Inbox e-marketing - Email Marketing Made Simple

Additional Information

Below are some additional topics to help our customers get the most from their email marketing. These have been gathered from multiple sources and can be considered the best general information available at this time, and you can use this in addition to your own customer knowledge to get the best results possible. We will be adding content to the page regularly, so please keep checking back for more up to date tools and information. Please click on a subject below to find out more.

1. Recipient lists & customer data

Your client database is probably the most powerful tool you can have as an email marketer. Here are a few key points to bear in mind:

Don't buy lists, save your money!
Purchased recipient lists are not a good investment, and crucially bought lists will attract spam complaints which could get you blacklisted.

Build your own recipient lists through opt-ins
Always create your own lists through opt-ins as these will invariably result in better response rates, and collecting addresses is easier than you might think. Below are some common methods to help you grow your database:

1. Add a subscription form on your website (ask us for more information)
2. Ask any new enquirers if they would like to receive email updates and offers
3. Incentivise opt-ins, perhaps by creating competitions to reward participation
4. Use an iPad to record recipient details when meeting face-to-face (ask us for more information)
5. Contact existing customers and ask for permission to update them via email

Get to know your customers
The more you know about your customers the more tailored your campaigns can be, so collect as much data as possible and try to segment your database accordingly. Your segments might be based on geography, buying behaviour or market sector, but the more relevant your message the better your response will be.

Don't wait too long to send
Recipient lists can go stale, if you get permission and they don't receive anything for 6 months or more they may forget they ever said yes. The quicker you can capitalise on getting those leads the better, and once you start sending keep it regular so you stay fresh in their mind.

Have subscribers add your email address to their contact list or address book
When people sign up for your list, it's a good idea to ask them to add your reply-to email address to their address book. This helps to ensure that any emails from your email address will land in their inbox rather than being filtered into spam folders.

2. Campaign planning

So you've got all your customer addresses ready to send your e-shots to, but what ground work needs to be done before you get on and put them together? What will help your campaign be coherent and consistent in every e-shot? Here we'll go through a few areas in which good prep can facilitate a successful campaign.

Who will be your audience?
Think who your typical recipient will be. Are they a business contact or a consumer? What interests them? What can you give them in an e-shot to fire up their intrigue? Understanding your audience is essential to ensure that the e-shot campaign is well designed to entice your readers with some tasty morsels of content.

Have you found that your contacts have quite varied interests? Why not record this goldmine of info in your recipient database? This will allow you to segment your list into different e-shots tailored to the specific interests and needs of your readers, thus allowing for more focused, individualised campaigns.

What message do you want to give?
The type of message will govern the design and content. Will your e-shots be direct sales messages inviting the reader to purchase? Alternatively would a campaign in a newsletter format be a better way to achieve your goals?

Regardless of the content type always have in focus that the message needs to give the reader value to arouse their curiosity, thus getting your e-shot read and clicked on. Including helpful hints, tips and info of interest to your reader is a good technique to grab their attention.

Plan and research content in advance
The best way to cook a tasty meal is to break down the task into small chunks, getting all your prep done before putting the dish together. An e-shot is much the same, organisation and preparation will make the end result a delicious experience for your audience.

A good idea is to jot down summaries of all the key points you wish to include in your campaign. Pop them into a chart and organise them into the e-shots you want to send. Include the actions and research you will need to complete before you begin the task of putting the e-shot together.

Now that every e-shot is planned it should make the process of completing the research and writing the content a lot more palatable, and the end result will be better to boot. Being good chaps we of course follow this advice, indeed we have already planned all of subject matter, titles, fun facts etc. of our toolbox newsletters in a progress chart. Pat on the back for us!

Imagery
Eye grabbing imagery is part of your armoury. As part of your planning process think about what images will draw attention and emphasise your content. Are photos of the subject matter required? Will you need to source or produce graphics to include in the e-shot?

3. Navigating Spam Filters

We know, you know and your subscriber knows that you are not an email spammer. But on the pathway between you and your recipient there is the cold logic of the spam filter. It could be fooled into thinking that you are, stopping your message from reaching your contact. Why does this happen? What steps can be taken to minimise this scenario? In this edition we’ll arm you with info to get that all-important clean bill of health from spam filters.

