1. Best Practice: Mini Ham Croissants (Or How to Engage Audiences Through Email Marketing)
This ebook from marketing consultancy, The Marketing Practice, provides 10 email marketing tips to consider at the tactical level. The email marketing ebook touches on the use of images in email messages, effective subject lines, email personalization, the use of attachments and more. The title has an interesting story behind it: The authors explain that while brainstorming a title for the ebook, an email with this subject line appeared in his email – proving that, despite all of the information in the ebook, sometimes “weird stuff still works.”

2. Making Email Marketing Work For You: Successful Strategies for Your Small Business
This email marketing ebook provides advice and best practices specifically for small businesses, including information on permission-based email campaigns and list management. The ebook offers tips for establishing brand identification, building strong customer relations and using email to answer customer questions. Plus, find a brief but interesting section on the history of the Internet and email marketing.

3. Using Original Content to Generate Online Visibility, Web Site Traffic and Sales Leads
This ebook from HRMarketer, a media relations firm for companies selling to HR departments, teaches how to effectively use a web site, original content and ongoing marketing activities, like direct email marketing, to achieve measurable results in publicity, traffic and leads. Find tips for determining the right topic to write about, as well as format of content (i.e., video, podcasts, webinars). Finally, the ebook offers advice for promoting and re-using content to get the most out of efforts.

4. 41 Ways to Grow Your E-Newsletter Subscriber List
B2B marketing consultancy DH Communications provides this ebook to illustrate how to grow a high-quality email marketing list without breaking the bank. The ebook offers tips on using direct mail to increase subscriptions, archiving newsletters on the web, developing an easy-to-use subscription form, incorporating social media and using incentives to encourage subscribers to sign up.

What email marketing ebooks would you add to this list?

For many, the start of the holiday season means scouring the stores in search of the perfect gifts, spending hours carefully wrapping them in shiny gold and silver paper, and finally heading to the post office with carload of cheer and packages.

It’s likely you’ve already begun thinking about gifts and cards for loved ones this year. Have you done the same for your customers on your email marketing list?

Preparing presents for family and friends isn’t all that different from preparing holiday email marketing e-commerce campaigns. Put your Santa hat on and follow these five tips for delivering the perfect gift and maximizing email marketing ROI:

1. The Perfect Gift. Give your customers exactly what they want this year. For marketers, that means providing them with relevant copy and an enticing offer.

   Study open and click-through patterns to understand the type of offers, the format and the frequency your customers prefer. If you find, for instance, if a significant number of subscribers click on a certain product but do not purchase it, send them some holiday cheer by offering a coupon for that product.

   Better yet, let your customers tell you how you’re doing and what they want to see more and less of by conducting a survey. Don’t forget to reward survey participants with a special incentive.

   

2. Gift Wrap. Remember how excited and curious you feel when given a present beautifully tied with a big sparkly bow? Make your subject linebe that big sparkly bow. Encourage subscribers to “tear open” your holiday email marketing message with a catchy, well-written subject line. Consider these tips:
   • Create a sense of urgency. 10 shopping days left! A 2 day sale for our loyal email subscribers!
   • Evoke mystery and intrigue. Remember the anticipation you felt as a child waiting to open up gifts? Find the special offer in this email!
   • Include the most important information first. What’s the incentive for tearing into this gift?

   

3. Holiday Cards. Think of your holiday email marketing message as you do a holiday card. You’ll achieve the best response if your “card” is personal and meaningful.

   Use the information you already have about your subscribers – i.e., name, location, age – to personalize your messages. Address them by name. Consider sending customized messages to subscribers based on their age or location, for example.

   If you know that a certain segment of your audience is parents of young children, include some holiday-themed family fun ideas in an e-newsletter. For subscribers in warm-weather locations, provide tips for getting in the holiday spirit without snow and winter temperatures.

   

4. Package Delivery. The post office promises to deliver holiday packages rain or shine or snow. Can you guarantee the same for your holiday email marketing messages? Don’t let your message be left out in the cold of the junk mail folder.

   An experienced email solutions provider (ESP) can maximize delivery for campaigns, ensuring messages reach customers’ inboxes. Look for an ESP that has built strong relationships with ISPs, enforces clean list policies, has sophisticated bounce processing, provides dedicated IP addresses, and complements their solution with delivery assurance consulting.

5. Prepare Now. Don’t forget the not-so-fun part of the season: Waiting until the last minute means long lines at stores, slow shipping times and gifts that arrive after the holiday season.

