Welcome to my Email Marketing and SEO blog

July 29th, 2009 No comments »

My name is Phil and I have been working in online marketing for over 5 years, the bulk of that has been involved with email marketing, something I am passionate about. I’ve been in everything from campaign planning, deliverability, segmentation to the design and build of emails and analysis of results.

I decided to write this blog, firstly to cover some of the basics for anyone who is new to the field of email marketing and secondly to keep people up to date with what is a fast moving area of online marketing.

For the last 18 months I have been heavily involved in web development and Search Engine Optimisation, there is so much information out there, some good, some very good and some down right ridiculous! I’ll cherry pick the best of what’s good and post it here too.

I’ll draw on my own personal experience as well as researching the dozens and dozens of articles I have amassed over time.

Please feel free to comment or get in touch about anything on this blog, I’d be interested to hear from you.

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BT internet email address problem

November 19th, 2009 No comments »

BT internet email addresses causing hard bounces

There’s been a global issue with  BT internet email addresses over the last few days. This means that email sent to those email addresses has been producing a ‘hard bounce’  The problem was first noticed late last week and at present it’s not clear if the problem has been resolved.

Many ESP’s have a threshold on the number of times that an email address can hard bounce before it is put into quarantine.  This is to stop problems with you becoming ‘blacklisted’ and therefore not being able to send emails to a specific domain or domains.

Check your email reports for high hard bounce rates and if you can,  find out what email addresses are affected. Work with your ESP on the best course of action.

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Email Marketing Lists

November 8th, 2009 No comments »

Email Marketing Lists

If you want to send emails to people you need their permission it’s a simple as that. We’re not talking about emails you may send to a friend or colleague, we’re talking about regular emails you may want to send to your customers or people who visit your website and want to know more about your products or services, so if you want to use email marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy make sure you have peoples permission to do so.

There are a number of ways you can do this. You could build your own opted in list via your website or you could buy an email list from a reputable data supplier to promote your list.

You can email those who people who have supplied an email address as part of a sale or if you are emailing them about a similar product they have purchased from you as long as you give those means to unsubscribe at any time.

Build your email list

Take every opportunity to grow your email list. Make your sign up box prominent on every page of your website. So many companies fail in this. Keep it simple, first name and email address are all you really need, you can collect other data later.

Make sure you advertise your newsletter on all of your off line media, in brochures, flyers, posters and event or exhibition material.

Getting people to part with their email address can be tough, so when they do, treat it with respect. You need to convince people that they should give you their details – what’s in it for them? You can try incentivising your sign up – a subscriber only discount or offer, entry into a competition or prize draw, a useful guide or download that the subscriber would find useful. These types of incentives also have the added benefit of making your subscriber want to open your emails when they arrive.

Once someone has subscribed to your list follow it up immediately with a ‘welcome’ email. Use this to reinforce why they signed up to your newsletter. This is always a good point to remind them of the free download or offer that prompted then to sign up in the first place.

Keep it simple

Keep the information you ask brief, first name and email address are essential, you may also want to collect, last name and title too.

Lots of tick boxes and other fields will put people off, especially if that information is for things like income (if you don’t need to know something, why ask for it?)
You need that person to sign up to your email newsletter, you can go back later to collect further information if you need to, or get certain information when they buy your product.

Make your privacy policy visible

Don’t hide what you intend to do with someone’s data, be as transparent as possible. Tell them who you are and how often you will be emailing them. Email marketing has come under a lot of scrutiny recently, especially as a large proportion of the email that is sent every day is spam (we are talking billions of emails) so be upfront about who you are. Make your unsubscribe procedure clear too.

Your opt in page

Keep your page simple, tell potential subscribers what it is you are offering if they part with their email address. If you are offering a download or freebie/discount make it clear when they can get or claim this e.g. after you hit the subscribe button you will be taken to a page to claim your discount etc…

Customer testimonials are a great way to convince people in the value of subscribing to your newsletter.

Tell them what you are going to send and when you are going to send it. Don’t promise a weekly newsletter and then email once a month.

Promote your privacy policy and unsubscribe mechanism.

Leave any tick boxes empty, never pre tick them.

Keeping your email list clean

It’s imperative that you keep your email marketing list as clean as possible. They should be kept free of email addresses that hard bounce and those subscribers who ask to be unsubscribed.

Managing your email list

  • Remove incorrectly formatted email addresses
  • Invalid domains and typo’s (e.g. alo.com)
  • Hard bounces
  • Confirm email addresses
  • Customer update link – Change of email or other details
  • Monitor delivery rates by domain
  • Test emails

Soft Bounce

An email that gets as far as the recipients email server but is ‘bounced back’ undelivered before it gets to the recipient.

A soft bounce can occur for a number of different reasons – recipient’s mailbox is full, server is down or swamped with messages, message too large or user has abandoned the mailbox.

Hard Bounce

Email is returned to the sender and is permanently undeliverable.

