The Ten Most Important Tips for Email Marketers

Let’s begin with the most important information first. Here is what we feel are the ten most important tips for anyone managing the email marketing process.

1. Only send emails to persons who have requested to receive them.
2. Only include content relevant to the type of content the person has requested.
3. Be consistent with your sending frequency. Pick a schedule, whether it is weekly, biweekly, or monthly and as often as you can stick to that schedule.
4. In most cases it is best to send business to business emails Tuesday through Thursday. We’ve found that the best times of the day to send are just after the start of the day around 9:30am or just after lunch around 1:30pm. It is best to avoid sending business to business emails after 4pm or on weekends.
5. In most cases it is best to send business to consumer emails either between 5pm and 8pm Tuesday through Thursday or between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon.
6. To improve deliverability, add a message at the top of your emails that says something like: “To ensure receipt of our emails, please add something@yourcompany.com to your Address Book.”
7. Make the From Name for your messages either your company name or the name of a person at your company. Once you choose a From Name, keep it consistent. During the split second decision subscribers make whether to open your email, the most important factor in their decision is whether the From Name is familiar to them.
8. Be sure to include both a plain text and an HTML version of your newsletter. Our System will automatically detect which subscribers can view the HTML message and which can only see the plain text message. If you don’t include a plain text message, around 5% of your recipients will see a message with nothing in it.
9. Don’t use all caps or multiple exclamation marks within your subject line or body. Doing this will trigger spam filters.
10. Build your list at every opportunity you have. If you have a retail location, add a point-of-sale sign-up form. At conferences or events, bring a paper sign-up form or have a laptop with a sign-up form set up and available for interested parties. Finally, add your newsletter signup form to every page on your web site. You can use the signup form generator within our system to automatically generate the code you need.

Tags: e-mail, e-mail marketing, e-Marketing

How to Maximize Email Response

What good is sending an email if it doesn’t get opened??? Today I’d like to share an article on how to maximize your open rates by writing really good subject lines. Enjoy!

For most people, a majority of emails received are junk email. As a result, each of us has developed a little ritual we follow when checking our email. Initially, most people look first at the subject lines to determine whether to read a message. Today, however, studies have shown that recipients glance at the “From” field to see if they recognize the sender’s name or email address. Then, only if they recognize the From Name do they look at the “Subject” field to see if it’s of interest to them. This is why we recommend using a From Name that is either your organization’s name or a well known person within your organization—and to keep that name consistent with every mailing.

Regarding subject lines, we have found a good strategy to be having one part of the subject line be consistent, and the other be variable. This way recipients can recognize your newsletter when it comes in as well as get a small taste as to what type of information might be featured for that issue.

Some examples of bad subject lines are:

The PermissionBased Email Marketing Monthly for September, 1 2005 from [YourCompany]

This subject line is simply too long. We recommend keeping subject lines between 20 and 50 characters whenever possible. This 84 character subject line is likely to get cut off in most email clients and could cause the message to have a higher chance of being blocked by a content based spam filter.

[FNAME]’S ENTREPRENEURS CHRONICLE FOR SEPTEMBER

This subject line is in all caps, which will increase the change the message will get blocked by content based spam filters.

Garden Tips

This subject line doesn’t provide any information as to what the message is about. We would recommend adding at least what month the message is for.

OxyPowder Special – Save £10 Today Only Buy Now!!!!

This subject line includes both a pound sign (£) and multiple exclamation points. Both of these things would cause the message to have a higher chance of being blocked by a content based spam filter.

Here’s is a revised version of each of these subject lines:

• PermissionBased Email Marketing Monthly for September

• Geraint’s Entrepreneuers’ Chronicle for March

• Garden Tips Monthly – Are Year Round Orchids Possible?

• OxyPowder Special: 15% Off

By following these tips on From Names and Subject Lines you can maximize the chance of your message being opened by your recipients.

Tags: e-mail, e-mail marketing, e-Marketing

How to Avoid Sending SPAM

I don’t think anyone likes SPAM. In fact, most of us despise it! So naturally, you don’t want to be perceived as a spammer. Thus, in today’s article I talk about how you can ensure you don’t get labeled as a spammer by mistake.

What Is Spam?

Spam is unsolicited email, also known as junk mail or UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email).

If you send any email in bulk to more than a handful of recipients who have not requested to receive it, it will be considered spam, regardless of the contents of the email. By sending email to only to those who have requested to receive it, you are following accepted permission-based email guidelines.

There are numerous laws restricting spam, including the United States’ CAN-SPAM Act, the Australian Spam Act of 2003, and other laws specific to a country, province, or state.

How Can I Avoid Sending Spam?

Our system is a permission-based email-marketing tool that follows the most stringent permission-based philosophies in order to protect users from sending spam:

• Communication – Your subscriber registration page must state why you are collecting the site visitor’s email address and how you plan to use their address. Additionally, by accepting our license agreement you have agreed to not sell or rent your lists.

