Internet Marketing Post

How NOT to Overdesign Your Email Blasts

I was thinking today about how simple good email post card design is.There is a simple brilliance to great email marketing post card design, actually. That old adage, "don't over do it", it applies here. Here's why:

Email, like most web mediums is scanned - more read then others, but still scanned. Of course in boxes are deluged these days, including mine, and ever changing email addresses and spam filters are a factor. List maintenance is another post, but don't ignore it, it's crucial. Email that stands out is simple, focused, well designed and brings relevant and useful content to it's recipient.

There are two major types of email marketing, (being very general here but hang in there with me). There is email you mail to an existing customer (my favorite) and email you mail to prospective customers. This post is about the former, the ones who love you already. Existing customers are a hotbed of opportunity for email marketing done right. Now for the "doin it right" part. There are (in general) 2 major formats for email, post card blast and email newsletters, this post is about the former.

Great email postcards with good response go something like this:

1. Use one maybe 2 messages, a strong tag and maybe a sub point. Don't over do the copy. Remember, they are scannnning....and they are in a hurrrrry.

2. Use colors that are the appropriate contrast or style for your audience. Older folks like high contrast, younger folks the more hip colors - check a fashion magazine or their favorite web sites and design within the realm of their ability to read and their liking.

3. Choose imagery carefully. Don't pick images that will limit the design appeal unless you plan to design several versions of the piece. For example if you are targeting men, age 40 and up that play sports, be sure to provide a general enough image to keep both the soccer players and the out doors men engaged. Be sure to vary your photos to include all the beautiful people in the world, within your targeted demographic. This is something you can schedule in over time, certainly not something to worry about in each piece.

On a budget or without a photographer, try these sites for reasonable and beautiful work:

www.corbis.com, www.dreamstime.com, www.gettyimages.com, www.istock.com.

Lastly, give your deep divers, or those that want to read more or better yet buy from you, a place to go. Include links to your web site with relevant content to that postcard's message. Specifically designed landing pages are not required, but definitely test landing pages vs deep dives on your web site. And do more of what works. (remember, simply brilliant.)

So, simple but relevant content, stand out imagery that your audience can relate to and links for deep diving.

Have fun, and send along samples if you want to brag on how great your post cards are. Cheers!

Email's Position in the Market - Real Life Thoughts

 

I called a business I frequented years ago today to ask them to please remove me from their email marketing list. The response I got was enlightening. Here is what I learned:

1. New adapters to online media often start with email marketing. Some would say email marketing is on the way out due to social media's onset. Not true. Online techies and long timers often usher out intellectually what the market is still adapting to. So as far as the salon goes, they have been emailing for a couple years now and still don't understand CAN SPAM or how to manage their email marketing agency.

2. New adapters in email marketing often times do not hire agencies or individuals that manage their email marketing deliverability carefully. This was the ninth time or more that I had asked to be removed from their list via email. There was not an unsubscribe link on the email and I had received 2 emails from them that day!

3. New adaptors to email marketing are at legal risk due to their lack of understanding. The woman that took my call repeatedly said "we have nothing to do with that" as if they did not control who was subscribed or unsubscribed from her company's list. (!) As a courtesty, I explained CANSPAM requires they remove me from their list within 14 days and she said "you are the one that gave us your email address."Scary misunderstanding of the legal risk their company is in emailing cluelessly.

4. Opportunity abounds for solid email marketing companies to help these type of clients. Educating them on the importance of list integrity alone would provide a valuable service.

Had any of these conversations lately? Do share.

Launching Email Marketing: List Building or Acquistion

Upon program launch, every email marketer faces the decision as to how they will acquire or build an email list of recipients. A solid email marketing strategy includes a thoughtful creative strategy based on your target market, and an equally thought out list acquisition or building strategy. Lets talk about what each is and when to choose which - list  approach that is.

Build a List Organically.
It is best to build a list of loyal, opted in email recipients, one by one via your online campaigns like search marketing, web site sign ups, blogs and other social media efforts. Also, take advantage of the many traditional media opportunities to collect addresses,  like direct mail lead cards, trade show booth sign ups and retail location POS collection.

