Testing Emails Effectively

The big picture, which is missed by many marketers, about email is that apart from being cheap and quick, it gives the ability to find what works and what does not. It is inexpensive and offers more information to the subscriber than direct mail and the turnaround time is decreased from weeks to hours. Yet, very few marketers invest time and efforts to test drive their eNewsletters and emails. Many of them will question whether the effort made is really worth it. If the order button is shifted from the bottom of the page to the top of the page, where it is more visible, the click through rate goes up by fifty percent. With such results, the effort is worth it. With hundreds and millions of dollars involved in email marketing, money cannot be thrown away like that.

The only way to know about offers and topics which work for the audience is by testing. Testing can be carried out on preferences, emotional triggers, reaction towards subject lines, do they like short or long formats, or do they like text or HTML format. Valuable information about the audience can be learned by variable testing.

Basics of the emails can be started with like the simplest portions of the emails can be formatted. Most of the emails aren’t read because of faulty HTML code. Emails should be tested in different types of email applications like Yahoo or Outlook. By doing this a drastic change can be observed in the overall response rate. Testing should be kept in control. Sometimes marketers get so overwhelmed that they test the whole email at once. If two completely different versions of the same email are send out to different groups, there will be no clue to what actually worked and what didn’t. Therefore it is necessary to pick a single element to be tested at a time and then observe the response of the audience to that particular variable before testing another variable.

Timing is also important when sending out emails for testing. When sending multiple test emails, the time of sending them out should be considered. It is to be seen whether the emails can be sent at the same time, same season, etc. This also includes the testing on more than one variable at a time. According to researches, Wednesday is the best day for getting responses. Other statistics say that at least thirty to fifty responses are required to make a good decision. Some percent of these responses can be confusing, but nearly ninety percent of them will be accurate. The list of elements can be further divided into smaller list and the individual list can be concentrated upon.

Testing doesn’t mean just taking the grade. It means that we should get the grades or results and learn from it. If something is wrong in the email, the correction should be sought out. When the email marketing efforts are put to test, the goal of this testing procedure is to test one or more elements or variables, the results must be analyzed and the lesson learned should be put to application. Otherwise, it is a waste of time and money to test. And when the results are ready, the marketer should know how to apply the new found knowledge.

The Biggest Email Brand Killers

One of the biggest mistakes to do is to use email like the electronic version of direct marketing media such as postal mailers, catalogs, radio, television, newspaper inserts and even brochures. A world class brand builder can become a sure fire brand killer in no time if it is treated with ignorance, carelessness, and laziness. The brand killing capability is very much dependant on the email’s relationship with the recipients. The relationship is more personal because of the intimate relationship between the people and their computer. And because of this intimacy, positive and negative feelings are encourages by the company’s name. No mail is as irritating as junk mail and the penalties for such emails are getting much stiffer. A flood of spam complaints can affect the email program to the extent of shutting it down.

The email is becoming a personal medium, slowly. The recipient should be made in charge, he should be able to decide from whom he should receive email from, what kind of email he wants to receive and when he can stop receiving those emails. An email program which dose not includes all these conveniences will do severe damage to the company’s or brand’s name.

The first thing to concentrate upon is to remove poor permission practices. If this thing isn’t taken care of, nothing done after that will make up for the loss. In simple words, it is completely wrong to email a commercial message to anyone who hasn’t given the permission to do so. Sometimes, a person is simply signed up for receiving email while registering on the website because of checking boxes in a hurry. Thus, it is important for the registration page to display the privacy policy which says that the registration also includes agreement for receiving emails. And in spite of this, there is a high chance to get large complaints because of the unclear opt-in process. Some companies send emails to a person who has downloaded whitepaper or brochure form the website. It is better for the check box be not checked before hand. The job of checking the box should be left to the visitor.

In spite of taking these precautions sometimes it happen that the recipient will head straight to the report spam button when they do not want to receive email anymore. This happens when the recipient dose not trust the unsubscribe process. The first reason for the loss of trust is because of not sending the message in the desired format: text or HTML. The readers subscribe intrusting the company and when their email program fails to honor their trust, the company has to pay for this. It is very important to give the reader the option to choose from text or HTML format. Usually technical people prefer only text messages where as the teenagers prefer messages in the HTML format.

The content of the email should exactly meet the requested information. If a subscriber has asked for sales announcements then do not send them company news. Similarly, the frequency of email should also be kept in mind. If request has been made to receive a weekly newsletter, do not send bi-weekly newsletters. An occasional exception such as sales bulletins or news can be used sparingly. Customers complain a lot about the pouring of emails during the holiday season. It is better to focus on the quality rather than quantity.