• Verification – we can automatically sends all of your new subscribers an email confirming their interest in receiving emails from you to ensure that they have agreed to be on your mailing list.

• Unsubscription – Every email generated from our system contains an unsubscribe link which automatically updates your subscriber lists in order to prevent the distribution of unwanted emails to visitors who have unsubscribed.

Here Are Some Questions You Can Ask To Ensure You Are Not Sending Any Spam:

1. Are you importing a purchased list of ANY kind?
2. Are you sending to non-specific addresses such as: sales@domain.com, business@domain.com, webmaster@domain.com, info@domain.com, or other general addresses?
3. Do you have any abuse@, postmaster@, or hostmaster@ domains on your list?
4. Are you sending to distribution lists or mailing lists which indirectly send to a variety of email addresses?
5. Are you mailing to anyone who has not explicitly agreed to join your mailing list?
6. Does your email’s subject line contain false or misleading information?

If you have answered “yes” to any of the above questions, you may be labeled as a spammer.

Need help with e-mail marketing? Let IT Pie run your campaigns for you ensuring you get the best results – contact us today for help.

Tags: e-mail marketing, e-Marketing, email marketing

How to Turn Your List into Gold

Did you know that the most important asset a business or non-profit has is their customer list? As they say, the “gold is in the list.” If you currently don’t have a sign-up form on the top fold of your homepage that is allowing you to build your list, I’d recommend putting one there today! Using our system you can ensure that potential customers sign-up to your mailing list without you  needing to do anything!

First Of All, Why Is Your List Important?
Building lists of subscribers, prospects, and customers is one of the most important activities your business can undertake. Once built, permission-based email lists can create sales for your company for years to come.

Tip #1 For Building Your List: Networking
Whether you have an online or offline business, networking has always been an effective way to build relationships and generate sales. In most cases, people exchange business cards or pass along leads when meeting. This contact information is then used to build your database.

Quick Tip: After a networking opportunity, get in the habit of sending a quick email message (no more than 3 days later) to all of the people you spoke with. Start by recapping your conversation, and then ask each contact for permission to be add them to your email list.

Tip #2 For Building Your List: Trade Shows
Trade shows can be an excellent resource for gathering sales leads; consumers that attend trade shows are often the most qualified buyers, as they are paying to attend an event that is of interest to them. As long as the majority of exhibitors could be part of your target market, this is a wonderful resource for obtaining top quality contact information.

Quick Tip: Send a follow up email to everyone from the trade show. Mention that you met them at the trade show booth, explain how you can help them, and then ask for permission to include them on your email list.

Tip #3 For Building Your List: One to One Email Messages
Many non-selling employees, such as accounts payable or repair and maintenance personnel, regularly communicate with prospects or customers directly via email. Adding a link to your sign-up form within employee email signatures increases your exposure and potentially builds your database with every message you send.

Tags: e-Marketing, email marketing

How to Get $57 For Every $1 You Spend

I think you’re in for a treat today. I’ll be writing about how and why email marketing can be used to convert prospects into customers and convert paying customers into lifetime evangelizers. Did you know that on average, for every $1 companies spend on email marketing $57 in sales are produced?

It is typical for email marketing campaigns to top the 2% conversion rates typically expected from direct mail.

In fact, email delivers the highest return-on-investment across marketing mediums by an eye-popping margin of $57.25 for every dollar spent on it in 2005, according to the Direct Marketing Association’s “The Power of Direct Marketing”(October 2006).

Not only that, but email is delivering sales at an average cost per order of less than $7! Compare this to the average costs per order of $71.89 for banner ads, $26.75 for paid search and $17.47 for affiliate programs, according to Shop.org’s “State of Retailing Online 2007” (September 2007).

These facts further support our belief that email marketing can be the highly lucrative tool that will take your business to the next level. The key to such success is knowing how to use email marketing.

Interested in sending e-mail from as little as 1p per email plus a flat fee of £5 per campaign using our professional system? Then contact IT Pie today

Tags: e-mail marketing, e-Marketing, email marketing

What the tweet is it all about?

Twitter Icons

Now I’m not going to claim to be ground-breaking following my newly created Twitter account, in fact until last week I was a bit of a sceptic, but as is partly the purpose of this blog I wanted and intend to test all forms of social media and plan on maximising my companies exposure through social media whilst minimising the amount of time invested in achieving this goal.  In a future blog I will explain how I am using Twitter to fully tweet my messages but for this post I would like to focus on Twitter the social media tool.

