Archive for the ‘Email’ Category
Apr
27
At a recent TED conference, best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert stated, “we have completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked.” She goes on to further frame “the utter, maddening, capriciousness of the creative process” by suggesting that we pull from something greater than ourselves. Maybe Gilbert was thinking of the late Carl Jung who once said, “Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.”?
When it comes to email marketing, designing for your objectives can be a little maddening. If you do pull from something greater than yourself, and then translate that perfect vision to strategy and paper, you may find that your creative team is not realizing it. So, back and forth you go until there is no time left. A deadline is a deadline. But there is no doubt that the battle for the inbox – and your customer’s attention – requires engaging, actionable designs. What can you do to minimize your suffering and help aid that creative process along?
Know Your Audience
Through personalization, you no doubt consider who you’re addressing with every send. But who really is your audience, and what are they expecting from you? If you have a sizeable database with varying preferences, this is where you can not only practice segmentation, but also employ different designs and messages for each segment. What a great way to make your audience feel like you are personally interested in their needs and goals. Not to mention leveraging different designs for newsletters, promotions, events, and important notifications, as many businesses do.
Get Your Rendering Right
There is nothing worse than a well-designed email that just doesn’t render right. Ask yourself whether your recipients are primarily businesses or consumers? This will determine if the majority is using say, Microsoft Outlook vs. Gmail or Hotmail, or perhaps even receiving their emails on a mobile device – keep in mind that 30% of B-to-B recipients are receiving emails on their mobile devices. Regardless, it is impossible to get an email design, or the content offer itself, to render perfectly in all email clients, so you want to shoot for the top 2 or 3 and then make sure you test – test – test before you launch.
Avoid Graphical Overload
Remember less can be more. It’s especially important not to overuse graphics in an email to the point that images constitute the entire message. It is that much easier to delete an email message if nothing at all captures the consumer’s attention before they have opted to download images. Ask yourself, what are recipients going to see above the fold? Does it stand out? Does it speak to their needs? Call upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs if you need some help with this.
Content is King
Great designs fall flat without good content. No amount of slick design skilz are going to carry your customer over the line if the message doesn’t add value to the recipient’s life. Subject lines, headlines, offers and calls to action are all crucial to a successful campaign. With one quick glance of these elements a recipient will understand what the value is immediately upon viewing the email. Easier said than done, but if you solidify the messaging first, establishing a strong supporting design can be made much easier.
The Beauty is in the Data
Don’t be afraid to test a few different designs early on in the game. Many email marketers get their template and design down to a point where everyone internally is pleased with the outcome. But no one has any idea what the customer really thinks! Each time a client has pursued A/B testing, it was completely obvious which email design performed the best. Also, don’t be afraid to test offers and subject lines. As you achieve greater relevance it will have a direct result on your clickthrough rates. Yes, you may have to invest more time in creating additional versions at the outset, but the payoff will be greater conversions with the final send.
Break the Rules
The email marketing industry loves to apply various rules and best practices by which we should guide our “online lives”. While it’s great to have a foundation to work from, don’t let best practices become a burden either. At the end of the day, your job is to move the needle more than you did the last time, so don’t be afraid to experiment with the experiential and maybe even defy conventional wisdom.
Considering these factors during the early stages of an email marketing campaign will lessen the suffering and assist you in finding the drive to make email a more effective instrument.
Posted in Atlanta, Blog, Email, Finance & Banking, Las Vegas, Marketing Tools, Member Orgs, Reno-Tahoe, Salt Lake City, Service Industry, Travel & Tourism
Feb
24
Tomorrow Jennifer Buch and I will be meeting up with our CEO, David LaPlante in Washington DC for DMAI’s Destination Showcase. David will be giving a presentation on the effective use of web technology and social media for destination marketing and event planning and management. Really looking forward to seeing all of our nation’s great destinations and the individuals who help fuel their tourism economies in attendance. If you are planning on attending, please look for us and say hi or leave a comment below.
Destinations Showcase Conference & Expos are the meeting industry’s largest forums exclusively bringing attending corporate, government, association, and independent meeting planners together with exhibiting destination marketing organizations (DMOs and CVBs) from the U.S. and beyond.
The details of David’s presentation are:
Meeting Expectations with Greater Integration & Multi-Channel Marketing Programs.
Sponsored by MPI
Never before have there been so many technology-based tools and strategies available to meeting planners. Never before has there been so much confusion and consternation on where, when, what, and how to use them. Compounding the challenge is the disparities between what “IT and Operations” leaders feel are appropriate, and what you need at your fingertips today.
In this session, David LaPlante, CEO of online brand marketing and messaging technology company, Twelve Horses will share with you stories and strategies of how to “sell technology” to your management and what strategies are having a meaningful and competitive impact today.
In this session, you’ll learn about:
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Comprehensive solutions for integrating and automating.
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What new technologies successful and leading meeting planners are relying on.
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How to sell the adoption of new technology to your management.
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Avoiding common pitfalls of implementing new technology.
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Proven strategies for building a better online collaboration.
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Leveraging latent and persistent online conversations to drive greater attendance and interaction.
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Deriving new revenue streams for your events with new technologies.
Once again, if you are planning on attending, please look for us and say hi or leave a comment below. We look forward to seeing you there!