Understand How Spam Filters Work
We’d recommend that you get a basic knowledge of how spam filters operate. Understanding what your emails need to navigate will help avoid oversights that could block your message getting through. Here’s a simple explanation to get you up to speed.

Basically spam filters check incoming emails for characteristics of spam messages. Most will calculate a ‘spam score’ for the entire email, and if a pre-defined threshold is passed the message is classed as spam.

This ‘spam score’ is made up of the individual scores for each spammy characteristic identified by the filter. These are valued according to their association with spam.

To demonstrate this we can compare a couple of terms that are associated with spam emails to varying degrees. The scores are arbitrary for the purposes of this demo.
• ‘Account suspended’ in the subject line of a message is highly indicative of a phishing spam email. Therefore ‘Account suspended’ would be scored quite highly by the filter. Lets give it value of 8.
• ‘Urgent’ being in the line does have an association with spam, but can be a characteristic of genuine emails also. So it is scored a lower by the filter, lets say a value of 3.
• If an email examined by the filter were to contain the phrase ‘Urgent – Account Suspended’ the two scores would be added together. So 8 + 3 = 11. So if the threshold were 10 this email would be stopped.

From this we can understand that it is possible for an email can be classed as spam by a filter due to a number of low scoring characteristics adding up to nudge the cumulative total past the ‘spam score’ threshold. It isn’t always the case that one feature alone causes it to be blocked.

Every Recipient is Different
With no two email servers alike what is acceptable for one filter will be rejected by another. This variance is caused by the differences in the software used and the preferences defined by the user. Thus there is no modus operandi to observe that keeps every filter happy.

What Steps Can be Taken?
Avoid filter issues by avoiding some of these common mistakes.
• Avoid spammy phrases like ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’, ‘click here’, ‘increase your sales’, ‘apply now’, ‘guaranteed return’ etc. The web contains a plethora of suggestions on what to avoid, but you get the idea.
• Go easy on exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• NO-ONE LIKES BEING SHOUTED AT, IT’S THE SAME WITH SPAM FILTERS. Steer clear of using all caps or too many capital letters.
• Keep symbol use in check, lots of ✔, ♥ ★ ☼ ♫ ☀ ✿ ☆ ♡ ⇒ ☺ ❤ ✈ → ☂ could be problematic.
• Try to avoid conveying a huge sense of urgency. ‘Buy this now’, ‘Don’t wait’ etc. It can give the filter the impression of a desperate spammer.
• Be careful of the use of words that could add to the ‘spam score’ of your e-shot, such as ‘Free’, ‘Reply’, ‘Limited’ etc.
• Avoid creating an e-shot that is one big image. Include some text so the filter doesn’t think you are a spammer trying to hide content in a picture.
• Beware of using bright green or red fonts.

What Are the Signs of A Spam Filter Problem?
Signs of a spam filter issue can be identified in the reports generated after an e-shot has been sent. Keep an eye out for sudden drop in open rates. A sudden increase in bounce rates is another indicator.
But what if the reports only show a small proportion of the bounces having the reason as being suspected spam? This can and does happen. Bounce reports work from the data we get back from the recipient’s email server. If no specific reason for the bounce is given we can only advise a generic reason like ‘General Bounce’.

Furthermore if the email was classified as spam further downstream the initial firewall, such as a subsequent filter or the email client, we receive no failure notification at all. In this scenario the email would show as unopened in the reports as we have received no data to assert anything different. Hence the overall rates are more telling.

4. Writing Effective Subject Lines

The subject line of your e-shot is the most important way to grab the attention of your recipient. It can be the only time too, the decision between the delete button or checking out the content can be based entirely on it.
So what makes a great line? Here we’ll give you a few ideas to help you catch the eye and extend a warm invitation to cross the threshold and check out your content.

Be Honest and Accurate
Being your first opportunity to snare attention, first and foremost the subject line needs to accurately describe the topic and type of content served up within.

Ensure that your recipient can easily understand the subject line, allowing for an informed decision to be made as to whether the content could be of benefit or interest.

Best practice for the email marketer dictates that your recipient should already have some sort of a relationship with you, so by being upfront and unambiguous in your subject line you will keep the trust of your subscriber, and get better results.