Causes of hard bounces can be – domains that don’t exist, typo’s changed addresses or recipient’s mail server has blocker your server.

Keeping your email lists is critical to your reputation, which together with a number of other factors determines whether your email gets delivered.

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What is email marketing

November 3rd, 2009 No comments »

What is email marketing?

Put really simply it’s the use of electronic mail for marketing purposes. Of course it’s a little bit more complex than that. Email marketing is a form of direct marketing, it allows companies too easily and cost effectively communicate with their customer base and target and acquire new customers.

Email marketing is often used in conjunction with other forms of traditional marketing such as direct mail and newspaper and magazine ads.

The advantage of using email is that it’s a lot quicker to get your message to a large number of people, it’s certainly cheaper and more often than not you see the results of email campaigns a lot earlier than other forms of traditional marketing.

Now that sounds wonderful but it’s not without its disadvantages. Practically anyone with an email account will have been plagued by ‘spam’ or ‘junk’ email at some point; email marketing messages can often be seen as such. It can sometimes be difficult for the recipient to determine what a legitimate email is and what ‘spam’ is

Because of this it’s imperative that you have someone’s permission to email them (it’s actually a legal requirement) without it you cannot email them, it’s really that simple.

I will be adding separate posts on each of the main components of an email marketing, from list growth to sending campaigns and measuring results, I’ll also make it available to download later.

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Basics of Search Engine Optimisation

November 2nd, 2009 No comments »

Search Engine Optimisation – Basics

For those of you who aren’t sure what Search Engine Optimisation is, put simply it’s the process of getting highly targeted traffic to your website via the search engines. Search Engine Optimisation is often known as SEO or SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

It’s no good having a nicely designed website if no one visits it. You can direct people to it via business cards, company literature but that really is a drop in the ocean.

The trick of SEO is to drive the people who are searching for what your website offers to your website. Depending on what market you are in, there are potentially hundreds of thousands of searches every day, the trick is getting those people to your site, to do that you need to have good search engine rankings, that is to appear highly in the search engine results for your chosen keywords.

SEO takes time and it needs to be done properly and constantly so that your site continually gets the best targeted traffic possible.

There are a number of things you need to do to ensure you rank well for your chosen search terms. I will cover each of these in a separate post but some of the main areas are

Keywords and keyword research
Meta Data
Title Tag
Content
Headings
URL’s
Links and Link building
Off page optimisation

I will cover what I consider to be the cornerstone of good SEO – keyword research in the next post.

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Testing Email Marketing Campaigns

September 10th, 2009 No comments »

Email Testing – why you should test every email campaign.

One of the great things about email marketing is that you can test and measure results quickly. Sometimes within minutes of sending an email campaign you can tell whether it’s working or not.

A recent study of 623 email marketers found that 37% did not test any part of their email campaigns.

Email testing – It doesn’t need to be complex

Testing does not need to be a difficult process involving complex algorithms it can be as simple as testing one subject line against another. A simple A/B split test can provide useful information that can then be used in the next campaign.

By just testing something as simple as a subject line you could notice a difference in open rates, what potentially positive impact could that have on your campaign?

What should I be testing?

Subject lines

An important part of your email campaign, it has a big sway in your email actually getting opened. If you can segment your list then you can send specific lines to certain segments.

Offers

Price testing, discount codes, free downloads. Price testing is a great way to quickly and easily test pricing for new products or changing the pricing of existing ones.

Calls to action

Really important this one, it can make the difference between someone clicking through from your email and them not. You can test text Vs image call to actions – text links as opposed to a banner. Where in the email do you place the links? (I would always recommend adding one high up in the email, above the ‘fold’ of the preview pane) and what do the call to actions say.

Length of email

Short copy Vs long copy. It would be easy to assume that in today’s fast paced life we all seem to lead that keeping copy short would be logical, we’re told people scan there inboxes and emails. However depending on the type of email you send, long copy may well suit your audience. If you have very long emails you could try breaking it down into ‘snippets’ and adding links to the full article hosted on your website.

Layout

Fonts, images, position of copy or ads, style can all be tested. Does your email reflect your brand? Is the design of your email consistent with that of your other marketing? Does it need to be?

Time, day, how often – If you go by common industry thought, B2B send early in the week (Mon/Tues) and B2C later in the week (Thurs/Fri) however this may not be true at all, you might find this completely turned on its head.

What time of day do you send, first thing in the morning so it’s in the inbox for 8.30 or later in the evening when people are perhaps catching up on email after the kids have gone to bed and the washing up has been done?

How often depends on what type of email you send. You need to tell subscribers when they are going to receive you email, e.g. while you are testing to say ‘weekly’ would be fine, once you know what day gets the best response then you can tell them when to expect your email.

Does sending at a weekend work? Or is everyone too busy having fun to be sat checking their emails?

Who is your email from – This has an effect on your reputation too so be sure to get this one right. Do your emails come from your company name or brand or from an individual person within the company.