It is not a compulsion that the content of the email look like spam and considered as a spam. If the recipients able to recognize the sender or dose not consider him to authentic, the mail directly goes to the spam folder. Three things should be considered to keep away from this problem. The sender or the subject shouldn’t appear vague. The content should be relevant to the brand name and its products. The unsubscribe procedure should be checked regularly. Failed unsubscribe and repeated requests for unsubscribing not only blocks the email program but also kills the brand name. Along with checking this link, it is highly recommended to check other links as well. Clicking on the link should take directly to the landing page and not on home page or a ‘Page Not Found’ page. Also, effort must be made in reducing the number of clicks done to achieve a certain action.

Monitor Feedback to Boost Deliverability

It is a fact that monitoring or managing customer feedbacks does not fall in the top 10 priorities of email marketers in order to improve the deliverability of their emails. It is really a sorry state of affairs as feedback management enables email marketers to improve email’s most important quality i.e. providing direct interface between customers and email marketers.

When a factor so important such as this it turns off the readers and makes your program vulnerable to threats like spam reports and leaves you with a list containing lots of invalid or dead addresses. Many email marketers forget that relevancy is pivotal to driving deliverability of emails which results in loss of opportunity to make email campaigns more sought after and pertinent to target subscribers.

Even if some email marketers are in a impression that they are doing a tremendous job just being able to receive and reply to people’s comments and issues they have through mediums such as letter, phone or through the website. What email marketers overlook sometimes are few customers who put not to reply to their emails in the subject line as nobody would see it or the email is highly monitored.

While the very thought of shutting down the communication with the customers creates a pain in many email marketer’s heart there are some good email marketers who take both negative and positive feedback in a right way and try to improve. It has been observed that a good email program always requests a feedback in the end with a link to feedback form or customer service or provides phone numbers of customer service. And again good managers have a habit of attending to the feedbacks whatever channel they come from.

Despite clearly telling in the email not to reply it is a fact that some customers will always reply to the email. Thus limiting the customers to only certain channels kills the relation that you are trying to establish in the long run. This also affects deliverability. Take it this way, when you try to close a communication channel you lose one channel to get information from the customer that could have helped you improve efforts.

Effective feedback management does not stop here I.e. just by taking care of customer’s comments or complaints or questions that you receive as a response to your email or purchases or any other interaction you had with the customer. But effective feedback management involves taking extra steps and going that extra mile to reach to the customers requesting your customers for their comments and surveys through offers, newsletters, web links and email transactions.

When customer’s feedback or comments are sought you get rich information that can not only help you market goals but at the same time also take care of the emails that create dissatisfaction among customers and affect their deliverability. But care should be taken that you do not give overdose of surveys also to the customers. Rather email marketers should give attention to 4 main points of interaction where the possibility of getting valuable feedback is highest. The first is when customers sign up for your email program. The second point of interaction is after two or three months when you should contact your customer to bring back their attention to the email program who might have strayed away from the email program. The third and very important point of interaction is when customers contact you with complaints irrespective of the medium of interaction. The fourth point of interaction is when customers contacting you due to sudden surge in spam emails; you can take this as an opportunity to survey the customers.

Last but not the least an effective key to better feedback management is cooperation of different departments in your company in sharing the data and in helping overall improvement of email program.

How Deliverability is damaged?

How many times professionals have said that senders should adopt better practices to enhance their programs but, marketers ignores it every time and commit same old blunder. They end up getting nothing but terrible outcomes and they blame them on ISPs for their tough spam filtering policies.

One of the reasons why emails are undeliverable is due to failed authentication checks. This is a key reason why marketers should keep good records of the authentications to make it easy for the ISPs to identify authentic senders and make use of the reputation data to make decisions related to delivery. More damaging is an incorrect or broken record which can be even more devastating than not having any record at all. For instance consider the case where the IP address and sender is identified by authentication and when this authentication check fails it sends out a message that the “email was not sent by me” and thus do not deliver the message.

One of the other things that damages chances of deliverability of marketing emails is using an unrecognizable sender address. It’s a general practice among the recipients to decide what should be done about the email after reading the sender address otherwise the email is most likely going to be reported as spam or deleted right away. So, the more you try to hide your identity the more damaging would be the results.

One of the ways to self destroy a good email marketing effort is to use subject lines which look like spam or spam themselves. The subject line is the next most important thing after sender line for an email marketing campaign to be successful.

Another important point that most marketers ignore when they send marketing emails is check the list for bad or invalid email addresses. A list full of incorrect or invalid address creates a bad reputation on ISP thus increasing the chances of messages being blocked. Taking invalid addresses off of your list regularly improves the situation. Processing requests to unsubscribe and taking care of spam complaints instantly also helps a great deal.