Be Concise
‘Read all about it!’ In the world of news media a concise, well-constructed headline is more effective than one that is longer and too detailed. It is the same with the headline of your e-shot, the subject line.

We’d recommend that you aim to attract your reader with a subject line of around 50 characters or less. Studies in this area show that being to the point is on the whole more effective. A rare exception would be an extremely targeted and specialised audience who may appreciate the extra info.

Suggestions to Get Opened
Want to get creative? Fancy venturing beyond a purely descriptive subject line? Here are a few ideas for you to chew over. Remember by using the reports feature you can always analyse and adapt your approach (if necessary) to find what style works best for you.

• Current topics: Incorporating events and trends into your subject line that will be at the top of your readers’ minds could link your e-shot nicely to whatever is in focus. You can be as general as linking a temperate season to an offer, for example autumn, or maybe something more specific to your sector which is of particular relevance to your readership.
• Call to Action: Success may be found by inviting an action. ‘Vote to win’, ‘Pre-order now’, ‘Order today for free delivery’ ‘Get up to speed on…’ etc.
• Ask a Question: Subject lines framed as questions can get good open rates. Pose one that your subscribers will want answered, ensuring that the solution or how to find the remedy is in your content. Curiosity quenched, the reader has got value from your email. Success.
• Include the ‘Bait’: Got a freebie on offer? Tell your reader in the subject line.
• Localisation: Know where your recipients are? Want to notify them of something in their area? Include the location in the subject line; this will make the mail stand out as über relevant in the inbox.

Don’t Look Like Spam
To get access to the inbox of your subscribers you’ll need to keep on the right side of the spam filters. This being a whole topic in it’s own right it will have an entire future edition of the Inbox e-Marketing toolbox devoted to it, but in the meantime here a few pointers to be aware of when composing subject lines.

• Avoid spammy phrases like ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’, ‘click here’, ‘increase your sales’, ‘apply now’, ‘guaranteed return’ etc.
• Go easy on exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• NO-ONE LIKES BEING SHOUTED AT, IT’S THE SAME WITH SPAM FILTERS. Steer clear of using all caps or too many capital letters.
• Keep symbol use in check, lots of ✔, ♥ ★ ☼ ♫ ☀ ✿ ☆ ♡ ⇒ ☺ ❤ ✈ → ☂ could be problematic.
• Be careful of your use of words that will add to the ‘spam score’ of your e-shot, such as ‘Free’, ‘guarantee’, ‘cheap’ etc.

Not sure whether your subject line will make it through the spam filter? Fear not, we offer a design and spam test which analyses your e-shot to see how it is likely to fair with popular spam filters. Contact us for more detail.

5. Creating Compelling Content

The great thing about creating e-shot content is that there is no rigid modus operandi to follow; it would be boring if there were. You’re free to be creative and experiment to find what works best for you and your audience. In this edition we go through a few basic considerations to have in mind when getting down to putting together your compelling content, helping you to discover the best methodology for your audience, whilst avoiding oversights on the way.

Consistent, easy to digest content
Most subscribers like to invest the minimum amount of time and effort when viewing e-shots. Your offering needs to be quick and easy to use so that everything is in plain sight and easy to understand. If an e-shot looks like it might be hard work to extract value from it’s unlikely to get read. Uncluttered, well laid out e-shots are easier for recipients to read.

Clear labelling and demarcation between sections allow readers to scan the message and zero in on the parts that spark interest with the minimum of fuss. Consistent layout and look to your content familiarises subscribers with your campaign. Subconsciously they’re being educated to know your brand identity and the likely nature of your email from the familiar aspects they see. They’ll even get to know where their favourite bits of content are on the e-shot. All without thinking. We’re not saying don’t ever change your layout – every once in a while freshens things up – just not every other e-shot in a campaign.

Bitesize is Best
Small, easily digestible bitesize e-shots are more effective than those with a whole heap of info in most situations. Overlong content with too much detail can make the reader feel like it will be an onerous task to trudge through the e-shot, something to avoid. If you have lots of good stuff to share with your subscribers try spreading it out over numerous little e-shots. Small messages are easier to consume and don’t overwhelm, the readers attention span is not surpassed.

