribers. The trick to relevancy is of to find out what your subscribers want – either via survey or testing.

   Relevancy – What to test:

• Subject lines – try different types of subject lines and do some A/B testing to find out which works best with your subscriber. Your subject line is an important determinate for whether or not the email will be opened!
• Content – Do your subscribers like the content they receive? Do they click through? Test your content and call to actions and see what works best!
• Frequency – Maybe your subscribers love your content, but feel they receive the emails too often? Or perhaps you wait too long between emails and they forget about you in between? Try a quick poll in your email to find out how often your subscribers like to be contacted. (If you want to get sophisticated, build it into the preference centre and send emails of different frequencies depending on the subscribers chosen preference!)

3. Deliverability: Because really, what good is your email if it doesn’t get delivered? Always a hot topic, deliverability is extremely important – and not just knowing your email got through to the address, but knowing it landed safely in the recipients inbox. While you can never know for sure if it’s landing in inboxes, there are services that will seed your emails in many major ISPs to test whether it did or not.

Getting your emails Delivered:

• The best way to ensure you are getting delivered is to ask recipients to add your email address to their safe sender list or address book. There’s no guarantee they will or not, but if you don’t ask they probably wont! Tip: provide a page that gives instructions to do this, like this.
• Scrub, scrub, scrub – keep your list clean! Clean out hard bounces after every email, and soft bounces after repeating a few times. The lower your bounce rate, the less likely ISPs will block you (turning into more bounces) thinking you’re a spammer! Remember, a list cluttered with bad addresses only costs you more!
• Like above, avoid spam trigger words, and practices used by spammers. HINT: Go into your spam folder, look at the spam emails, and DON’T do what they are doing!!

Hope these will help with your email program for 2007. Have a safe and happy holiday, and here’s to a new year, filled with legitimate, relevant email marketing landing in the inbox!

What are you doing to get into the holiday spirit this season?

I admit, here at card we aren’t doing a whole lot – Well let’s say just enough

But bv02 – whom we share an office with – has done something very cool! They recorded a Christmas album with local crooner Johnny Vegas. It’s recorded on CD, but also on bv02’s website, with a very cute look! Check it out!

Ok I’ve been suffering from “blogger’s block” for the past week… I just can’t think of anything to blog about.

So for your enjoyment, I thought I would compile a list of other great blogs (only a very small sampling of the ones I love):

• art2blog – e-Marketing and new media. It’s relatively new, but updated often and alway interesting!
• Email marketing hall of shame - also relatively new, but a great concept, and so far, quality posts
• No man is an iland – Mark Brownlow collects all the greatest email info and posts it up here. Plus you can subscribe to the feed via RSS or sign up for the enewsletter – which is an update of all the posts every two weeks.
• Profectio – great source of internet marketing news
• My name is Kate – Another great blog from a well-established Canadian marketer.

Don’t stop reading this blog though! I promise I will have some new stuff up soon!

So a client email was scheduled for this morning, and I logged into the account to make sure it sent off smoothly. It was about 2 minutes after it sent, and so far about 20 people had opened, and of those 20, something like 18 had clicked – that’s 90%!

So, now distracted by this discovery, I stayed there for a few minutes refreshing the stats. And the more people that opened, the more the click rate went down. So what I’m getting at here, is that if you are able to send your email when most of your audience is at the computer with their email application opened, the more click-throughs you will ultimately get.

My theory is – picture this – you are at your desk, working on something, and you hear that satisfying “ping” sound, and you are just dying for a distraction, so you open, read and click. You are engaged in the email.

Now imagine you can pinpoint that “sweetspot” where your audience is looking for that distraction. There are many interesting email studies that examine time of day and day of week sent, but what’s more important to you is how your particular audience behaves. Of course it will probably change from time to time, so be on your feet and test, test, test! I bet you will see improvements!

Is by far Copyblogger. It is always chalked full of great writing advice. And what I especially love about it, is Brian, the author, always uses the technique he writes about in each post.

For example this post about writing subheads is so compelling, I was just scanning my RSS reader like I usually do, and the subheads caught my eye so I read the whole article. If you haven’t already, check it out!

This is (I think) a new development in email deliverability – with phishing scams on the rise – that could be affecting your deliverability. In particular, when you place a URL in your email with the text matching the url (e.g. http://www.website.com is the link, and http://www.website.com is also the link text), your email marketing software adds a tracking code (usually something garbled like rs6.net/234swefkjads) and it looks to email clients like a mismatch and you are potentially marked as a “phisher” and your emails could start being blocked and undelivered.

Combat this by NOT using the link URL as the link text.. (eg: instead use “Visit my site”)

Very interesting, and for more tips to ensure your emails aren’t being confused with phishing scams, read the full article by Stefan Pollard over at ClickZ

An article from Online Media Daily says email marketing is losing its ground since aggressive spam filtering is affecting deliverability, and people are moving to new Web 2.0 tools – blogs, RSS, social networking etc.

I admit, I don’t really remember life before email… I was pretty young, but I’m willing to bet in email’s heyday everyone was saying that direct mail was dead… and look over 10 years later, it’s still around!

However, as the article says, I would like to see some of these new exciting social media tools better integrated with email, but I suspect, with all the different email clients, it definitely be a slow transition.

An article from iMedia Connection today, “Get the Most ROI from your Email” is a great how-to article about choosing an agency to help with your email strategy.

This is extremely relevant, as the perceived “Easiness” of email often makes people overlook a solid strategy. But of course, without a plan and strategy, the goals of your email program start to get overlooked or ignored. While the article recommends working with an expert (and so would I… Since that’s what we do!) If you don’t have the resources, do some research, make some goals, and try it yourself, as the article cites, the latest figures has an ROI of around $57 for each dollar spent (as opposed to $22 for other marketing channels)So it’s definitely worth it to make the most of your email program!