Tag Archive for 'newsletter'

What Social Media Can Do For Your Email Marketing

Published on January 27, 2012 in Best Practices, Internet marketing and Tips & tricks. 0 Comments Tags: email marketing campaigns, newsletter, social media.

Before the rise of social media, email marketing was the only way to reach people who had shown enough of an interest in a business to visit the website but weren’t yet interested enough to make a purchase. Persuade those people to leave behind an email address and the company could return to them with a special offer or news of a product release and pull them back through the door.
Since social media?
Well, all of those things are still true.

Social media’s strength is that it allows marketers to access prospects all the time. It lets them respond to their comments and posts, entering into the kind of dialogue that email marketing just can’t replicate. Lists (on Twitter and Facebook) and Circles (on Google+) let them target their messages, and social media has a much greater potential to send a brand viral than email marketing.

But those messages are often overlooked. While an email sits in an inbox until it’s opened, a tweet quickly disappears down a stream.
And while a Facebook page can generate lots of likes, the number of fans they collect is often smaller (and harder to convert) than the number of email addresses the company is able to collect.

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Reduce Unsubscribers Before It’s Too Late!

Published on November 3, 2011 in Tips & tricks. 0 Comments Tags: customers, newsletter, spammer, unsubscribers.

In general, if more than 0.8% of your subscribers opt-out of your mailing list, you need to ask yourself why and make some effort to correct the problem.

Why Do People Unsubscribe?

One of the most common reasons people unsubscribe from a mailing list is because they’re overwhelmed by the amount of mail that’s landing in their email box. If you’re sending them an email every day, especially if you’re including a sales pitch, they may be intimidated by the sheer volume of what you’re sending. If you’re using your emails mostly for selling, they may also be dissatisfied with the content.

When people sign up to be on an email list, they hope to receive useful information that will make their life easier. If your correspondence is a thinly veiled sales pitch, you’ll probably get more than a few unsubscribes.

Keep your emails to a maximum of 2 to 3 times per week, and give your customer useful information each and every time.
By doing this, they’ll look forward to your emails rather than lumping you in with the other spammers that clutter their mailbox with junk.

At the other extreme, you may be contacting your customers so infrequently that they’ve forgotten about you.
Ideally, you should email customers no less than once a week, but certainly no less than monthly.
If you wait too long between mailings, your customers may not remember who you are, and you’ll run the risk of being labeled a spammer. If you’re limited on time, send a brief, informational email with a link to your website once every two weeks to keep your name in your customers’ minds.

Here are some practical tips to reduce unsubscribers:

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New Hotmail Features: Email Marketing Friend or Foe?

Published on October 25, 2011 in General and Tips & tricks. 0 Comments Tags: greymail, hotmail, newsletter, spam.

Hotmail feels that it has won the war against spam, having announced that true spam in users’ inboxes has reduced to under 3% using SmartScreen™ filtering. Now they have turned their attention to graymail, the emails that users may or may not be happy to receive. Graymail includes newsletters that subscribers may have forgotten signing up for or time-limited offers that clog up users’ inboxes long after the deal has expired. They found out that “more than half of the mail in a typical inbox is newsletters or deals, 17% is social updates, and about 14% is person to person email”.
For this reason, Hotmail announced on their blog that they will release soon some new features to help users filter out unwanted emails and clean up their inboxes.

Let’s see the most relevant ones.

Newsletter Category
Using SmartscreenTM technology, Hotmail automatically categorize newsletters, removing them from the general inbox. Boasting an initial accuracy rating of 95 percent, Hotmail’s technology will improve as users tailor their preferences. This feature will make it easy for users to ignore unwanted email newsletters. However, it will also allow them to quickly locate relevant information. Provided your emails contain valuable content of interest to your subscribers, Hotmail’s new newsletter category could work to your advantage.

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Share, Share, Share!

Published on September 8, 2011 in Best Practices and Tips & tricks. 0 Comments Tags: email marketing, newsletter, sharing.

The most trusted form of advertising is a recommendation from a friend. Savvy email marketers can harness the power of a friendly recommendation by encouraging readers to share the content of their email marketing campaign with friends and colleagues.
A Silverpop benchmark study found that shared emails increase the reach of email marketing campaigns by 24.3 percent, on average. However, readers will only share your emails if they are packed with interesting and valuable content. For this reason, ensure that your email marketing includes top tips, exclusive competitions, and useful information that readers will want to pass on.