Can’t wait? Need to get all your goodies out there ASAP? No problem, effective use of links is a good technique in this scenario. Give brief, honest summaries of the deals or info you have to offer, with an invitation to click links to your website that show the extra detail. Job done, the e-shot is quick and easy for readers to process with those that want to know more being only a click away from fulfilment. Everyone wins.

Choosing the Right Tone
Your audience and the nature of your message will guide you as to the written style to adopt. Place yourself in their shoes, from their perspective what approach will be the best? Is there a particular style that will be off-putting? For most scenarios penning the e-shot in a friendly style, as if you were talking personally to your recipient, works best. The warm tone will engage. But some instances require a more formal style. Communications can need a matter-of-fact tone with emotion absent.

Combine Pictures with Text
Having text in the body of your e-shot will help it perform better. Even if you can only include a small amount, it’s way better than none at all. Your e-shot will have an improved chance of reaching your recipients and on arrival shall perform better. Many of your subscribers will receive their emails in such a way that images are not downloaded automatically. Emails in which the body is constructed entirely of images without separate text will effectively appear blank in their email client.

But what about the ‘view web version’ link included in every e-shot? Surely these recipients can download images manually? Not enough I’m afraid. Without a tempting snapshot of content some recipients will not exert the effort to see the images. Give them a hook. Readable text allows these subscribers an opportunity to judge what your e-shot has on offer. You’ll be justifying the effort to download or view the images by indicating the potential reward in your content.

Spam filter problems can also be minimised with the simple addition of readable text. Making emails image only or image heavy is a technique used by spammers to sneak text past spam filters. So to protect the addressees the filter can block the delivery of image only/heavy emails.

A second pair of eyes is invaluable
Most of us are guilty of not seeing the obvious at times, us included! We all want to make the perfect e-shot, but sometimes the task is so consuming that we get blinkered, missing mistakes and not seeing potential enhancements. A neutral set of eyes is the cure.

Ask a colleague, friend or anyone trustworthy read through your e-shot before sending. Most of the time they’ll confirm that your email has perfect grammar and spelling, the content makes perfect sense and that they wouldn’t change a thing. Peace of mind achieved. But on the odd occasion they’ll spot a little error, or maybe suggest a brilliant improvement you never thought of. For that you’ll be truly grateful.

6. Timing and frequency

You’ve put together an excellent thought provoking e-shot, but when it drops into your recipients’ inbox will they be in a position to read and digest the nuggets you have sent them? What timing and scheduling factors do you need to consider to gain access to as many of your readers as possible?

Schedule Your Campaign
E-shot campaigns are at their most effective when emails are sent regularly at a balanced rate. Get it right and your readers will be aware of and understand your message, putting your organisation’s products and services in pole position. Planning the correct schedule for your campaign will achieve this.

So how will you decide the perfect sending frequency of your emails? The style and the amount of content in the campaign indicates way to go.

Little and Often
Smaller, concise emails such as direct selling messages can be sent quite often. The recipient can quickly understand the message and judge whether the message is of interest, small chunks of info are usually welcome. A good example of this is the e-marketing strategy of Amazon. At times they will contact their customers on almost a daily basis, but as their messages are mostly bite-size with a clear indication as to the content most receivers don’t object. Short, sweet and well described sent regularly is good.

Something a Little More Substantial
Messages that are more detailed (like an e-newsletter) are best sent less often. These require more investment in time from the recipient to digest and get benefit from. Bombarding your reader with too much in depth material can frustrate, a well-spaced schedule will prevent unsubscribes through irritation. Monthly or bi-monthly can be good schedule for in depth material.

When is My Recipient Most Accessible?
When is the optimum time? There are multiple possibilities here. Understanding your recipients and the message you want to present will let you to work this out, no sweat.

Business Contacts
Is your campaign aimed at business customers? You’ll need to consider their behaviour during the day. For example an office based recipient is likely to work roughly 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. So they may be most receptive to a direct sales message 9am to 10am during the working week when they are checking through their emails and planning their day. Later than this could be ineffective, their focus might have switched to completing job tasks, meetings etc.

Towards the end of the working day, particularly on a Friday, fatigue may be setting in. The focus of a proportion of office based business contacts may be turning away from starting new work tasks resulting in distractions becoming welcome. Success may be found sending a newsletter later in the working day to provide that welcome diversion.

