How do my email campaigns compare to someone else’s? August 29, 2008
Posted by marckamaka in email marketing.Tags: business to business open rates, campaign performance, email benchmarks, email campaigns, email marketing, Forward to a Friend, opens and views, opt-in email list, retailer open rates
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Generally, campaign performance should be gauged against prior campaigns to the same audience. How have your recent broadcasts performed versus your prior broadcasts using your old system?
When clients ask me for benchmarks, I say it varies by audience. When a client has purely opted-in readers their open rates are much higher than one who is sending to a) old subscribers or b) a list gathered from other sources, such as loaded from business cards gathered from a conference.
Generally speaking, open rates above 8% are good, anything higher than 15% is excellent.
Retailer’s broadcasts to consumers generally hit the 3% to 5% mark. Business to business is usually double that. Again, a fully opted in list should expect opens above 10% or higher.
When I look at who is opening, I also check those who are showing unusually high opens, like over 20 times because that indicates that this person is either a) very interested or b) forwarding the information on to their friends colleagues and THEIR FRIEND’S opens are registering under the original person’s userID.
Finally, opens and views are counted every time the email message loads (with images), so that includes each time you preview your newsletter.
What is IPV6, and what is happening with it? August 25, 2008
Posted by tailoredmailtech in internet.add a comment
TCP/IP (Version 4) is the network protocol used by most networks, including the internet. Essentially a network protocal is a set of rules that define how computers find each other and exchange information.
When you open a web browser and type in the name of a website, your browser asks an internet name server for the network address of the server with the name you entered, then makes a seperate request for the page you requested from the server at that IP address. Any request that your computer makes has to be translated to a network address before it can be sent to a server. Your computer does the translation for you, and usually hides the details. (more…)
Create a “weekend” list to improve open/click rates August 20, 2008
Posted by Mindy Dolan in email marketing.add a comment
We have had great success in improving list open and click rates through the use of a simple segmentation technique ANYONE should be able to do: create a list of emails most-likely to be opened on weekends, and then send your message to them on, well, the weekend! This technique has increased the open/click rates of these addresses by up to 50%, and when those results are merged into their overall list open and click rates – the improvement is often 15% or more.
Here’s the logic and how-to for this:
- Most people have more than one email address, often signing up for Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and other free web-based email addresses in addition to their ‘work’ address.
- In an effort to keep their work-inbox clutter free, people often subscribe to “I’ll get to it when I’m not swamped” content via these web-based email accounts.
- We’ve all been guilty of using these secondary addresses to sign up for newsletters and “more information” from businesses we’re interested in – but not quite ready to buy. Plus, we all have very little time to deal with emails during the business day, so reading detailed emails and clicking through to offers, educational information, and articles of interest is better suited to go into an account we can check on in the evenings and weekends.
So, the concept is simple:
- create a list of your subscribers where the domains are from web-based ISPs, and send your messages to them on the weekends
- broadcast your normal communications to the remainder of your list during the workday.
The results are astonishing. The ‘weekend’ list can have up to double the open/click rate versus being sent during the work week. It’s incredbily simple, logical, and silly not to do. Try it and report back to us your success story – and we’ll pass it along.
One thing I learned at the OMS August 12, 2008
Posted by Mindy Dolan in email marketing.Tags: Google Custom Search, Online Marketing Summit
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Last Thursday I attended the Online Marketing Summit in downtown Seattle, and of all the marketing summits I’ve been to, I was quite impressed with this one. The line-up of speakers was credible and covered all areas of online marketers needs. I was drawn to this summit because one of our competitors was speaking (which always poses a great opportunity to learn what they’re up to), however this summit wasn’t about the vendors flaunting themselves. The Online Marketing Summit prides itself on being an educational day for attendees to learn how to be better ina variety of online marketing areas, and actually supports the audience to “boo” if a speaker starts talking too much about themselves or their company.
This summit came at a key time for me as we just launched our new website and are looking for any other tools to draw people to the site. One of the speakers, Thanh Ngyuen, Senior Website Usability Consultant, BusinessOnLine, offered great insight as to how to design a website, and some of the big design mistakes not to make. As she was mentioning all these I was going through our website in my head and checking off what we did right and what we need to improve on our new website. One thing she mentioned is including a search box in your site. Google Custom Search allows you to do this and only search on content within your site. We only have 2-5 seconds to grab our users attention, and if they come to our website and can’t find something and there’s no search box, chances are we’ll lose that visitor permanently out of their frustration for not being able to find what they were looking for. So the tip of the day… add a search box to your website. Your visitors will thank you for it!
