Making Email Marketing Simple and Effective
Microsoft released an informative infographic about the evolution of email since its introduction.
Did you know email was “born” in the mid sixties? and that “only” in 2004 the FTC codifies email spam laws? It evolved over the decades and still continue to innovate.
Once more…Email is not dead, long life to Email!
Click the image for a full-sized version
via Mashable
The folks at Web Target - a popular Italian email marketing webzine – have just released the first 5 episodes of a new video series called “Email Marketing Toons. Tips & Tricks in MarketingLand“.
These short videos tell about the adventures and misadventures of two particular friends, who get together to do marketing without knowing it.
Pretty amusing (and original), don’t you think?
1. Only the best-dressed email arrives at its destination
2- A good list is a permission-based list
Finding out what happens after you hit the “send” button is extremely important since it may help you to know your subscribers better and, as a consequence, to improve your email campaign results.
In today’s post we focus on bounce rates. Are you calculating them periodically?
Let’s go back to the basics. Bounce rate is the number of email messages (in percentage form) that were returned as undeliberable. You can calculate it simply dividing the total number of emails that were bounced by the total number of emails sent, and multiply by 100 to get your bounce rate as a percentage.
For example, if you have sent 5000 email messages and 800 of them returned undeliverable, your bounce rate is 16% (800/5000 * 100).
We higly recommend that you keep track of your bounce rates, following each email campaign you send, and learn to manage bounces messages.
In order to increase your delivery rates, make also sure to deal with hard and soft bounces in different ways.
A hard bounce happens when emails are sent to a non-existent email address (either the domain name does not exist or the address is misspelled or is erroneous).
A soft bounce means that the email message was sent to the destination server but the delivery is delayed temporarily for some reason. (eithe full mailbox or the server is temporarily unavailable).
So, what actions should we take when hard or soft bounces happen?
Hard bounces >>>> Remove those bounced email addresses from your database.
Soft bounces >>>> Try re-sending your email message later. If the email continues to bounce back, contact the recipient to update their email address or remove it from your list.
These are simple actions that you should take regularly. They can take time and be boring but, in return, you will get a cleaner database and more effective email campaigns.
The biggest advantage that email newsletters bring to businesses is the steady contact with leads. Every week, a potential customer who has expressed an interest in the service you supply is reminded that you’re still there, still offering that service and still available for them.
It’s a method that can be hugely effective. Provided those leads read what you’re sending them.
But email isn’t the only way that businesses stay in touch with leads. They also write blog posts which they distribute through RSS. And they chat on Facebook and Twitter, a channel that allows for two-way communication and instant feedback.
All of those channels are useful but they also raise the risk that by the time the lead receives your newsletter, he will already have read your content when he clicked a link in Twitter or saw the post in his RSS reader.
In a recent newsletter, MarketingProfs, a marketing training company, described how sales firm The Loud Few raises its open and clickthrough rates above the industry average in part by ensuring that its newsletters contain exclusive content. “If blog visitors, Twitter followers, Facebook fans and email subscribers all get the same information, a customer has little incentive to interact with you in every channel,” warns MarketingProfs.
Continue reading ‘Put the Right Content in the Right Channels’
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