   You run the same risk with holiday email marketing. Start planning your campaign today. Make sure your customers feel appreciated this holiday season with timely, relevant, engaging offers.

The details collected are supposed to match the information that appears on the identification the passenger will present to airport security, and the airline must collect them before the boarding pass can be issued. Naturally, then, it makes sense to streamline the process for frequent flyers by asking them to include it with their frequent flyer account.

Unfortunately, the way some airlines are going about this is creating false positives of its own. The personal information on an ID is exactly the sort of thing that a phishing scammer would try to trick victims into divulging, and the email sent by one airline via its ESP set off red flags for email administrators on the SpamAssassin users’ discussion list.

The following are excerpts from the discussion. The names of the airline and the ESP have been obscured because the purpose of this post is not to blame or embarrass anyone (this is not the only such incident), but to emphasize how important it is to think about all the messages, both explicit and implicit, that you are sending to your subscribers every time you email.

The SpamAssassin list discussion begins with this:

not to be outdone by hackers and thieves, phishing for PPI, [airline] is sending out their own DKIM signed, SPF PASSED, from their own servers, their very own phishing email.

I called [airline]. they say the hold time is between 45 mins and 1 hour and 6 mins. (i wonder why). I called [ESP]. phone doesn’t even ring …

A responder continues:

I have no idea what the story is here but from what you say here, it’s not clear whether [ESP] is a legitimate marketing company that was hired by [airline].

Assuming [ESP] *is* legit, they could do a better job of reputation management.

Another responder:

I reckon its a scam.

[ESP] appears to be … “a … provider of on-demand marketing solutions …” – IOW they’re at best a UCE source.

The original poster finally concludes:

SUPPRIZE.. its legit folks.

[Airline] phone lines, and web site have been swamped by people all day calling to see if this was legit!

(however, its STILL AN INSECURE HTTP BASED FORM ON A PARTNER SITE, A PARTNER WHO IS A PERMISSION BASED EMAIL MARKETING COMPANY)

Bad, stupid, really stupid… go put your dunce cap on and sit in the corner.

I believe that this attempt violated the TSA’s privacy policies as well (asking a third party to collect information over a non ssl encrypted, non authenticated web site?)

Don’t be the marketer in the dunce cap. Think about what you’re saying, and how you’re saying it, and make sure you’re using the appropriate tools for what you want to accomplish.

Facebook may have 300 million users, but Hotmail alone has 375 million+ active accounts worldwide. Also consider that to even use social networks, you need an active email address to sign up in the first place.

Most companies are engaging in one form of email marketing or another. Unfortunately, many don’t take the time to optimize their efforts. Email marketing is a proven tactic and one of the more effective digital marketing channels, if you take the time to give it the proper strategy.

With that in mind, we want to help you succeed with your next effort. Following are 24 email marketing tactics the pros are using that will help your next campaign sizzle:

