photo by neubie
I’ve been doing some work that means I’ve had to buy a few more email lists lately & mail other people’s lists.
An in-house list is always better than a bought one, but, if you need to buy email lists, here are a few more simple tips to save you money & increase your results…
Keep Reading this entry –»
The best type of email list is your own: A list made up completely from people who have come to your website said “yes, I like you. sign me up to receive more of this”. However, though that’s always the best type of list, you can get great results from another type: The email list that you buy.
Don’t worry - I’m not advocating going to some back-street broker & hoisting over cash for a list he’s cobbled together by trawling facebook for addresses. There are thousands of reputable companies selling email data. Their lists are usually made up of people who tick those “Yes, I would like to be emailed by carefully selected third parties” boxes.
Buying and emailing this kind of list sounds very simple: Buy the addresses, email them, profit. But in practice there are quite a few pitfalls to avoid. I’ve bought email data myself quite a few times over the years & have learned a lot about the process. I thought I’d share some of the tips with you. I hope these 15 tips save you a bit of pain & save you some money!
Here’s an email I got recently from hmv.com (a CD/DVD store):
Looking at that, they’ve obviously spent time on the creative. It looks ok. It’s very timely. There’s a strong call to action. But it really annoyed me…
If you’re just starting an email newsletter campaign, or you’re reevaluating how you use email, there are 5 very simple questions you can ask to solidify your plan & give you the best chance of success.
Thinking of all of these questions together & the trade-offs between them will help you to understand why & how you want to use email, which gaps it bridges between you and your customers, and how you will know when you’re moving toward your goals…
Email Personalisation is always a hot topic in email marketing &, if you ever do an A/B test on this, you’ll see a personal email will come back better in almost every situation.
Some email marketers misunderstand ‘personal’ though - they look at it from a technical point of view & think “personalised email is an email where you automatically insert the name of the recipient”. In actual fact, it’s not just that… Keep Reading this entry –»
Email marketing campaigns generally start out with an idea like this:
But, if you’re not careful, they can end up looking like this:
Keep Reading this entry –»
In the short term, the purpose of an email subject is to get your recipient to open the email. In the long term, the purpose of an email subject line is to position you & your emails, and to make sure your recipients keep reading your emails week after week. Here are five quick tips for writing effective subject lines.
This doesn’t necessarily mean be ’salesy’. Using the same, simple subject line every week can work, as long as your emails continue to be valuable to your recipients. The same goes for leading on news, offers, information of interest. What are your customers interested in? Telling your customers that your email contains something of interest to them & following that up will reap benefits.
If you’re afraid of letting your customers know that the email is from you, then you’re doing something badly wrong elsewhere.
Over the past few months you may have noticed subject lines on spam emails becoming less obvious. Spammers eventually got wise to the fact that their “Huge Gains In Only 5 Days” subject lines made them easily identifiable as spam. This is something you can learn from: While leading on benefits can offer great results, be careful not to sound like a traditional spam email. Look like a spammer & people will assume you are a spammer.
While having a boastful, overselling subject line may increase your short-term open rates, if the content doesn’t live up to the promise your recipients will feel cheated. That leads to lower conversions & more unsubscribes in the short term, and damaged trust & lower open rates in the long term.
That point could be reworded “make sure your customer realises you aren’t overselling your content”: If your subject line does include reference to a news item, an offer, or a specific piece of content, make sure that item is plainly visible as soon as the email is opened (and that may mean opened in the preview pane). The simplest way to follow up your subject line is to start the email content with a very closely related headline. For example: your subject is “Apple Releases New iPods”, your content could begin with the headline “Today Apple Released New 100GB, 150GB iPods”.
Occasionally when you send out an email it will come straight back at you with a ‘message undeliverable’ error or something similar. This is called a ‘bounce’: it bounced back to the sender. Bounces come in two types: soft and hard.
A ’soft bounce’ is an email that reaches the recipient’s server, the server acknowledges that the email address is correct, but the email still can’t be delivered. Soft bounces can occur if the recipient’s mailbox is full or if there’s a temporary error.
A ‘hard bounce’ is an email that is returned because the recipient’s address doesn’t exist (either because the recipient moved on, the domain name doesn’t exist, or the recipient is unknown).
If your system doesn’t automatically deal with bounced emails, removing bad email addresses itself, then it can be tempting to just leave bouncing emails on your list. Firstly it takes a bit of effort/programming to remove them, secondly nobody likes to see their email list size reduced (especially if you’re selling advertising space on emails & want to keep subscriber figures high). But this is the wrong thing to do for a few reasons:
Trust has become a big factor in mass email over the last few years & that’s only going to continue, so it’s definitely worth putting in the effort to fix your bounces. The risk of getting blacklisted just isn’t worth it:
Firstly, blacklisting doesn’t just affect your email campaigns, it also affects your day-to-day email: say you send your campaigns from marketing@yourdomain.com; blacklisting doesn’t just affect that address, it affects everything @yourdomain.com.
Secondly, even if you’re only banned by a small mailserver, blacklists are held centrally & subscribed to by many other mailservers, so the ripple effect can easily put a gigantic hole in your ability to use email at all.
Newer email broadcast systems usually include automatic systems to take care of bounces. Often they’ll remove an email address from your list after 1 or 2 hard bounces, and after 4 or 5 soft bounces. It’s worth a check in your system to see whether this option does exist & whether you have it turned on.
If you don’t have an automatic bounce removal system, you have two basic options:
The keys to a great relationship with your email subscribers are to maintain an expected frequency, never abuse your subscribers’ trust & always include valuable content. Those are the tough bits. Before you get to that, there are nine simple things you simply must include in every email to give yourself the best chance at success:
Email response rates vary wildly: Every email campaign & list is different. For one list, a 10% open rate be a great success, for another, a 50% clickthrough rate might be considered a failure. So it’s difficult to make generalisations about what kind of rates are ‘good’.
On top of that, it’s unlikely your competitors will want to share their email metric data with you. So how do you get a picture of where you stand?
MailChimp has just very kindly released a statistical analysis of 3-million emails sent out by their customers. Split across a couple of dozen verticals (from Advertising, through Legal Services, to Web Design), it shows Open, Click, Soft Bounce, Hard Bounce, Complaint & Unsubscribe rates for each vertical.
The average results across all verticals come out as:
How do your emails compare with that average? How do you compare against your vertical?