What could be the next damaging factor to a good email marketing campaign? It is generating excessive complaints. If you accumulate lot of complaints from the receivers this affects your reputation again on ISP and they use this as a foremost factor to stop your emails. To help reduce this, immediately remove the addresses that are associated with any spam complaints you get. Not only that, take one extra step in finding out how those addresses got into your list and what commonalities they share in order to better your programs and cut complaints down.

Sending unsolicited emails is not just anyone’s liberty. Nobody would like to see any unsolicited email in his/her inbox without any reason. The ISPs judge a sender’s reputation by knowing how sender acquired the email address of the receiver like whether they solicited their permission or simply got it by spamming.

It is a tendency by the marketers to overload their emails with irrelevant text and images which the receivers may not want to see. Always ask for subscriber’s choice in selecting the kind of content they want to receive and go one extra mile in asking any other thing that they can do to satisfy their requirements.

Few points discussed above are some of the many measures that email marketers can take to prevent the deliverability of their emails from getting damaged.

Doubling Promotional Email Revenue and Ecommerce

One of the best aspects of email marketing is that it has the ability to turn out considerable revenue from a promotional email campaign or ecommerce. But the common perception of this type of marketing is that you design your email, forward it to a list of subscribers and then wait and watch the revenue rolling in. But it is not that easy.

For an ecommerce program to be successful it takes more than just emailing the newsletter. And because of this, companies jeopardize lot of money by not dividing their customers into segments and utilizing more advanced emailing features. Segmentation can be done on the basis of demographics, personalization, actions, customers responses detail tracking and trigger based emails. By considering these variables, a lot of investment may not be made in infrastructure or technology.

The revenue of an ecommerce program can be doubled or even tripled within few months with a little extra effort, analysis, refinement and testing. The things to be taken care of here are list building, content creativity, list management, segmentation and testing.

List building is the most effective means for increasing revenue. The email subscription form must be optimized for growth of the email list. Just a good home page won’t do the trick of capturing new subscribers. An eye catching link to the subscription form must be placed on every page of the website, possibly with an impossible to miss image. Many readers expect incentives when they sign-up for something. Try to offer ‘free shipping’ or ‘$25 off on the first order’, or something like it. The email address of a customer should be captured on the shopping cart form. Then a transaction confirmation email can be sent which includes link to the subscription form. This opportunity can also be used to get additional information from the customer in order to target them better. Demographics such as gender, product interests, and preferences can be asked about.

Try to use a search engine pay-per-click or PPC program, because search is the most frequently used way for customers to buy products they desire. PPC program increases the traffic towards your website. If such programs are used, the signing up process must be made easier for visitors who have or haven’t bought products from your website. Making the website search engine optimized is the most cost effective method of getting traffic and improving your list. This optimization can be done either internally or by hiring an external SEO consultant. Every page of the website must be optimized to get the top rankings. The ‘Send-to-a-friend’ feature must be included in every eNewsletter as this feature generates a considerable amount of new subscribers. Although the number won’t be big, but it will be enough to satisfy the number of unsubscribes every month.

If the business or shop is located somewhere, in-store promotion offers can be sent via emails. Sign-up forms can be given at cash registers and subscriptions can be promoted at the point of purchase.

According to researches, a compelling subject line can increase the open rate by fifty percent. Solid offers and great design are the perfect blend for doubling the click through rate. Give customers options from which they can choose the most appropriate one which suits their appetite. The products must be divided into categories. Personalization helps in increasing the response rate. Emails can be personalized by referring to the customers by their first name or by their past purchase history. Since the email is just an extension of the website, it is better to leverage the website’s navigation. If the website has search capability, it must be incorporated in the email.

The personality of the company should be reflected in their emails and its designs. Emails main job is motivating the recipients to click on the links to go to the website or subscription form. Some other very important links can be included, but a clutter shouldn’t be formed so that the most important one cannot be located. Graphic buttons and images can be used to draw attention. Great subject lines, top lines and offers just to wonders.

List should be managed by calculating email churns and fatigues. Incorrect email entry can be solved by including a second email entry box. Send out confirmation to check the validity. Update email address and manage account link should be included in every email.

Testing is very critical in optimizing the email program. Majority of the email variables must be checked before the emails have been send out.

Future of Email Deliverability

The biggest boost to email deliverability is the growth of transparency since the internet bubble burst in the millennium. It took away much uncertainity associated with email marketing. Address spoofing was absent then and spam undermined the recipient’s confidence in email marketing. In transparency means the person at the other side goes according to the claims he make. Now the identity has to be proved through out the delivery chain. Authentication systems used by ISPs have been developed to check the validity of the authorized sender and then either pass along the email or block it.

