Email Marketing

July 23, 2009: Landing Pages: The Key To Your Email Campaign's Success
Comments: 3 | Categories: Email Marketing
Email marketeers spend all their time working with you, the designer, in coming up with relevant and great looking campaigns. Both you and your client do countless tests on subject headers, and ensure sharp targeting of the recipient profiles. All set? Campaign launched and you see great results and click through performance. Yup, you got the email portion down pat. But your client isn't seeing any great increase in sales. And the reason is, only half the battle is won through email, the click-through to website conversion was lost along the way. Welcome to the world of landing pages.

July 15, 2009: Why You Need Email Authentication
Comments: 1 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Email Marketing
Email is essential to our daily business lives. And for an email marketeer or any design/communication agency providing email marketing services, it is their livelihood. Email has been a convenient and cost-effective way for us to communicate, be it through peers, work or engaging our clients. Unfortunately, email is also very easily forged. Email authentication proves the authenticity of your email and its source. And the great thing is, its starting to grow in popularity amongst the large ISPs and corporate email servers in their effort to control incoming spam. This gives legitimate email marketeers and opportunity to differentiate themselves from spammers, and aids in better deliverability.

November 25, 2008: Permissions in Email Marketing: Educating Your Clients
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
Its a tricky situation: selling your email marketing services and educating your clients about permission based email marketing. Sure you'd love to close the deal, but just because your client's got a fishbowl full of business cards doesn't necessarily make email marketing right immediately. Whether your using BlinkCampaign, or any other ESPs for that matter, permissions are taken very seriously and most ESPs have a zero-tolerance anti-spam policy. Permission is simply determined by individuals who has given permission to contact them via email regarding a topic they've explicitly signed up for.

September 23, 2008: Deciphering Those Bounce Error Codes
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
If you've been conducting some campaigns recently, you might've notice the new swanky (but rather daunting) bounce reports being generated from BlinkCampaign. Bouncereport Here's a quick low-down on what those error codes really mean: 500 The recipient's email server is not recognizing the email that was sent out or was not formatted in the way the server expected. This could occur for longer emails. 501 This is due to syntax errors in the email address, outside of those that are automatically cleansed by BlinkCampaign. Some of your client's email servers may not recognize, and do not have addresses with underscores for example. This is also indicative of an invalid email address.

August 13, 2008: Be Wary Of How You Label Your "Unsubscribe" Link
Comments: 1 | Categories: Design , Email Marketing
File this under the "good-to-know" section for your email marketing developments. Apparently, certain popular spam filters such as Spam Assassin consider the term "opt-out" to be spammy. Coupled with common design practices such as including two unsubscribe links (one at the header and the other at the footer of the email), this could be a double-whammy to your email design. How about "unsubscribe"? Well, I've actually tried it again with Spam Assassin and it seemed to help. Unfortunately, I got word that "unsubscribe" may get flagged by other spam filters. I can hear the "OMGs!!!" right now... The alternative is using other words like "remove" or phrases such as "take me off this list" and "I do not wish to receive anymore emails". Don't get overly creative. Be short, sharp and to the point. The more ambiguous it gets, the more likely someone's going to hit the "report spam" button. If its not a properly constructed or recognizable phrase, yup, there may be a tendency for the phrase to get caught by the spam filters as well.

August 6, 2008: Forward-a-Friend, Then?
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
I've been going through some past issues of email newsletters and promotional EDMs which I've collected over the years. It then dawned on me that many email marketers had taken for granted, something that should've fundamentally been there in the first place. The lack of a "Subscribe" button. Its really a curious find. Perhaps due to the short-sightedness of some email marketers, having their email campaign forwarded is already an achievement in their context. However, such hit-and-run tactics have little long term benefits. Why pass on any (every) opportunity to grow your mailing list?

