TIPS FOR BETTER EMAIL INBOXING:
When a business attempts ‘email marketing’ for the first time and have never done it before, it more than likely fails to live up the high expectations they had. Many larger organisations are used to the diminishing returns and lack of engagement that this type of marketing holds – business has perhaps become over-reliant on it for too long, the fact is, it is proving more difficult than ever to inbox in 2014 than ever before.
The laws on privacy are changing; increased numbers of email addresses are circulating, stricter laws from email service providers and an ever growing number of spam rules by email platforms. Gmail and Yahoo accounts, for all but the largest brands, are transforming into no-go destinations for marketers and key findings of the latest edition of the Email Marketing Industry Census, published by E-consultancy have shown that the largest number of marketers say the ‘quality of the email database’ as the major barrier to effective email marketing. With physical in-boxing and game-changing developments from ISP’s like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, or Hotmail’s behavioural pattern grouping, getting it to work has never been harder. Not using specific phrases, bad links, ensuring copy/image ratios and the ever problematic subject lines are old news. Your email engagement is under scrutiny – email providers are relying less on cold, logical computers and more on emotional, irrational humans and email fingerprinting will mark you or your business out as bad news for inboxes, meaning the worse your performance, the worse the future will be.
The report also found that ‘only 49% carry out any regular list cleansing’. This is a worrying statistic because in-depth and methodical list-management practices can actually make or break an email-marketing campaign, our experience has shown that to deploy a successful email marketing campaign, brands need to do more than just segment and construct a target list, the main rule is that cleanliness is next to Godliness.
Accurate Data is Good Data:
The vast majority of lists are as good as their input source, so often on user-generated journey from a recent enquirers, thus typos, lower case names, abbreviations and misspellings are everywhere. As is the common false information or plainly misleading; M. Mouse of Hollywood has slipped through more databases than an extra comma. When opting in to your emails, some subscribers may have made simple errors which have resulted in them never actually receiving a single email from you. It’s worth your time reading over these with a human eye to post the obvious. Another common error is to look for missing dots in the ‘.com & .co.uk’ and misspelt domains like ‘yaoo’ (yahoo) and ‘gmal’ (gmail), their deliverability issues aside.
Dedupe, Dedupe, Dedupe:
There is no excuse for having duplicates on your list, but it is one of the most common issues with marketing lists. If you send duplicate mail to your customers, it alienates them and damages your brand and their trust in you. Notes become split across duplicate records and multiple sales calls are made to the same contact and when details change, only one record is amended. In short, the quality of your data will quickly erode and this costs you money. It can also be very annoying for subscribers who will often eventually unsubscribe entirely if they receive multiple contacts due to duplicated entries.
Timing, Platform & Device Planning
Make 100% that your email broadcast is built for mobile devices also, our campaigns sent through 2013 showed 51% of email was opened on a mobile device, and if your message isn’t being rendered across vast array of mobile devices, it isn’t going to be read. The most active period for open rates is a scheduled weekend send although obviously mobile or tablet use is higher at the weekend. If you determine to send on their leisure time, make sure you know where it will be opened. Plan and use local knowledge with your own marketing insight, what are your core customer’s engagement habits? It’s a mistake to assume that every email recipient is more engaged at a certain time of the day or week; our rule is – if it’s relevant, it’s timely.
Although it may seem you are pulling in two directions to actively reduce the length of your email marketing list, there’s little or no point in continually sending newsletters or promotions to those who simply delete every message that you send them without so much as glancing at it first.
Before you Go…
Just before you start deleting away at a hard won customer list though; it is worth trying to understand why they are no longer engaged with you or what it is you are offering to them. It’s worth segmenting the bin-list for a final attempt to re-interest them with perhaps a one time offer, so as not to alienate your regulars, try offering something different, better to leverage in an extra few % discounts than to lose a client for good.
Email Engagement is a numbers game. If an email goes to 10,000 subscribers but only 1,000 open the email, the open rate is obvious. But with some basic intelligence we can identify the subscribers least likely to open emails and remove them from the list? Maybe now we send to 4,000 subscribers and the same 1,000 open the email, which is a much higher 25% open rate. Higher open rates mean more engagement, even if the number of opens is the same. Consider it’s also cheaper to send 4,000 emails than 10,000 emails to get the same 1,000 opens, and suddenly pruning the list seems like a really good value. Even better, because overall engagement on the email increased, the email is more likely to end up in the inbox and opened by more subscribers.
Offering unengaging users an opportunity to filter what messages they would like to receive rather than simply deleting them also pays dividends or you can offer them an exclusive download or report – to show engagement is a two-way street. Finally, be sure to create a list of employees or trusted friends to review each email before sending it to subscribers. Make sure your test list includes all the popular email clients, including Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo and don’t neglect the mobile preview, the first wrong howler or bad subject line or ‘from name’ that slips through the test net, is the last you’ll send to each unsubscriber!
Please do drop me a PM as we can carry out any of these tasks for you and hold tens of millions of consumer and business records in-house.
All the best everyone!