You will need to evangelize the value of email addresses in some corporate environments where often physical addresses are still the sought after consumer data.

Acquiring a List
Shortly said, acquired lists can be expensive and you don't always get a quality list. The list seach requires time and research, so choose carefully and talk to list holder references, get 3 bids, you know the drill.

Also, some email senders  will not even accept most acquired lists. So know your sender's list policies before you decide your list route. The reason is "you never really know what you are going to get". The addresses on many acquired lists are old, include non-opted in names, and sometimes come with no proof of opt in at all. The best thing to do if you have the budget to acquire a list is to get the seller to scrub it for you, or scrub it like crazy once you have it. And this means sending a "resubscribe" invite to the subscribers to make double sure (thus "double opted in") that they still want to hear from your company. This may shrink a list but a small and mighty list (mighty = high responding) is much better then an expensive to mail to large list.

A Note about Deliverability
A positive deliverability reputaion is paramount to ongoing success in email marketing. Deliverability is risky game, even when you know exactly who you are mailing to. Consider that you have once chance to gain a good reputation with ISPs and if you blow that chance getting black listed is not fun and even always possible to recover from. So, waiting a few months to build your own organically grown list, and spending that time, instead of the dollars acquiring a list that you may not know much about is often the safer route.

Whichever route you travel, you are sure to enjoy great cross sell, branding and offer results with email marketing. For a free copy of our list qualifying questions, email us.

6 Reasons to Keep or Start Your Email Newsletter

                                    

While rumors of social media threatening email marketing bounce around the web, email  done right, marches on producing leads and loyalty from consumers. Here is where the loyalty comes from and also why you should keep or start your email newsletter. 

1. Email newsletters deliver value add content to an otherwise offer badgered audience. In the "it's all about them" web economy it is crucial to deliver content useful to your audience and completely not focused on your company or its products and services, offers, coupons, you get the picture. For value ad content ideas, sign up for few of your competitors email newsletters and see how good they are at focusing on the needs of their customers, and downplaying their own interests. 

2. Email newsletters are a great environment for offers. (see #1, and then read #2) Your offers should not be the focus of a email newsletter. But, you can test new offers tastefully within and email newsletters. The targeted content of email newsletters offers opportunities to present new offers, in a non pushy manner - right there amongst content that is valuable to your customer.

3. Email newsletters succeed at establishing your company as an expert in your industry. Your customers may buy Widget X from you but do they think of you for expert advice and industry trend information? Email newsletters enable you to build trust and credibility with your existing customers. 

4. Email newsletters are a great vehicile for promoting your key partnerships - interviews with key executives, featured new products and other company tidbits about your partners will educate your customer and help your partner companies. 

5. Last but not least, email newsletters produce great fresh content for your web site - they are easily hosted on your site for revisiting and SEO purposes. 

6. Email newsletters are great viral marketing tools - in other words, if they are well done your readers will forward them to friends and family, file or bookmark for future reference, share on social media networks. 

So tighten your existing email newsletters with relevant "all about them" content, bright imagery and clear brand messaging. Make sure you include a means to share the content, and a forward to a friend button. Email newsletters done right can build your customer's loyalty and build the value and size of y our email list. 

5 Reasons to Launch Email Marketing Now

Did you know that 91% of internet users between the ages of 18 and 64 send or read e-mail, and an even higher number of users ages 65 or older do the same? The only other activity to even approach e-mail’s popularity is using a search engine to find information. Here are 5 reasons to launch email marketing now:

1.       Email marketing is a basic ingredient of balanced and effective online media menu.
 Email marketing copy can be built off of the data of pay per click media and visa versa. Your most successful pay per click ad may also be your most successful email header or subject line copy. Email is a perfect way to follow up with paid search responders who have not yet closed to sale.

2.       Your customers, who know and trust your brand, want to hear from you.
If your branding has formed and emotional connection with your audience (like it should) your customers trust you and want to share your great products and services with their friends and family. And email gives them the opportunity to do just that, quickly and easily.