August 4, 2008: Sender Reputation
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
Being email marketeers, we all know that having a "good reputation" is essential to getting our messages into our recipient's inbox. But, do you know what are the factors that affect a sender's reputation? Although white-listing your servers does partially attribute successful delivery, good sender reputation cannot be bought. Although proper email authentication protocols and setting up of Sender Policy Frameworks (SPFs) do play a part, there are 3 main factors that most large ISPs use in establishing your sender reputation.

July 18, 2008: Should You Outsource Email Delivery?
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Email Marketing
If you've been doing email marketing for some time now, this question always pops up at one time or another: "Can't my email software do that? I could use the same email program to do email marketing just like sending ordinary emails.". At this juncture, we normally bite our lower lip for a moment, and proceed on with the following anecdote. Your email campaigns are like poster ads. You could either start going around town yourself and sticking them up on walls and bus stops, or get a proper distribution team to do the legwork for you. At which moment, the usual response from them would be some silence.

July 16, 2008: Who's Your Daddy? Your Client's Domain May Be At Ransom
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Email Marketing
The web has been recently abuzz when some light was shed on web registrar, GoDaddy.com, on abuse complaints stemming from email marketing. And its a real BIG DEAL to legitimate email marketeers and email service providers like Blink Campaign (Heck, our domain is registered with GoDaddy!). So what's the big deal? For a start, GoDaddy is one of the premiere domain registrars for the web. A good bunch of our own clients are on GoDaddy.

July 14, 2008: Getting Creative With Images Blocking
Comments: 1 | Categories: Design , Email Marketing , Tips & Tricks
Most email clients, both online and offline, block images by default. The age old practise of web accessibility becomes ever more important in instances such as HTML email design. Usage of ALT tags should be mandatory. But I don't just mean putting in ALT tags just to explain what's behind the image. Go one up and get your recipients to download the images and entice them to update their preferences in their email client so that future images from your campaign will be automatically downloaded.

July 11, 2008: Steer Your Clients From Being Spammers
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
Spammers work on the notion of bulk mailing with a low conversion rate. That's why they require millions of email addresses for it to be of any real ROI. Unfortunately, it still works to a certain extent as there are recipients who still respond to spam, though unimaginable as it may seem. And its these sorts of recipients that are still keeping spammers in business. Spammers steal almost everything they can get their hands on. Besides email addresses, they highjack server accounts and bandwidth. Worse still, some spammers use auto-generated email addresses just for sheer luck that a few of those might actually be valid email addresses.

July 10, 2008: Newsletters: How Often And When?
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing , Tips & Tricks
There's no real hard and fast rule (you knew I was going to say that, didn't you?) when it comes to the frequency of email newsletters. Depending on your client's profile, each would have their own unique demands and requirements, and so would their recipients. Your best gauge on frequency for each of your clients would have to be from the horse's mouth. You'll know that its too often, or not often enough when you see the unsubscribes climbing.

July 9, 2008: Oops... Re-Sending An Erroneous Campaign
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Email Marketing
Just this month, one of our clients made a rather big mistake. He was sending his company's regular monthly email newsletter when he accidentally selected the wrong contents to be sent out. This resulted in his recipients receiving the base template with the default "lorem ipsum" text instead of the actual content that he had prepared beforehand. Hey, we're only human and make mistakes from time to time. We too are guilty of sending out a campaign with the wrong hyperlink, typos and other embarrassing mistakes. Due to this, a number of things went wrong: 1. The content looked like spam due to the mash of unrecognizable words 2. The open rate was way lower as the preview pane of most email clients simply showed the gibberish text 3. Needless to say, click rate was 0 4. Unsubscribes spiked a little as recipients weren't sure where this email was coming from

July 9, 2008: Bounce Management: Don't Just Look At Your Open Rates
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
Many of us are guilty of this: looking and focusing on the click-open and click-through rates first each time we view our reports. That's fine and all but the reports don't just stop there. Too many a time, we've seen our users ignore their bounce rates. Bounce rates could indicate certain problems with the particular list. Bounces reveal a lot about your client's list. If you've yet to make any sense of the types of bounces that Blink Campaign tracks.