So I’m confident you have all heard of twitter following the mass media coverage it has received over the past months with many celebrities and even politicians using it (it was part of Barack Obama’s campaign) But in case you haven’t the concept is that you can ‘Tweet’ your message which is made up of 140 characters and contact all your followers with one single message.  The idea was inspired by MSN Messenger where it is possible to add an out of office/ away to lunch message according to co-founder Biz Stone, Biz and the other two co-founders decided to create a prototype and insisted that family and friends use it, at first they were reluctant, but following a minor earthquake many turned to twitter to get a message of their safety out to friends and family instead of using the phone to contact everyone individually – this was a real moment in Twitters history when they realised that there was a use for Twitter. The other was when the plane was landed on the Hudson River and Twitter seemed to be ahead of the media in delivering the news! According to Sue Robinson from the School of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin told the Daily Campus “It was a kind of mass network journalism, or crowd sourcing is another term for it. A lot of people are writing in, and that mass, that collection of data, creates the news story.”

So Twitter had arrived and had a respectable following for a social media site, but it was when celebrities began to use it that it really took off. It is claimed that when American celebrity Oprah Winfrey ‘Tweeted’ live on her show traffic to the Twitter site increased by 43%. The site has grown in the number of users dramatically, from half a million in February 2008 to seven Million a year later and in the past four months it is thought to have grown beyond 10 million, but there is a downside.  According to a study by Harvard University, 10% of Twitter users generate 90% of the content where as on a typical social media website the top 10% of users generate 30% of content. It also claims that more than half of people using Twitter updated their page once every 74 days. This research has led to the longevity of the site being questioned, will Twitter survive the hype?

It is our belief following our brief experience that Twitter is here to stay, it is just the way in which it is marketed and used that needs re-defining.

On the Twitter home page it claims that:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

But it is our belief that users do not want to share the same information with family, friends and colleagues and do not want to use Twitter to communicate personal information. In fact as a personal tool for communicating I am not convinced that Twitter has any future, but as a commercial tool for businesses to promote their services and to maintain continued contact with the clients who are interested it is ideal. In a matter of 140 characters it is possible to remind customers of your company and direct them to your website.

An additional bonus of Twitter is the way in which it now connects to varying applications, we believe it has become a useful SEO tool and an excellent way of generating inbound links. In a future post I will share with you how I am now using Twitter to create at least 3 in bound links to my post whilst writing my post – through blogging I am creating in bound links using Twitter (without even logging into Twitter) which will help to further promote my blog and website.

So now you know what the tweet it’s all about don’t you think you should get tweeting?

Follow IT Pie here (http://twitter.com/itpie)

Tags: e-Marketing, Social media, tweeting, Twitter, using twitter to promote your blog

The importance of e-marketing – keeping your clients informed

The internet is a wonderful thing, it has made communicating with the world and their dog easy. Gone are the days of hand written letters and waiting days or weeks for responses, with today’s technology we’ve become so impatient for a reply. I’ve been guilty of considering people rude if they haven’t replied to my text message, I know that working in the IT industry and sitting in front of a computer for most of a day if we send an e-mail we expect one within minutes, the patient people will wait maybe an hour if they’re having a lunch break then maybe two, but we are the most impatient of people when it comes to electronic communication, luckily for me I’ve worked beside people from a wide variety of industries and know that if I don’t receive a reply then they’re simply busy, not ignoring me (IT people take note of that last point)

But a conversation with a perspective client recently triggered the importance of staying in touch with our customers and clients, and one of the easiest ways is via an e-mail. It’s cheap, instant and can be personal or in-personal depending on the requirement, though it is essential to point out that with the amount of spam today, receiving permission to e-mail your customers or clients is a necessity – but this blog is about keeping in touch with your existing clients so you’re allowed to e-mail them right? 

A business I know of which is suffering in part due to the economy, told me recently that they had a conversation with a supplier who installed their IT system and the suppliers comments were

“wow – you guys are still in business, we thought you’d gone under”

not the sort of words you want to hear from someone you paid x amount of money to recently install your IT suite, we then began discussing what if their customers thought they’d also gone out of business, if times are hard now, how hard are they going to get when everyone thinks they’re no longer trading. I did ask if they were doing any active marketing, e-mail or otherwise and unfortunately due to budget constraints (remember perspective client of mine) they aren’t.

This conversation only highlighted the importance of staying in touch with your clients/customers and in my opinion e-mail is the best tool for the job. Now you may not have something to tell your clients, though if your struggling then you may want to consider some tempting promotions, but it is still important to remind them that you still exist, your still providing your goods or service, and that if they need you, you are still there! Sometimes, an e-mail or e-newsletter can be an excuse to share some information you believe your customers will be interested in. A bike shop may highlight some of the many excellent cycle routes available to customers when the weather forecast is positive (not that often in the UK) a chocolatier may send some yummy chocolate recipe ideas, its not a direct sales channel, but getting them thinking about your product or service and more importantly your business is a good thing. 

So taking some time to contact your customers with some useful tips, ideas or even your latest offers is an important part of running your business, and with an e-mail it can be incredibly cheap, you could reach 1000 customers for only £15 and that small investment could be the difference between your customers coming back to you for business or going to your competitor.

Tags: e-mail, e-mail marketing, e-Marketing, online marketing