Monthly Archive for June, 2011

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How to Solve Character Encoding Problems with SendBlaster

Published on June 16, 2011 in Sendblaster. 1 Comment Tags: Sendblaster, windows codepage.

SendBlaster fully supports a wide variety of international character sets. Despite that, sometimes it happens that users with non-latin character sets contact us saying they get encoding issues. No panic!

SendBlaster simply relies on Windows codepage for displaying non-latin character sets (Cyrillic as well as Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, etc).
To solve this sort of encoding problems, simply make sure your language is used both for codepage and for number / dates format. Display language is not relevant.

In short, please follow these basic instructions:

Open Windows Control Panel, Regional and Language Options, and make sure that

1) in “Format” tab, the format for numbers and dates is set to your language (for example Russian) – not to English or any other language.

2) In “Advanced” (WinXP) or “Administrative” (Vista, Win7) tab, the “Language for non-Unicode programs” is set to your language (for example Russian). Changing this will require re-starting your PC.

Finally, when you compose your message, choose “windows-1257″ charset and make some tests composing a new message from scratch instead of editing an existing one.

You can also find a good tutorial on this site.

If this does not help, open a ticket and attach the needed files to your request.

Do you Measure Churn Rate?

Published on June 13, 2011 in Best Practices. 0 Comments Tags: churn rate, mailing list.

If you want to find out how your email list is performing, make sure you measure the Churn Rate. We can define “churn rate” a measure of how many subscribers leave a list in a given period of time.

It can be very useful to check the health of your mailing list and to identify actions to improve results.

Calculating the Churn Rate is very simple:

Churn Rate = (Subscribers who leave your mailing list) / Total Addresses

Please note that in Churn Rate calculation you should include not only subscribers who opt out but also hard bounces and spam complaints.

A realistic churn rate benchmark is between 20% and 30% annually, but it may vary a lot depending on your business niche. If you have a churn rate of 50-70%, there’s something in your email marketing process that is wrong and should be investigated further,

How to reduce high churn rates?
There’s a lot you can do in order to reduce churn. For example:
- Segment your list and deliver personalized offers, services
- Drive retention and loyalty programs
- Monitor how you are doing against your competitors. and if necessary, update your prices and create more competitive offers

For additional information, check out this informative iMedia Connection article written by Chris Lovejoy.

Are You Overthinking Your Email Marketing?

Published on June 10, 2011 in Best Practices. 0 Comments Tags: email marketing.

Email marketing can be complex stuff, a combination of smart copywriting and careful number-crunching.

The only thing that’s clear is the goal: to send emails that deliver the maximum possible number of clicks and conversions. To reach that goal though, you have to define the message, refine your copy and tweak your content. Then you have to track the results, monitoring the effect of every change to every headline, call to action and shift in subject matter. Get it all right and you should, eventually, reach the nirvana of an email marketing campaign that operates at 100 percent efficiency.

Each email you sound will generate all the sales that your list and product can achieve together.

In practice, of course, that’s impossible and it might not even be a good idea to try. All that time spent sending multiple emails to different parts of your list to see whether users respond best to “click here,” “buy now” or “read more,” while valuable, might have been better spent on customer service or improving the user interface. The handful of extra sales the best call to action will generate over the second-best call to action might not pay for the effort put into testing them.

Not sweating the small stuff doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sweat at all though. Some pieces of information are essential. You should know:

Your average clickthrough rate.
Once you have a baseline, you’ll be able to compare the effectiveness of future emails. Identify the messages that do significantly better or worse than others and you’ll be able to trace the factors that most influence clicks.

Continue reading ‘Are You Overthinking Your Email Marketing?’

Co-registration: An Effective Method to Expand Your Email List

Published on June 7, 2011 in Best Practices and General. 2 Comments Tags: co-registration, email lists, leads.

There are a number of common techniques to expand your email list. For example you can offer some extras like a free ebook or a free admission to your member area, sponsor a contest (people love them!) or set up a Google AdWords campaign in order to collect.

Today we focus on co-registration, a bit less popular technique that has proven to be effective over the past few years.

In a recent Marketing Sherpa study, 32% of marketers who collect new email addresses via co-registration offers on third-party sites, say the names collected perform just as well as regular house names.
But, how it works? Co-registrations are generated when someone subscribe to a newsletter or sign up to a website and in the registration process are invited to optin to other offers. Usually this is done using a separate check-box on the signup forms.

Image from Multiplestreammktg.com

Continue reading ‘Co-registration: An Effective Method to Expand Your Email List’

Anatomy of an Email

Published on June 6, 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: context, email, subject lines.

According to BNJ.com there’s a simple structure that emerges across the successful emails, and ”just like most movies have three acts”.

Here below you can find the Anatomy of an email. The first element considered is the Subject line (Engage) followed by the Headline (Context), Act 1 (Evidence), Act 2 (Proposition), Act 3 (Support), and The Ask.

What do you think about this scheme?

The Evolution of Spam [Infographic]

Published on June 3, 2011 in Infographic_. 0 Comments Tags: email marketing, spam.

Enjoy this cool infographic displaying the evolution of spam. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom …you’ll find 5 useful tips on how to not look like a spammer.