Targeting a Consumer Audience?
Sending a consumer e-shot? You might think that you need to target your recipients’ at a time when they’re not at work. Drill down into consumer behaviour you will find this is not necessarily the case. Office workers will often take a cheeky peek at their own personal emails on their desktop PC or smartphones throughout the day. Access to personal emails at work is becoming the norm. Sending an offer to consumers during the workday for them to act upon in their own time later may yield you positive results.

Newsletters for consumers can also be sent during the working day. Sending in the afternoon results in the message being in their inbox for later when work is over and done with for the day. It may even become the aforementioned welcome distraction from work. Not something you or we would entertain, but this sort of naughtiness does happen!

Something for the Weekend...
Sending emails at weekends to business contacts is usually an unproductive exercise for obvious reasons, but consumers are in their own time and free to read and act upon your message. Sending consumer e-shots before lunchtime on a Saturday could be a successful strategy to consider.

Test Your Method
Unsure that your schedule and timing is as effective as it could be? Why not experiment with your campaign by varying the schedule and timings to test which method is best? After sending e-shots use the reports feature in your Inbox e-Marketing account to gauge what your best strategy is.

Unsure how to use the reports feature? Would like to have a better understanding of open rates, clicks, bounces etc.? Fear not, get in touch with us and we will happily tool you up with how it works and what it all means. We’ll make sure analysis of your campaign is easy peasy.

7. Understanding your results

Have you an effective e-shot campaign? Are you engaging your subscribers? Is your message reaching them? Answers to these questions can be found in the reports.

But what do the numbers and rates mean? Knitting together this data into an overall picture can at first be a little daunting, but with an understanding of each measure you’ll be well on the way to self-appraising your campaign performance, getting the most out of all the data available in the reports.

How Many Recipients Saw Your e-Shot? The Unique Open Rate Has the Answer
A unique open is a record of when an individual recipient has opened an e-shot for the first time. Therefore the number of unique opens is a measure of how many recipients have opened an e-shot.

From this we can find the unique open rate. Expressed as a percentage of the recipients to whom the e-shot was sent to, excluding bounced messages.

Open rate figures aren’t 100% accurate; it’s not technically possible. This is not an issue as the rate is used as an overall guide, not an absolute number. So as an indicator of overall performance it is a highly valuable stat, particularly when comparing individual e-shots within a campaign to each other.

Current opinion and research shows that if the unique open rate for an e-shot is in the range of 20% to 40% it has performed around average.

Bounces – These Guys Didn’t Get Your Email
A bounce is a record of an email that could not be delivered to a recipient. A bounce is shown in the reports when a recipient’s email server has communicated delivery failure.

They fall into two categories. Permanently undeliverable emails are called hard bounces. Temporarily undeliverable emails are termed soft bounces.

Soft bounces can occur because of a full mailbox, too large a message or the recipient’s email server being too busy or down. A hard bounce can be caused by an incorrect email address or domain. Emails that are suspected as being spam can also be bounced.

The bounce rate is good at indicating issues with a recipient list (inaccurate or out of date data) and spam filter problems. Comparing the performance of each e-shot should highlight any sudden jump in bounces, showing that a problem is present.

Clicked a Link, Recipients Who Took the Bait
Click through rate, shown as ‘clicked a link’, is a measure of who clicked on a link in an e-shot. Expressed as a percentage, it is calculated by showing what proportion of recipients who opened the e-shot clicked a link. Recipients for whom no open has been recorded are excluded from calculation.

We recommend that you always analyse the links that have been clicked as shown in the ‘Link Activity and Overlay’ section of the reports. Here you can study which links were popular and identify those that did not attract much attention. This gives invaluable experience; you will learn what type of link works best for your audience.

Unsubscribed. Recipients That Don’t Want Your Message
The unsubscribed figure describes how many recipients have elected not to receive future e-shots. The percentage given is out of all the recipients to whom the e-shot was sent.

It is difficult to keep every single recipient interested in your campaign for the duration. Even with the most engaging thought provoking e-shot their will always be a small number of subscribers who decide it’s no longer for them. So don’t be downhearted by unsubscribes if they number relatively few.