1. Experiment with A/B testing of your email content. For example, perform A/B splits with your list and vary the placement of links or the Subject line. Then monitor to find out which version produces the best results.
2. Pre-fill purchase forms on landing pages. Make the purchasing process as simple and quick as possible for subscribers. Use the information you have about them and pre-fill the forms as much as possible, so they don’t have to.
3. Work to grow your list. Offer email list signup at each touchpoint (where possible) and promote the email list at other touchpoints Your website is a ready opportunity for list growth from existing site traffic. Where you promote the email list, make a clear and compelling case for signing up. Examples: special email-only deals, email exclusive new product announcements. Let users see an example (or the latest) mailing. Sweepstakes, list rental, and list appends are generally not cost effective for list growth.
4. Call subscribers by their names. It may sound obvious, but personalizing messages by including the recipient’s name can enhance the user experience. They’ll feel more connected with your brand and more likely to remain a subscriber.
5. Make sure unsubscriptions are effective immediately. For one, it’s important to stay compliant with regulations for subscription management. For another, it’s just the polite thing to do. Who knows? If your subscribers experience a pleasant unsubscribe process, they may one day become your customer again.
6. Include polls in your e-newsletter. Ask your subscribers to answer a question, then turn the results into content for a future issue. Poll questions can be anything from fun to serious, depending on your subject matter – just as long as they are compelling to your audience.
7. Survey your subscribers to find out what they want. Send your subscribers a questionnaire about the type of content they are interested in, preferred email frequency, etc. But don’t just sit on this valuable information, use it to improve your email marketing campaign.
8. Follow up with a triggered email for related products after subscribers make a purchase. “Thank you” emails following purchases can include links to complementary products or services they might be interested in.
9. Use complete and consistent headers to ensure successful delivery. The “From”, “To” and “Subject” fields are all highly scrutinized by content filters, so be clear and consistent in your messaging.
10. Create email messages with a good balance of text, graphics, and links. Content filters may look for messages that are dominated by images or that do not have an extra message part for text-only readers.
11. Forget opt-out strategies. Although it’s technically legal to email first and ask permission later, study after study has shown that opt-in strategies produce much higher click rates than opt-out strategies. Opt-out strategies might seem like a “get rich quick” scheme, but the statistics say otherwise.
12. Provide immediate responses to opt-ins. Don’t simply send a “thanks for subscribing” message. Rather, send an entire welcome package with offers, additional information and a past e-newsletter issue.
13. If you’re sending out a long e-newsletter, use in-page anchors. First try to cut down your message as much as possible, but if it’s still long, split it into sections and build a table of contents. Use page anchors to allow readers to jump to specific sections.
14. Attempt to revive sleeping subscribers. For subscribers who have stopped paying attention to your messaging but have not opted out, reduce the frequency of your messages to them. They just might notice the change and start paying attention.
15. Send inactive subscribers a reactivation offer. If #14 doesn’t work, send your sleeping subscribers a series of re-engagement offers.
16. Include images or links to videos in your messages, but plan ahead. Images can be an effective tactic to include in your messages, but some subscribers block images, so make sure your message works even if images don’t appear.
17. Stay gender neutral. It sounds like a no brainer, but it’s easy to personify a specific gender when writing copy. Make sure you have both a male and a female copy edit the content to ensure you aren’t leaving out one sex.
18. Don’t use too many links. You don’t want excessive links competing for your call to action, but there isn’t a science to how many is too many. Use testing (see #1) to determine the right amount.
19. Include a teaser to your next issue. Give your subscribers a quick glance at what’s to come. You’ll get them excited for the next issue and keep them guessing at the same time.
20. Use countdowns to create urgency. Is there a product launch or upcoming event you want to highlight? Create excitement by counting down the days or weeks in your e-newsletters.
21. Follow up on complaints. Try to remove from your list those who reported your email to their ISP. Otherwise, you’ll keep getting routed to junk folders and may eventually be penalized. A good ESP provides tools to automate this.
22. Avoid reverse-type text for copy like coupon offerings. If your subscribers need to print out your email to take advantage of an offer, avoid using white text on a black background. Some might refrain from printing because it would take up too much ink.
23. Refrain from unsubscribe form tactics that are not CAN-SPAM Act compliant. Don’t advertise products on the form, ask for login or password before proceeding, or use multiple-step processes.
24. Consider how your subscribers will react. Whether making an offer or asking for information, think beyond getting out the message. Don’t be caught in a horror story about coupons you couldn’t honor because they were too widely shared, or about how badly your message was misunderstood because it appeared pushy or just plain suspicious.

Those high-achieving oldest children—email subscribers who are active, engaged and likely to purchase—garner a lot of praise and interest. And a good amount of time is spent worrying about those rebellious younger children—those subscribers who have officially opted out.

But what about those who are technically subscribed to your emails, but are inactive and uninterested? These subscribers quickly delete your emails without reading them, but haven’t taken the effort to opt-out. It’s time to think about those middle children, or the “emotionally unsubscribed” as marketing blogger Joanna Lawson Matthew calls them.

Re-engaging Your Email Subscriber List

Matthew suggests first identifying those subscribers by segmenting your list to determine who hasn’t opened or clicked on any of your emails in a given timeframe, based on your email frequency. The next step is to re-engage those middle children, the emotionally unsubscribed group.

Matthew offers 3 ideas for doing so:

1. Send a series of 3-5 re-opt-in engagement messages to the emotionally unsubscribed group. Remind them of who you are and restate the value of your emails. When the re-engagement effort ends, remove anyone from your email subscriber list who hasn’t re-opted in. But be mindful that with this highly aggressive measure, you could lose a lot of email addresses—typically 70-75%.
2. Bring a sense of urgency to your email campaign. Think, “Your subscription will soon end! Act now to renew!” Communicate to the group that they will miss out on useful information and offerings if they don’t act quickly.
3. Segment the emotionally unsubscribed from your regular email subscriber list. Consider cutting back on frequency for this group and offering them a special whitepaper or free trial of your product. Or, send this group a survey to find out exactly what they want.

Re-engagement in Action

Perricone MD, a skincare products provider, is a terrific example of a successful email subscriber re-engagement effort. Before the campaign, many customers were no longer engaged or purchasing. Perricone MD experienced deliverability problems because those emotionally unsubscribed customers were driving up spam complaints.

