Useful Email Marketing Tips

Keeping your email list clean is always a challenge and weeding out bad email addresses is a big part of that.

Dylan Boyd at The Email Wars highlights a tool that may help you verify email addresses before you put them on your list.

The tool can be found here: http://Verify-email.org/ .

However, as Dylan points out, this tool could easily be abused by spammers. Overall, he’s not a fan:

“I know that it is quite easy to guess anyone’s email address, but if they did not enter it into your opt in form should you be taking the initiative to fix it? I think you let it die. Human error is going to always be a factor that we have to deal with.”

A privacy policy is a good way to let your subscribers know how you’re going to use their information.

If you would never sell their email address, tell them so that they can be reassured. If you plan to sell your list, your subscribers deserve to know that from the start.

You can also use your privacy policy as an opportunity to tell your subscribers how often you intend to send them emails and on what topics. The more transparent you are with your subscribers, the more trust they’ll have in you.

For business to business email lists that are focused on generating leads, it’s worth looking at restricting access to your list by certain email address domains.

For example, if you notice that 99% of the leads you get from people with hotmail.com addresses are junk, it may be worth blocking those subscribers. That way you no longer have to waste valuable resources on people who have no intention of doing business with you.

This obviously won’t work for business to consumer lists and would in fact be a bad strategy in that situation.

Dylan Boyd at The Email Wars is considering this strategy and is looking for others who may have tried it in the past.

Respect for subscribers is the foundation of every successful email marketing campaign.

A good rule to keep in mind is to ask yourself if you would treat your subscribers the same way in person as you treat them in your campaign. You wouldn’t try to sell them something or ask them for a favor everyday if you had to look them in the eye, so don’t do it in your email campaigns.

The reality is that you need your subscribers’ trust and respect to keep your campaign afloat. Don’t take it for granted.

Andrew Kordek at Deliverability.com recently wrote about this topic:

Respecting your subscribers goes a lot farther than just send frequency.   You respect them in many other ways including:

Respecting their privacy.

Respecting their choice.

Respecting the fact that they once took the time to register for your email.

Respect that they are intelligent human beings who support your program.

Respect that if you give respect…you will get it in return. [...]

Respect should be the number one goal/challenge put forth to email marketers for the remainder of 2009.  In fact it should have been in 2008 and should be number one in 2010 and beyond.

In most cases, it’s best to stick to the tried and true best practices when sending email. After all, there’s a reason that they’re called best practices.

However, if you feel like your campaign is getting a little stale, it’s worth trying something new. Design an email that turns the old time-tested advice on its head.

Chad White over at MediaPost’s EmailInsider highlights some examples of this email marketing strategy:

1. Make your emails user-friendly and intuitive. Over the past couple of weeks, Abercrombie & Fitch has sent several side-scrolling emails. When I started talking about them on Twitter, there was concern that people aren’t used to scrolling horizontally, that it wasn’t easy to do because most scroll-wheels don’t go that way. I’m sure that many people were a little perplexed by these emails — and that may have been a very good thing. It probably made them pause for a second to figure out how those emails worked, and the uniqueness surely intrigued some. A&F clearly found success with these sidescrollers or they wouldn’t have followed up by sending more.

2. Make your emails highly scannable. When Coach announced to subscribers the relaunch of its We bsite in April, the company did so with a long  email that ditched its  standard branding and navigation, had a bunch of screen-grabs all over the place, and used tiny graphical text in spots. A bastion of best practices it was not.

However, the email contained a lot of information and completely oozed excitement. While most subscribers probably didn’t squint to read the print, they were likely inspired to click through to the site to see what all of the hubbub was about, which was the real goal of the email anyway.

3. Be sure to optimize for preview panes. When subscribers opened up their email from HPshopping on March 30, all they saw in their preview pane was the grinning face of Susan/Ginormica, the 50-ft star of the “Monsters vs. Aliens” movie. They didn’t see anything about the Monster Sale that HP was holding or the fact that they could save up to 50%. They had to scroll a bit to see that information.

But I’m sure many subscribers indeed scrolled. Even if it was mainly to see the rest of Ginormica, in doing so they learned about the sale. This email kicked off a series of emails featuring the stars of “Monsters vs. Aliens” and likely elevated interest in the rest of the series by grabbing subscribers’ attention and raising expectations about what might be arriving in their inbox from HP next.

4. Establish a color palette and stick with It. On Nov. 28 last year, Overstock sent a Black Friday email that disregarded the company’s well-established color scheme. Instead the email had reverse type-white text on a black background — which is a big no-no in design because it’s hard to read in large amounts.

But since most marketers stick to the best practice of dark fonts on a white or light background, Overstock’s email popped in the inbox like crazy. If you were quickly clicking through your inbox, this email would have immediately grabbed your attention. On one of the highest retail email volume days of the year, breaking through and getting the attention of your subscribers is half the battle.

It may seem counterintuitive, but it makes a lot of sense to put your unsubscribe link in a place that can’t be missed.

Although it may seem like a waste of valuable real estate, putting your unsubscribe link in the header of each email is something that can pay off for you in the long run.

The DMA Email Marketing Council explains why:

[A] typical scenario is where the email recipient knows and accepts that the email was solicited by them at some stage in the past, but now wants to be removed from the list, and can’t see any obvious way of doing so (usually because the unsubscribe link is buried in a 6 point font somewhere in the email footer in the hope that it won’t be seen!). In such a situation, the spam button then becomes a convenient alternative to unsubscribing!

This represents a double-whammy for the e-marketer – in addition to losing a member from the mailing list, these notifications are fed back to the ISP that the email account is held with, which ultimately compromises the sender reputation of the sender if these notifications are received in sufficient quantities. And we are not talking big numbers here – Return Path regards complaint rate statistics of greater than 0.65% of all emails sent as indicative of “high risk” status.

If a reader has unsubscribed from your email list, chalk it up as a loss and learn from the experience. Do not attempt to email them again.

Using a Microsoft email as an example, BrontoBlog explains why this is a bad idea. Emailing to unsubscribed contacts is spam.

Many email service providers provide extensive tracking data. This data includes how many bounces, unsubscribes, opens, and clicks each email generates.

Use this data to adjust the content of your emails. If you notice a particular topic or style is generating substantially more opens and clicks, consider focusing more on that type of content.

On the opposite end, if certain topics generate more unsubscribes and spam complaints than usual, consider de-emphasizing those topics.

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When planning your email campaigns, it’s useful to decide how often you’ll be sending emails and on what schedule (daily, weekly, monthly, etc). Ideally this is something you should decide on early in the process.

Setting a regular schedule and keeping to it lets subscribers know what to expect and they may even grow to anticipate your emails based on the schedule you’ve established. This leads to fewer unsubscribes and fewer spam complaints.

Further Reading

Certain words are more likely to trigger spam filters. While it’s sometimes necessary to use these words, try to substitute in less-spammy words when possible.

A few words that trigger spam filters are free, guarantee, spam, Viagra, sex, your income, subject to credit approval, check or money order, print out and fax, or call now.

You can also look through your spam folder and see what words pop up most often. They are likely to be words you want to avoid.

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