How to test your email marketing

Random test – You may have a large data base, so you could test just a small random segment of your list and roll out the winning test to the rest of your list.

A/B split test – or A/B/C testing, depending on the variable. For example you could test 3 subject lines to see which one gets the better open rate, useful if you are doing email campaigns to third party lists. A/B price test, £5.99 Vs £7.99

Have a control and test against it, when the control is beaten by the test this then becomes your new control and you test against that.

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Email benchmark report

September 2nd, 2009 No comments »

Signup.to have produced a really useful email benchmarking report for UK email marketers on email marketing performance. The report is based on emails sent from their own clients across a number of different industries. It’s useful to see how your email marketing stacks up against others in your given industry.

To see how your email bench marks against others in your industry, pick up a copu of the report

Get the full email marketing report here

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Don’t email more email smarter.

August 20th, 2009 No comments »

In these times of recession, email marketers are under more pressure than ever to get the best return from their email marketing campaigns. So it’s tempting to crank up the frequency in which you hit your list or lists.

As email marketers we’re under increasing pressure to maximise the ROI from email marketing campaigns and in the short term there may well be a lift in sales or website visits but how much long term damage could this do to your overall reputation? You risk potentially doing more harm than good if you increase the frequency in the number of emails you send, you could end up bombarding your subscribers with more emails than they are happy to receive from you – don’t forget you’re not the only one sending them emails!!

So what can email marketers do?

Well sometimes less is more! A well targeted and timely email campaign will yield far better results than an untargeted blast to your entire file.

Segment your list

I’ve known companies (and I’ve done it myself) segment to the most very basic level, for example, if your database contains people who have bought different products from you, then email people who have bought product A promoting product B. (not forgetting to make sure you exclude anyone who already owns both products!)

You could send a targeted offer to the male and female readers of your list; it could even promote the same product but with a different message that appeal to that demographic.

Depending on how much you know about your subscribers there is so much you can do. If you don’t know much about your subscribers (perhaps you have only collected the most basic information) then you can ask them, run a questionnaire or poll on your website and find out more about them, these can be targeted to your business needs, then make segments based on the feedback and email accordingly.

Timing your email campaigns

Timing your email campaign is critical to its success; I have learnt this from bitter experience. I’d recommend thoroughly testing the day and time that you send your email campaigns to see when you get the best response. From experience it tends to be Tuesday to Thursday, between 5 & 9 in the evening. Of course this may be different for your industry and also for your market, for instance those in a B2B environment may notice that’s it better to send early in the week opposed to sending on a Friday afternoon when people are winding down for the weekend.

Of course a timely offer is a great way to increase the response of your campaign. Email campaigns around a specific event work well. If you know the date of your subscriber’s birthday you could do a special offer available on that day. Or its known event coming up (mothers day, Valentines Day or the kids going back to school)

As with all marketing test, test and test again.

Run split campaigns against creative to see which works best and if your as not testing subject lines on EVERY send you should be!

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Email Content

August 13th, 2009 No comments »

So you’ve got your email delivered into the inbox and persuaded your reader to open your email, it’s time to give them the content they want (dare I say demand)

If your email contains nothing of interest or doesn’t meet the expectations you’ve set in your subject line your readers will simply stop opening your emails or worse unsubscribe/junk them.

Content is not just how it’s written, it’s delivering something of value to your readers, and it’s about meeting the expectations of why they signed up in the first place.

Simply ask yourself this: Why did people sign up to your newsletter in the first place? Does the content I provide meet the needs of my readers?

Deliver the content you promised in your subject and at the time the reader signed up to your newsletter. Defining what your email newsletter is about and keeping this in mind is useful when you are writing the content for your emails.

What is the purpose of your email?

• Keeping in touch with customers about your companies news and developments
• To sell new products
• Providing product updates or support/training
• Building your brand
• Customer retention
• Free content to up-sell to a paid product
• Part of a subscription

Knowing your audience and what the purpose of your email is helps you provide content that gives your readers something of value and a reason to continue opening your emails.

If you know enough about your readers you may want to segment and deliver content based on certain demographics. For example if your company sells sports clothing you could send an email to your male subscribers featuring sports clothing aimed at them and similarly for your female readers. You may even base your content on a specific region, for example an event taking place in Scotland may not necessarily appeal to those living in the south of England.

What kind of content works best? Here are a couple of ideas

News or product reviews. HMV send regular updates on new releases, very often tailored to what you have bought previously, this also has the added benefit of driving traffic to the website to find out more.

Promo’s and special subscriber only deals – Waterstone’s do this regularly, often sending out special promotion codes in their emails, with details of what books can be bought and when the promotion ends.

Useful information or training/knowledge about your product or service – how your reader can get the most of out the software they may of purchased from you or where they can go to find help for commonly asked questions.

Free information or tasters of your product or service – perhaps you allow readers access to certain information or products for free, it helps build your relationship with them and build up trust with a view to converting them into a paying customer or client.

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