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Suggestions for improved email results in 2007 |
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Have you joined one of our monthly webinars yet? Many of you have and the feedback has been great. We would love to see more of you invest an hour with us online for some tips, tricks, best practices and ideas that will help improve your
campaigns and subscription rates. |
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We are always striving to make CoolerEmail even better. Customer requests for feature enhancements are responsible for many system upgrades. If you have feedback or suggestions, please send them to
suggest@cooleremail.com.
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| January 23, 2007 | |
| Suggestions for improved email results in 2007 | |
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Well 2006 came in fast and left even faster. The good news is that 2007 will offer even bigger opportunities to increase your productivity from email marketing. Listed below are some key areas which you may want to turn your focus to
sooner rather than later. Diligent application of these suggestions will not only improve your campaign results, it will also help take your email marketing programs to the next level! |
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| List Hygiene and Dynamic Content | |
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List Hygiene: Despite a "gut instinct" that there may be a better way, many email marketers prepare and send the same message to their entire optin list, regardless of the open and click metrics for the individuals on that list. Why is this? Well some email marketers are in a slump of what we refer to as "Lather, Rinse, Repeat". To get out of this mode we suggest that you do the following. 1. Export your Master list from the MasterCRM 2. Sort the reads by the last 4 months history 3. Look for those that have stopped reading your newsletter 4. Segment those into a "Not Read" version of your list and import them into a new list. 5. Create a second main list for your newsletters or outreach programs that are the remaining subscribers that have read at least 2 campaigns out of the past 4 months. 6. With your next campaign, create TWO editions, one for each new list. 7. Send the active readers your regular newsletter. 8. Send the lack luster non-readers a version that starts with letting them know that you are trying to accommodate them. Along these lines, encourage them to join another one of your lists which they may find more relevant . This reasoning is that, if they aren't reading, they really are not of value to your campaigns. They are just driving your metrics down. Don't get caught in the slump of thinking that is it all about list size, it is the quality of the list that matter to drive sales and conversions from your campaigns. 9. Look at the stats from the two list campaigns and look for those that actually read in the non readers list and move them back into the active readers list. 10. After 2-3 more campaigns to these lists you will be able to see who is of value and whom you may just quarantine or simply unsubscribe. Do not delete them permanently from your lists as you would not want to mistakenly remove an unsubscriber for legal compliance. Most importantly, save those two Excel lists you created for back up as you might need to refer to them at a later time. Dynamic Data - The Profile Update In between your campaigns, ask yourself what would be of value to ask of these subscribers if they updated their profiles with you. Set up the fields in the Master CRM --> User Fields to contain those profile questions. The reason for this is you want to drive them in the off campaigns to tell you more about themselves. Not just for your value (well maybe) but explain to them that you are asking so that you might send them more relevant content or offers. There needs to be a value proposition in here to trigger them to act. Repeat this "ask" campaign in between your main campaigns. You will get a percentage each time to tell you more. Now you are ready to build in dynamic content to each subscriber in your email campaigns. You can use at the footer of the email editor (or if you are importing your own HTML each time, you can add the tags you create in the Dynamic Data box in the footer of the editor before you import your HTML) the Add or Modify Dynamic Data rule system. It is just that easy. If you need additional help on this, consult the Help section of the CoolerEmail platform. One thing to remember is you are most likely NOT going to have data on everyone for the dynamic data fields you power using the User Fields you have set up. So create a second rule in the Dynamic Data editor that creates an IF rule for empty fields. Now you have a cleaner list and you can send relevant emails to your lists. |
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| Email Creative and Rendering | |
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Email Creative: Are you taking advantage of the Preview with Stats button in the Campaign reporting screen? If you aren't, it is time. This is an extremely useful tool to see if your subscribers are actually driven by the link placement, length, width, copy or colors you are using. Take some time to think about sending 2 versions of your creative to your lists. You can test using the New List button and at the bottom doing an A/B list split at 50/50. This will allow you to test two versions to a random segmentation of your list. Try using a different placement of the link you want them to actually click on, change the button color or side of the creative that the action button resides at, or think about the length of your email. Many studies we have seen suggest that consumers want a shorter, easier to digest email with links that take them to the rest of the content on your site. (Not like this email you are reading now, as this is a TIPS email to help you get what you need in one place.) Watch what happens when you send these different editions and use the Preview with Stats reports to see what impact it has on driving clicks or conversions. You might be surprised at the little changes that have yield the most impact. Email Rendering: Do your emails look different in AOL vs. MSN vs. Gmail vs Yahoo? Each email client is different and can cause colors to change, images to not appear or the creative to scroll up and down or left to right and you need to be aware of this. We perform countless quality control procedures with each new release of CoolerEmail to test how the rendering impacts email campaigns. If you are interested in performing your own tests for an important campaign, here are some simple steps: 1. Set up a test list in the My Account --> Update Account screen. This feature allows you to set up a list of email addresses that you can test to prior to sending out you campaign. Set up email accounts at all the major ISPs you can (look at your list to see what ones you send to most) and add these seed accounts to your Test List. 2. Send your edition to the test list prior to sending the full campaign out. 3. Go to these inboxes and look at how they appear. 4. Tweak your edition or the HTML you upload to correct any issues you see. There are some outside tools you can try as well. Paid Services: ReturnPath Pivotal Veracity Delivery Monitor Email Exam Habeas EyeTools Web 2.0 Tools: Site Vista Browser Shots Articles: Email Rendering, All the Rage How HTML Code Affects E-Mail Deliverability Boosting Email Deliverability Also think about joining or subscribing to the Email Experience Council for a community of 1000s of email marketing professionals where you can learn about trends, what to watch for, new testing tools and best practices. |
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| New Features Making Us Cooler | |
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You might have taken some time to rest over the last month with all the holidays, but our little fingers were busy banging away at the CoolerEmail code base to add more features and get some future ones moving forward. We added a new link structure for added security. We upgraded the XML API so that those of you using it have an even more secure API for your data. We upgraded our ACT 6 plug-in. Finally, we added a new bounce record that is marked with a "U" for those rare cases where nobody, including the recipient's network administrator, knows why a message happened to bounce. Coming soon: A new WYSIWYG editor that will give you unprecedented control of the system. |
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