3.       Your customers said “Yes” to you once, some will again.
Statistics suggest that suggestive selling will work anywhere between 58 and 72 percent of the time," says Jim Sullivan, chief executive of Sullivision Inc., an Appleton, Wis.-based consulting company for the restaurant industry. Why would that not translate to email marketing your loyal customers to up sell them to your other products and services?

4.       Mailing to an existing list is much less expensive than building or renting a list.
 The best part about cross selling and up selling to an existing customer list is that it is much less expensive than trying to find new customers – use the list you already have to build your bottom line.

5.       There is a percentage of your list that will respond.
 Is it .01% .05%? Can you afford to let your list sit and not earn for you? It may be the asset you didn’t realize you had.

Th There are dozens of other reasons to launch email marketing - to gain ecommerce product sales, survey your customers for likes and dislikes, provide value add information. Once you dip your toe in the water on this media type you will find your own dozens of ways to add value to your marketing efforts.

Augmenting Paid Search Marketing to Gain Increased Return

For online marketers, Search Engine Marketing seems to lead, and provides the “ultimate” way to get your name out there on the Web. 

 

A recent article from UK based SEM firm Hitsearch blog states “The Search Engine Marketing market in America is by far the most established and competitive as well as innovative.”

How does this affect us now that we are living in an economic downturn?  Some businesses have confidence that we will bounce back with resilience.  However, others feel that things are bound to get worse before they get better.  Companies are turning to shift spending to measurable methods of advertising. 

John Miller of Marketo.com says in his blog about Strategies for Marketing During a Recession….“Fewer consumers means less demand; less demand means that efforts to stimulate demand (i.e. marketing) are less effective overall. Put simply, when people buy less, advertisers spend less.”

 

As marketers, how do we encourage companies and small businesses to continue seeing the value of the advertising dollar?  I believe that we need to show them the value by helping them produce results with cost-effective advertising. How cost-effective is Search Engine Marketing? Search is expensive and time consuming and has it really yielded your company many leads?

 

Truth be told, search does bring in the sales.  But what happened to those leads that didn’t close?

 

It’s no doubt that search is a major part of marketing, but it doesn’t stand alone.  Putting all your advertising eggs in the “search” basket will not produce a balanced online advertising card, so to speak.  Combining SEO, PPC strategy and email campaigning will provide you with not only leads generated by high visibility, conversions to closed sales, but prospective customers that you can continually reach. 

What does that mean for the marketer looking for a more cost effective way to advertise in this economic downturn?  It means more return on time and dollar investment  - you can gain a better return on the dollars invested in search by using the consumer data gained, especially the unconverted customer data – for email marketing and other forms of advertising.

Email marketing, especially triggered email enables you to work the “longtail” of response by staying in touch with search responders until your prospect closes to sale.

For example, an email newsletter or survey is a low cost marketing tool to reach customers, whether they are among the leads that didn’t close, or return customers.  This method will bring them back again and again to your excellent product and services.

A Business Strata blog on Marketing News says…” An expert has claimed that email marketing is "still an attractive option" for growing businesses looking to promote their work during the economic downturn.

If you sell a product that sells over time, email marketing can grow your business.

If your company sells products that need replacing or services that are ongoing and need repeating, email marketing is a great way to spend your advertising dollars in this economic downturn.

6 Reasons to Launch Email Marketing

1. Your customers who love you want to hear from you and what you are up to.
If your branding forms an emotional connection with your audience, as it should your customers trust you and want to share your great products with their friends and family. An email gives them the opportunity to do just that. CAN SPAM law allows  you to email people you have an existing business relationship with  - so what are you waiting for?

2. Your customers said yes to you once, some will again.
Is your product something people need more then once? Or that their friends or family would want? Email marketing is a great way to reintroduce your brand to your buying customers.

3. Cross selling to an existing customer is less expensive and easier then trying to find a new customer.
You have heard that before, but it is true. You have captured their attention once. No need to reach out with ads to gain response. Use the list you already have.