July 8, 2008: Promotion Or Newsletter? Know The Difference
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
At present, email marketing is still rather deeply rooted in most people as promotion or sales based. Most of our own clients (end marketeers, not Blink Campaign users) would send out a promotional email once or twice a month, getting their recipients to sign-up for something, introduce their new products or spread word about a great sale coming up. This sort of direct marketing has already established itself as an effective method of marketing. In fact, its so deeply rooted that we've noticed many people use the same lingo/tone/impression/content in general with their email newsletters. Email promotions focus on ACQUISITION, email newsletters focus on RETENTION. Promotional based email's primary goal is for the recipient to click on the call-to-action. Taking a cue from Google Analytics, the email is designed and laid out to "funnel" the recipient through a persuasive process, giving the final push at the call-to-action. Even the copy is written solely for this purpose. The end "goal" would be either to register/participate in something (survey, contents, etc), download, go to the product page on the website, and anything else under the sun that prompts the recipient to take some immediate action. As immediate action is required from the recipient, promotional emails are very short-term. If the recipient doesn't take the intended call-to-action, the entire value of the promotional email is lost.

July 4, 2008: Good and Bad Email Newsletters
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
Developing a good newsletter can help your client see ROI in their online marketing efforts with you. Leading to further establishing a great working relationship between the both of you, as well as passive recurring income through email marketing as well as your client's regular correspondences through their email newsletter. Here are a few simple good and bad points you should consider when developing your client's email newsletters.

July 3, 2008: Learning From Your Recipients
Comments: 0 | Categories: Case Studies , Email Marketing
At times as agencies, we get too caught up with timelines, client's requirements, planning and delivery that we tend to forget the most important person in a campaign - the recipient. Just a few days back, I've had the fortunate (or unfortunate) privilege to re-visit being at the other end of the inbox. A certain local web portal totally ticked me off and has tarnished its reputation and professionalism in my mind. I won't mention any names, to save mylifestlyemap the embarrassment. Through this experience though, it reinforced a few basic, but often overlooked lessons. Its was just simply amazing how the online marketing folks there could've gotten it so wrong, in such short a time.

July 1, 2008: Building That First Impression Through Welcome Emails
Comments: 0 | Categories: Email Marketing
Guess which sort of emails have the highest click open rate among all email communications? Yup that's right, its the welcome email. And not utilising the welcome email to its full potential is a great opportunity cost to your clients. Through the welcome email which your client's recipients have signed up for, you should (through good design and content structure) set the tone and expectations of the recipient. The old saying "You never get a second chance to make a first impression" couldn't be more apt. Properly executing your client's welcome email message can create anticipation in the recipient for future campaigns.

June 26, 2008: Creating, Designing and Coding HTML Templates
Comments: 1 | Categories: Design , Email Marketing
Traditional marketing has already started to becomes less effective and accountable since the advent of the internet. Businesses are constantly seeking ways to engage customers on a personal level and provide them with information that is in line with their goals as consumers and in turn, gather information on what sells. HTML emails allow us to do things that traditional email doesn't. Besides having a more pleasing and desirable design, at the same time reinforcing your client's brand, HTML email also allows you to track opens, click throughs and forwards. Communicating with your customers and providing them with information that they ask for is a great way to drive traffic to your client's site and ultimately generate business leads for you and your client.

June 26, 2008: Build Customer Value for Your Clients
Comments: 0 | Categories: Business Articles/Tips for Agencies , Email Marketing
Branding 101: Through strong branding, we build a base of customers who will keep coming back year after year. However, the truth of the fact is: all these branding and marketing tactics usually end up with a one-time sale, only benefiting a short-term revenue. To truly achieve the objective, you, as the online marketing guru in your client's eye, have to help your client build true customer value. Consider too, that each campaign requires more involvement from the end recipient. And thankfully, there are benchmarks which you can use to help your client measure each of these forms - Revenue, Loyalty, and Advocacy.