Can your salutation send you to the junk folder? August 4, 2008
Posted by Mindy Dolan in email marketing.Tags: Outlook 2007 junk folder, spam filters, spam words, testing email campaigns
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I was testing out an email campaign with Outlook 2007, and couldn’t figure out why it was going to the junk folder. It was a more formal email going out to the media announcing a press release. I was careful to not use the “spammy” words and even ran a Barracuda test in our system, but nothing was jumping out at me that would result it to it going to the junk folder. Ahh, why wasn’t this going through?! I pulled apart the email sentence by sentence and added each piece into another test article. The test article included email copy that I had sent to a co-worker about arranging a meeting time, and it went to the inbox when it was by itself. It even went through to the inbox when I had added all of my copy from the email I wanted to broadcast to the media. But once I pulled out the email to my co-worker, it goofed up again. I probably spent about 3 hours testing this campaign. It would be rather humiliating to send a campaign to the media about a new feature, if the email I sent them went to their junk folder. So to make a long story short, I FINALLY figured out what the issue was…the greeting I used for the media email was “Hello”, and the email to my co-worker used “Hi”. Now when combined in one email, it was fine, but when I was sending the email out on it’s own, Outlook 2007 recognized the word “Hello” as being too formal and perhaps that I didn’t actually know the person I was sending it to. Lesson to be learned… don’t forget to test your campaigns out in all email clients to make sure that the email you spent all your hard work on doesn’t go unseen. Check out these websites for more “spammy” words that get caught in the filters.
http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2006/01/can-i-get-a-list-of-spam-words.php
Email Marketing and “Cuil” July 29, 2008
Posted by Mindy Dolan in Search.Tags: Search
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Email marketers who know what they’re doing often focus on integrating with search engines, usually via the content they create/send (by posting archives on their website). To that end, then, it’s wise to keep your eyes on the horizon for ‘what’s next’ – and some press have suggested it will be “Cuil” (pronounced “cool”).
Former Google-idians (Anna Patterson and others) have raised $33M to try and outduel Google with a more efficient and comprehensive search engine, http://www.cuil.com. It launched this week, and is a no-frills and interesting approach to presenting results. I found the results very suspect, but the layout of the results with it’s “Explore by Category” helper tool has potential. Keep an eye out on these guys as you focus on getting search engines to find all that great content you’re developing!
Here’s a not-so-good review of Cuil. Looking for other search alternatives? Powerset (a great way to search Wikipedia articles) is worth a try, and so is Twine (category-oriented search with a social networking twist).
Spam-filter testing with Outlook June 25, 2008
Posted by Mindy Dolan in email marketing, using email.Tags: email campaigns, email delivery, email marketing, image-spam, junk folder, large images in email, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Outlook junk folder algorythm, Outlook self-test, spam words, spam-filter testing, Spam-filter testing with Outlook, url domains in emails
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Outlook junk folders are dangerous territory for email marketers. Make one tiny mistake in your HTML, and you can unwittingly cut your broadcast response rates by 25% or more. And yet it doesn’t need to be this way…and you don’t need a high-end email service provider to solve it for you. Here’s how:
- Get a copy of Outlook 2003 (don’t go to 2007 if you don’t have to).
- Set your “Junk Folder Rules” to “High”. This is the default for anyone installing it for the first time. Assume that’s the minimum bar you need to achieve.
- Do NOT whitelist your broadcasting “from” address…just let the emails come into your inbox with the highest chance of getting caught as possible.
- Send yourself a “test” before every broadcast, and check to make sure it arrives in the inbox.
- If it’s in the junk folder, here are some likely culprits, edit it, and resend: (more…)
Centralizing Your Email Marketing June 17, 2008
Posted by Mindy Dolan in email marketing.Tags: centralizing marketing, consistent message, consolidating marketing efforts, email marketing, email marketing strategies, successful campaigns
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Isn’t it interesting that so many organizations these days use multiple vendors for their different departments for their email marketing needs? You have corporate marketing sending out their own campaign and message to their own lists with one vendor, sales doing the same thing but with a different message to their list with a different vendor, then you have the store doing their own interactive campaigns with yet another vendor, etc. So all these different messages are going out with a corporate identity attached to them, but no consistency in the messages, and all from different vendors. And, some subscribers may even receive duplicate messages from the different departments because of list sharing. Wouldn’t it be easier (and save employee time), to use one vendor to centralize email marketing and deliver one consistent message across all departments?