But it is also true that a 2010 report by Contactlab found that 73 percent of respondents had never shared an email newsletter with friends on a social network. How come? Not knowing how to do it was the second most common reason for not sharing newsletter content via social media. That’s why it is fundamental that you make sharing easy by including hyperlinked buttons in your email marketing. Clearly labelled buttons allow readers to share your emails with one simple click. For example:

Forward to a Friend buttons will forward your email on to email addresses entered by the original recipient.
Social Sharing buttons will increase your company’s visibility by posting your content on the recipient’s Facebook page or Twitter feed. You can find a big collection of social sharing buttons on this site.
QR codes. These pixilated squares allow smartphone users to access information from the internet simply by scanning the code. They are an increasingly effective way of encouraging people to share content with friends and colleagues.

After spending time designing attractive forwarding and sharing buttons, be sure to view your email (and landing pages) on as many different browsers and email clients as possible. This will allow you to check that the layout is readable and the graphics work as they should. Garbled emails look unprofessional and will not encourage sharing or click-throughs.

17 Effective Ways to Grow Your Opt-in Subscriber List

Published on August 24, 2011 in Best Practices and Tips & tricks. 0 Comments Tags: email list, newsletter.

Your opt-in subscriber list is the foundation for your email marketing campaign. No matter how interesting your content and compelling your call to action, your email marketing campaign cannot be successful without a sizeable list of interested recipients.

Follow these 17 tips to grow your opt-in subscriber list.

Keep It Short & Simple

1. Keep your opt-in form short and simple. Capture only essential information, such as the user’s name and email address. Add an optional second stage if you want collect further details.

Make It Obvious

2. Every page of your website should display your opt-in form. Place it at the top of the right-hand sidebar, above the fold, for maximum effect.

3. Give users a nudge by displaying your opt-in form on a pop up. Although some web users find them intrusive, marketers continue to use them because they are an effective way to increase subscriptions.

4. Include a sign-up request in the “About the Author” paragraph at the bottom of your blog.

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Expand Your Email Content to Cover More than Your Business

Published on August 3, 2011 in Best Practices. 0 Comments Tags: email content, newsletter.

Your customers are interested in you. But they’re interested in more than just you. They’re also interested in your industry and in the kinds of products you sell. Book buyers don’t just want to know about a bookstore they bought from once; they want to know about books and authors. Video gamers don’t just want to know about the store that sold them the latest version of Halo; they want to know about game design, tips and trends. That broad interest is an opportunity. It’s a chance for a savvy email marketer to add information to a newsletter so that it hooks readers.

One company that works supplemental information naturally into its email marketing is MooShoes, a New York retail store that sells vegetarian clothing. Each month the store issues an email with the subject line “MooShoes Newsletter + Discount Codes.”
The newsletter usually contains two kinds of information. Most of the email will be given over to the kind of sales copy you’d expect to find in a piece of email marketing:

“Going for a hike? Get yourself a pair of Snowdon or Veggie Trekker Boots from Vegetarian Shoes. Beach time? Maybe it is time for a pair of Flipee from Simple or Water Divas from Jambu.”

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Designing a Call To Action That Customers Can’t Resist

Published on July 25, 2011 in Best Practices. 0 Comments Tags: call to action, email marketing, newsletter.

By the time you have designed your email template, filled it with quality content, and crafted an intriguing subject line, you may be running out of fresh ideas. Perhaps that explains why so many email marketers fall back on a boring “click here” button as their call to action. It’s easily understood, but it’s not inspiring.

Prominent Placement
Your call to action must be easy to locate. Don’t tuck it away at the end of paragraphs of text. Place it in the top half of your email where it will catch the reader’s eye.

Design Matters
The shape and color of your call to action button can influence the number of click-throughs you receive. Tailor the design to the action required. Red is a useful color if you want to establish a sense of urgency. BMI, a leading UK airline, increased their conversion rate by 2.5 percent by adding a red background behind their message “Hurry! Only XX seats left”.

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