Posted in Email, Marketing, Member Orgs, Mobile, Podcast, Social, Web & SEO
Jan
28
As email marketers, we are faced with a myriad of tasks when it comes to constructing successful email campaigns. Proper design, messaging, and the integration of actionable items are just a few of the required steps. Once you finally get to the point of hitting send, you want to be confident your message will reach its intended recipients. If only it were that easy!
Spam is on the rise and has been since its origin. It was recently reported[1] that close to 200 Billion spam email messages are sent each day – approximately 90% of the world’s email. To combat this, Internet and email providers aggressively monitor their networks for user complaints, stale data, and malicious content. They establish reputation models that identify if an email sender is legitimate or not, and then use this data to determine whether to deliver, bulk, or block incoming messages.
Companies that are in the business of sending email marketing messages find themselves in a position where they are trying to send large volumes of legitimate email, but at the same time not look like a spammer. To help bridge this perception gap a number of email sender best practices have been developed and recommended by the email industry at large. These best practices help email senders to identify themselves as legitimate companies, sending legitimate email to recipients that have requested it.
There are some fundamental steps you need to take on your own, but then there are also several services your ESP should provide.
Accountability
Email providers continually monitor their inbound mail to determine what messages are legitimate and don’t cause user complaints. To that end, there are a number of steps a sender can do to look as legitimate and authentic as possible:
- Authenticate email with the authentication standards available (i.e SPF, Sender ID, DomainKeys, DKIM).
- Ensure that WHOIS information for the sending domain is correct and accessible. Don’t mask this information using domain privacy services.
- Ensure that sending IP addresses have valid and correct reverse DNS.
- Use a dedicated sending IP address.
- Add verbiage to the top of the message asking the recipient to add the sender email address to their address book.
- Provide a link to an online version of the email.
- Make unsubscribing obvious and easy.
If you are not sure whether your ESP provides these services then now is the time to ask. Nevertheless, not all deliverability services come automatically, and some take a little more effort on your part. But it is worth it.
Project Your Brand
Companies often make the mistake of not leading with their brand when they send email messages. Use the “from” field and subject line to distinguish your company, and live text in the preview pane to again communicate who the sender is. Be very aware of how your emails appear before images are downloaded by the recipient’s email client, and when in doubt setup and test send to multiple email clients from Gmail to Microsoft Outlook.
Maintain a Two-Way Dialogue
It is important that you give your recipients an easy means of responding. If you can email them then they can email you. Many times recipients will simply reply to the original senders address, so be sure to monitor those requests. It also helps to clearly provide a “Contact Us” link, or a preferred “reply to” address. Another means of leveraging the conversation is to point your email communications back to a company sponsored blog or forum.
List Hygiene and Maintenance
In order to maintain good deliverability rates, it is important that you keep your email lists up to date. The best means of doing this is to be sure you email everyone on your list at least once every 90 days. Senders should keep historical data on subscription signups, and quarantine email addresses that bounce, or are returned as not deliverable.
The plague of Spam has taught society to not trust email. As such, it is a continual uphill battle for legitimate senders to get their email delivered successfully. Nevertheless, if you take these steps it will go a long way to demonstrate accountability and maintain email marketing as one of the most effective tools to reach your current and potential customers.
[1] “Cisco Report Spotlights Worldwide Cyber Security Threats”, http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_121508.html
Posted in Atlanta, Email, Finance & Banking, Las Vegas, Member Orgs, Reno-Tahoe, Salt Lake City, Service Industry, Travel & Tourism, Utah
Jul
8
For those engaged in or planning to implement email marketing campaigns, please be advised that new rule provisions pertaining to the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM) go into effect today. Twelve Horses recommends consulting with your own legal counsel to determine how these rules specifically impact your email campaigns. However, we would like to provide you with some more information. Below is a summary of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved rules.
(1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender; (2) the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements; (3) a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and (4) a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.
How does this effect you?
As long as you are sending permission-based emails, and your opt-out pages are in compliance, you have very little to worry about. The 10-day mandatory opt-out requirement is still in place, and the Commission determined not to “designate additional ‘aggravated violations’ under the Act.” But you need to be sure you are in compliance. Here is some more information as it applies to the above provisions.
- The first provision deals with Unsubscribe Requirements. If you require your customers to visit more than one web page or enter a password to unsubscribe from your email list then you are not in compliance. In addition, a recipient cannot be required to provide anything other than their email address. This means you cannot ask for their physical mailing address or request a fee.
- The second provision addresses the Definition of a Sender. If your company engages in affiliate marketing and sends email campaigns representing more than one brand, there must be a designated lead marketer. In other words, whomever is listed in the “From” line is the designated sender and the one who manages the unsubscribes. Agencies who send email campaigns on behalf of their clients or partners should also pay careful attention to this.
- The third provision is fairly minor but indicates that you can now list a PO Box as a valid physical address.
- The fourth provision clarifies the definition of a “Person.” The FTC has made it clear that no organization, association, group, or non-profit is exempt from the rules under CAN-SPAM.
The FTC also made it clear that the same rules apply to any “Forward-to-a-Friend” action. Furthermore, there has been clarification of “transactional or relationship message(s).” If a customer unsubscribes from your list, this applies to any additional email that is ever sent from your brand in the future. This means making sure your data is clean and synchronized and replicated across all departments within the organization.
Hopefully this helps you take the proper course of action regarding your email marketing endeavors. If you need any assistance with your email campaigns and/or the management of your data please feel free to Contact Us.
Posted in Email
