The new email marketing: innovation and opportunity
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on June 13, 2008
Part 8 of an ongoing series:(We're looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer. See the New Email Marketing index page to access the rest of the series.)
Email works. Which can be a problem. Success sometimes dulls innovation and investment: if it ain't broke, don't fix it (and definitely don't spend any money on it).
But every successful email marketer has a horde of competitors in hot pursuit, each trying to reclaim space in the inbox at the expense of those who fall into smug complacency.
The new email marketing continually tests. And probes. And questions. And asks...what existing opportunities am I missing? What new opportunities are out there? What conventions might be worth challenging?
Existing opportunities
Since every outgoing email from your business has an impact on the recipient, then every outgoing email is a marketing opportunity. Look at all the emails your business already sends and ask what you can do to give them a more positive impact.
The two classic examples are email signatures and transactional emails.
Traditional email business correspondence is by definition personalized, targeted, relevant, timely and (mostly) valued by the recipient. An appropriate email signature is an opportunity to piggyback brand-building and advertising messages on those one-to-one emails, as Simms Jenkins explains.
Transactional email refers to all those order confirmations, shipping notices, account updates and other administrative messages that customers and prospects see.
Again, they're relevant, timely, targeted and valued by recipients. And thus fertile ground for incorporating marketing messages within them. Much has been written on the topic. For example, Melinda Krueger covered the subject recently and MarketingSherpa recommends three steps to a transactional email marketing strategy.
But it doesn't stop there: what other emails are going out?
Does your blog software alert people when a new comment is added to a post they commented on? Does your forum send out "new thread started" notices? What about customer service emails?
Are all these emails sending out the right message / image and a consistent message / image about you, your brand and your products and services?
New opportunities
All the talk of Web (insert number greater than 1).0 often treats email like some old sheepdog. Reliable, efficient, but a little set in its ways. And certainly not up to learning new tricks.
Patent nonsense of course. New email marketing continually searches for novel opportunities thrown up by the eddies and tides of an ever-changing Internet.
Aaron Smith, for example, suggests some ways you might apply the concept of UGC (user generated content) to your emails. And Anna Billstrom reports on one success story where UGC played a key role. Elsewhere, Jack Aaronson discusses how dynamic email ads that update themselves permanently might change the way you think about campaign frequencies.
Spotting new opportunities is not a question of luck.
It comes from an inquisitive mind that constantly seeks innovation and ideas.
It comes from the many sources of email marketing inspiration out there. Whether award and design galleries, case studies, blogs or resource sites.
And it comes from rigorous reviews of your existing efforts, finding the weaknesses and opportunities, and then seeking out tactics to address both. (It never hurts to conduct formal reviews once in a while. Karen Gedney has some thoughts on that, as does Reagan Taylor).
Challenging existing conventions
Finally, opportunity and innovation sometimes arrive in unexpected form. Email marketing is littered with best practices. Which are called that for a reason.
Some best practices are inalienable truths. Others reflect what works best for most people, most of the time. Not all people, all of the time. Sometimes doing things a little differently produces surprising benefits. Here some examples:
- Shorter subject lines work best? That's what most studies show and most experts recommend. But not all. The people at Emma found longer subjects worked best for them. And Alchemy Worx discovered sweet spots when subjects were short or long, but not in between.
- Best time to send? Surely not after we're all tucked into bed? But that's worked for retailers targeting time-pressed mums catching up on email late at night.
- Emails that force you to scroll horizontally?
- Image-only emails? Nobody recommends those. But sometimes they work. Especially if you know the recipients open your emails.
Tags: email marketing, transactional emails, email signatures, user generated content, subject lines, email
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1 Comments:
Email marketing missed opportunities is the topic I would be exploring.
eROI, in a recent survey of 523 e-mail marketers found that many email lists are using a "Thank You" page after the opt-in, but not taking complete advantage of this area.
eROI also found that only 29% of email marketers reiterate the benefits of subscribing, 11% define the email frequency, 11% offer a promotion or coupon, a mere 20% display whitelist instructions and 8% offer additional subscription options.
That is four out of five sites not offering any whitelist instructions to their subscribers. Talk about a missed opportunity.
Email whitelisting allows your subscribers to add your email address to a list of sites NOT to be filtered. It just doesn't just give it priority, it sometimes avoids the filters altogether!
In Hotmail, email whitelisting adds the sender to the “Safe senders” list. At Yahoo! email whitelisting assures the email appears in the inbox rather than the Bulk folder. At AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo email whitelisting enables HTML, clickable links and HTML graphics. Without whitelisting your HTML emails appear with just placeholders and text emails appear with the links disabled.
The bad news is that you could spend all day, researching, writing, formatting and proofreading a set of whitelist instructions for your site.
The good news is that there is a email whitelist generator that will do all this for you. It now includes the top 10 ISPs, Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, Blackberries, SpamCop (yes SpamCop has a whitelist) who is now heavily used by Microsoft and ReturnPath, McAffee and Norton and all the popular client side spam filters.
It's really easy to use, just fill in four fields, click the button and there is your HTML page, ready to be uploaded to your site. No information is recorded, it only creates a web landing page for you.
How do I use this you ask?
Let's start with what happens when your new subscriber opts into your email newsletter by filling out your form.
A welcome email, or double opt in link is sent to their email inbox. It is very likely that it can end up in the spam folder due to overzealous spam filters at ISPs. Right at the top of the generated instructions this possibility is addressed and the subscriber is asked to check the spam folder and mark it as "Not Spam."
That is the right thing to do. This usually moves it to the Inbox and sets some priority for your newsletter to get to the Inbox everytime.
This also means that upon subscribing you must display your whitelist instructions as the landing page displayed as soon as the form is submitted.
It is also best to provide some form of irresistible incentive on this landing page. Push your new subscriber to not only whitelist you, but confirm their subscription if you use double opt in.
The second place to use your whitelist instructions is in every email, prominently displayed at the top. Say "To make sure you continue to receive this publication please add us to your address book" and link to the whitelist instructions.
It seems to work best if you use "add to address book" rather than "whitelist us" as that confuses non techies easily.
Using some basic common sense, putting yourself in your new subscriber's shoes and offering some helpful whitelist instructions will definiteley raise your delivery rates, your double opt in rate and continued readership!
By 
Chris Lang, on
16 June, 2008