Some unsubscribes can be seen as a positive. Unsubscribes by contacts your organisation cannot offer anything to are in effect cleaning your recipient list for you, leaving only the interested parties subscribed to your message.

Marked as Spam
This measure shows how many spam complaints have been received against an e-shot. Given as a percentage of all the recipients to whom the e-shot was sent to as well as the quantity.

Major ISPs like AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo etc. offer users a reporting facility to flag emails as spam. It’s these spam complaints that appear in the reports.

Your target spam rate for an e-shot is 0%, no question. But accidents do happen; recipients can press the spam button by accident when trying to unsubscribe, maybe they forgot that they subscribed with you. So there is a little leeway, currently a rate of under 0.2% (1 spam complaint per 5000 recipients) shouldn’t create issues.

Want to Improve Your Stats? Here are a Few Helpful Pointers
To improve unique open rates examine whether your subject lines could be more effective. Also check whether you are sending your e-shots at the optimum time for your audience.

If an increase in clicks is your desire check that the links on offer are interesting to your readership. Are you highlighting the links in the e-shot clearly? Have you effectively communicated the goodies they can access?

Have a high unsubscribe rate? Review whether the e-shot content is useful to your audience. Check that your recipient list is clean, only containing contacts who have a relationship with your organisation.

Minimise bounces by only using clean, up to date recipient lists. Had a sudden jump in the bounce rate? Check that you haven’t accidentally created an e-shot that could have been mistaken for spam.

Spam complaint problems can also be avoided with a clean, opt-in only recipient list. Consider using a double opt-in process; send your subscribers an email containing a link to confirm they want your e-shots (we can help with this). Negate forgetful subscribers by minimising the period between sign up and e-shot send. You could even remind subscribers they joined your emailing list up by stating this in your e-shot.

More detailed explanations and further tips can be found here. As always we are only an email or phone call away if you have any questions with your reports, or anything else!

8. Current Email Marketing Statistics

44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email. (Source: Convinceandconvert.com)
33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. (Source: Convinceandconvert.com)
Roughly half of an email list will be active – either opening or clicking on emails. (Source: Epsilon)
Subject lines fewer than 10 characters long had an open rate of 58%. (Source: Adestra July 2012 Report)
Personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. (Source: Adestra July 2012 Report)
For B2B companies, subject lines that contained “money,” “revenue,” and “profit” performed the best. (Source: Adestra July 2012 Report)
64% of people say they open an email because of the subject line. (Source: Chadwick Martin Bailey)
7 in 10 people say they made use of a coupon or discount from a marketing email in the prior week. (Source: 2012 Blue Kangaroo Study)
39% of marketers have no strategy for mobile email. (Source: eConsultancy 2012 Email Marketing industry Census)
72% of B2B buyers are most likely to share useful content via email. (Source: Earnest Agency)
56% of businesses say they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2013. (Source: The Small and Midsize Business Email Marketing Survey 2013)
Monday emails had the highest revenue per email. (Source: Experian 2012 Q4 Email Benchmark Report)
27% of consumers were more likely to say their favorite companies should invest in more email. (Source: ExactTarget)
1 in 2 marketers use animated gifs in their email campaigns. (Source: Experian Email Market Study)
This year, about 84% of all email traffic will be spam. (Source: The Radicati Group)
Email ad revenue reached $156 million in 2012. (Source: Interactive Advertising Bureau)
Emails that include social sharing buttons have a 158% higher click-through rate. (Source: GetResponse)
Women click 10% more often than men on mobile emails. (Source: Tailored Mail 2012 Email Marketing Trends)
Email marketing spend grows 10% year over year. (Source: Forrester 2011)
40% of B2B marketers rated the leads generated by email marketing as high quality. (Source: Software Advice Survey)
For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment. (Source: Experian)
82% of consumers open emails from companies. (Source: Litmus)
64% of decision-makers read their email via mobile devices. (Source: TopRankBlog)
There are 3.6 billion email accounts in 2013. (Source: The Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report, 2012-2016)
By 2016, the number will reach 4.3 billion. (Source: The Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report, 2012-2016)

Did you find this useful? Would you like more information? Just get in touch and we'll do our best to answer any queries you may have.