4. You can't afford to not find out what your email marketing opportunity is.
A certain percentage of your email database will respond. Can you really afford not to know what that percentage is?

5. Email Marketing is a basic ingredient of a balanced and effective menu of online media.
Email marketing copy can be built off of the data of pay per click media and visa versa. If they found you on search, why not follow up a week or so later to see where they are in their purchase process?

6. Emailing is on the rise.
There are fewer than 20 million business users of mobile email around the world and thanks to mobile devices, it will hit near 350 million by 2010, a Gartner report published today. Is your message reaching mobile devices?

Email Marketing's Deliverability Mystery

So a good Agatha Christie mystery novel includes your basic story line, some simple mystery solving tools like an old fashioned typewriter and a magnifying glass. Not so with many of online marketing's evolving mysteries. Is email marketing deliverability going the way of the search engine marketing mystery? Are the deliverability rules the new mystery of online marketing?

Similiar to the Google algorhythms PPC managers struggle with, seems ISP email deliverability rules are becoming somewhat nebulous and hidden. There are the trusty guidelines on image vs text balance, meeting CANSPAM requirements, etc, yet ISP post masters are becoming a thing of the past to dig into the deeper questions, with email managers often find their way through campaign optimizing by the numbers alone. Your messages are hitting a spam folder based on the ISP's rules but the rules are mysterious. Sound familiar SEM? There are the tried and true email marketing best practices - stick to them with a twist and add some standards to your ISP vendor management. Here's more.

 

Mystery Solved:
Manage the deliverability you pay for very closely. Demand accurate matrixes of the actions being taken monthly on your behalf to monitor and proactively improve your deliverabilty. If clients demand this of their ISP's hopefully the AOLs and Hotmails of the world will eventually realize how crucial it is to publicize clearly what they are calling spam. If we send a consistent message of "we need quality and consistent disclosure", they may eventually listen. Are we not the same people paying the advertising dollars on their portals?

Images
The other continual struggle for email's growth is the ever increasing and aggressive email client trend towards images being turned off - now even as a default upon registration, by many free email services like Gmail and others. If you don't design for this you completely miss the attention of your audience as your email is a box of X's until they choose to view images. Makes sense, who wants to provide a free service and then pay to store millions of fancy HTML messages for consumers. Nevertheless this practice hurts the email marketer's efforts.

Mystery Solved:
Designing with no images in mind is a bender for designers. Writing with no image to play off of is a bender for writers. But you have to do this. You have to design with the images off and on in mind.  Make sure your tests include looking at the messages in both modes images on and off - it's awkward at first to "design" to the no image view, but you can't avoid this - your results are the reward of transitioning to this approach.

Opened or Not?
Open rates are fading as a true measurement of consumer due to many email client's auto open functionality. (preview pane sound familiar?) When emails are auto opened by email clients the open rate is no longer a true measurement of consumer interest.What's a marketer to do?

Mystery Solved:
Refocus your analysis on clicks, form field patterns and the appearance of that beloved Thank You page. Nail down those measurements with any solid web metrics tool - know what the openers are doing once on the email page and your form. Where are the drop outs? Where is the content that no one is reading or responding to? When it comes to content optimizing, don't be too attached to your online brand as you know it today. Be willing to bend towards consumer response and your true market demand for the information then need to make the decision to buy your great product.

With some fresh strategy and consistent approach to these issues, the core mysteries will continue to surface and will become increasingly visible to the industry partners we need at the table - like Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink and others. In the mean time, solving these mysteries this keeps us all out of trouble - busy pioneering this great new media type called the internet. Agatha would be so proud.

Making Friends with Your Email List

 

Came across some excellent information in regards on consumer response to email marketing. This report, created by IPSOS, a reputable research firm, indicated consumer opinion and typical actions taken in regards to email they don't want to receive. More indication of how important it is to build long term happiness and loyalty with your consumer in a number of ways, so they see you as an expert in your industry and welcome your email whenever it arrives.