Few authorization systems work invisibly while others display a visible notice in a message form. Authentication, though, hasn’t solved the phishing and spam problem, but transparency fostered by it makes the legitimate senders more vivid. Previously there were closed systems which have become open now to email senders because of introduction of transparency by reputed vendors. The IP address of the sender can be known instantly and there are websites which can show how the email pattern of a particular sender is reflected to the world.

Things are easier for the email sender too, as they can check whether their email has been delivered or not with the help of email broadcasting solutions which have incorporated delivery monitors in their systems. Emailers who follow the best practices policies being offered by vendors, ISPs, and email industry trade groups have greatest rate of email message delivery. These policies include delivery volume, email bounces, opt-in practices, address management, IP address integrity and content trigger. According to these policies, transparency is also meant for the emailer’s personal program. The subscription process of the sender explains why the sender is is signing up, type of emails he will receive and how the unsubscription process is carried out. Depending upon the trustworthy atmosphere created by these policies, the ISP separates emails which have to be delivered, blocked and filtered.

If messages are being send to major ISPs, the sender must watch and study spam complaints, reply to emails, and bounced emails more carefully. Permission emailers who are willing to work within the requirements of the ISP, showed how content filters which were simple and server settings which were restrictive blocked requested emails which were both transactional messages and commercial messages.

In 2003, email receiver and senders gathered to share their concerns and air their grievances. From there aroused industry working groups who tackle fraud issues and email spam. Now ISPs are also identifying and trusting emails which are sent by clients of systems of third party authentication, email certification agencies and reputed vendors which take the guarantee of the email sender’s legitimacy. The regular server lever filters now let’s go the guaranteed email which is being delivered to the desired inbox, as requested. In both email delivery and sending, transparency has helped in dealing with the uncertainty and mysteries which prevented the marketers from effectively utilizing the email and the marketing associated with it.

Now it is very easy to come out the darkness and know whether your email has been delivered or not, with the help of transparency. If it is not delivered, the notification message can be checked for details and the mistake can be taken care of so that the message gets delivered in the future.

How to Make the Subscription Process Easier

There is a lot of competition in catching the attention of the subscriber in the email world. In order to distinguish from the rest of the clutter, communication must be made easier for the receiver. People always get attracted to things which are easy and go away from things which are difficult to do. Because of this hallmark of services and products like Google AdWords, Turbo Tax, etc., they have gained popularity all over the world.

Like they say it is easy to say but difficult to do, so is the case with making each and every thing easy for the customers and subscribers. Sometimes it might happen that the things which are easy for a group of customers might not be easy for the rest. This case is true especially with new customers.

The very first step in making things easier is to have a simple email address, link or opt-in form field in a promotional email or newsletter. Also this information must be included on every page of the website. There should be provision of a web version of the emails which are in HTML. It helps to include a send-to-friend link or functionality in every message. The subscribers must be able to take actions in spite of the images being blocked. Every submit button should be labeled with the action to be taken like ‘buy now’, ‘Subscribe here’, etc.

If any of these functionalities are missing, then Email Management and Accessing Content should be considered for simplification.

Email Management

Subscription must be made easier by working on email ids, links and sign-up form and post this information on every page. Every email should have the subscribe link in order to tempt the readers, especially those who have received the message from a friend. In order to subscribe, the steps to be taken should be minimum. According to a survey, marketers who had cut down the subscription steps from 9 to 3 saw an increase of 300% in the subscription rate. More personal information need to be collected from the subscriber in order to send more relevant emails. It also helps in maintaining the email list effectively. But email marketers should know where to draw the line as too much information can turn off the subscriber, especially those who haven’t subscribed yet but intend to do so. A separate page can hold the opt-in form to collect relevant information. The critical fields on the form should be marked with a star and the other extraneous field should be left on the subscriber’s choice to fill. The setting and updating of the customer’s preferences about the content must be made easier. Password can be allowed along with the inclusion of link for the retrieval of password, in case it has been forgotten. These links should stand out on the web page and in the email. The email should have software which provides ‘Mail-to-friend’ option and it should be easier than the forward function.

The email should stand out amongst the rest of the emails. The sender should be easily recognizable and the subject line should be catchy. Emails should have provisions to take action in an easy way. They should be text based as well as HTML based. Include a link of the web version of the email, so that more vivid information can be seen. Obviously, the emails should be printer friendly; if not a printer friendly version of the email should be provided.

It is very important to check the working of each and every link, including the unsubscribing link. Clicking on the link, it should take the reader directly to the web page, image or file. Subscribers find it very tedious to hunt for the desired content. Another important point which most of the marketers forget is to make the unsubscribe option easy. This strengthens the trust of the subscribers. More can be gained out of the unsubscribing process by including various options such as address change or changing the frequency of emails.

When all these points will be pondered upon, you will be certainly surprised with the subscription turn out.