To identify engaged customers and reconnect with dormant customers, Perricone MD:

• Worked with iPost to refine its use of Google Analytics, fully implement the strategy and train Perricone MD on using the analytics to create new email campaigns.
• Implemented iPost Autotarget™ to automatically identify the engaged and unengaged subscribers, based on their actual subscriber behavior, and segment the email subscriber list to reach out to each group appropriately.
• Increased the frequency of email to the engaged customers.
• Developed a “trial-size” offer program to entice the emotionally unsubscribed customers, the unengaged portion of the list.

As a result, Perricone MD increased its revenues and interaction from unengaged subscribers without risks to deliverability. Learn more about the re-engagement campaign in this case study.

How engaged and emotionally subscribed is your email subscriber list? Now may be the perfect time to consider a re-engagement strategy to help those middle children follow in the footsteps of their older siblings.

Share your thoughts on this concept via a comment.

Recall your last email campaign. Did your subscribers tune out your messages as background noise? Or did they truly listen and respond as you intended?

Gain Active Email Subscribers

Ensuring an active email subscriber base can be tricky. But in a recent post, email marketing blogger Jimmy Adames offered 5 tips to help guarantee success:

1. Brand your email messages. It’s critical that your recipients can immediately identify the email’s sender. That way, they’ll feel comfortable and confident enough to open it or click through.

   Find out how Perricone MD was able to invigorate its brand among customers who were no longer engaged or purchasing with a targeted, well-branded email campaign.

2. Personalize your message. Relationships are key to successful marketing online. At the very least, use the personalization features that your Email Service Provider (ESP) offers to personalize the subject line with the recipient’s name.

   Your ESP should also be able to pull together information from across multiple sources to help you achieve a complete customer profile—who they are and what their interests are. That way, you can truly customize campaigns for maximum results.

3. Offer email value beyond promotions. Adames stresses the importance of offering e-courses, tutorials and other useful content instead of simply pushing product.

   Read this case study to uncover how Gilbert Guide Inc. used email marketing to provide articles, tips and checklists for its subscribers in order to build brand awareness and increase site traffic.

4. Create a must-read subject line. Keep it short and to the point, and attempt to grab the reader’s attention.

   But it’s also important to ensure your subject line text doesn’t trigger spam filters. Read this case study to discover how iPost helped Libida.com follow best practices to ensure its email messages were received and not filtered out as spam.

5. Create a sense of urgency. Give your readers a reason to open the email. Complimentary offerings are enticing, but be careful not to trigger spam filters by using the word “free” too often.

   Your ESP should guide you through the “do’s” and “don’t’s” on email marketing best practices to maximize the delivery of your campaigns.

Subscribe to Not Just Another Marketing Blog to be sure to get the latest email marketing tips and insight! It’s free. It’s easy. It’s not just another marketing blog.

What three things are crucial for any company to know before embarking on an email marketing initiative? To help provide this answer, to email marketing beginners and veterans alike, our Email Marketing Thought Leader interview series turns to London-based Dave Chaffey.

Chaffey is an Email marketing consultant and author of “Total Email Marketing.” Chaffey also posts regular insight to Dave Chaffey’s Right Touching Blog.

In our interview below, Chaffey reveals three email marketing tips most crucial for you company to know about email marketing and the single most important component of any email marketing campaign:

iPost:
What are three things most companies do not know about email marketing, that they should, before embarking on any initiative?

Dave Chaffey:
I’ve talked to thousands of email marketers over the past 10 years about their email practices and many certainly miss out on the unique opportunities available by email – most simply treat it as a different form of direct mail.

Three of the biggest opportunities they miss out on are:

• You can track individual response and so follow-up with an email, phone call or direct mail to move the customer along to the next step

• You can trigger emails individually personalized through dynamic content insertion. For example welcome emails, birthday emails and shopping cart abandons.

• Developing an email strategy so that its email activity has clear outcomes and integrates with other direct communications

iPost:
When first launching an email marketing initiative, what should companies be prepared for in terms of initial ROI?

Dave Chaffey:
When launching a programme for maximum ROI you should aim to get it right from the start, not a “let’s dip our toe in the water” experiment.

You will almost always get your highest responses from new people on your list, before they “emotionally unsubscribe.”   So you should make those first emails count, maybe through a powerful, focused sales promotion rather than an enewsletter. Many companies are now moving away from enewsletters since they don’t have the cut-through they used to.

Alternatively, starting by a research survey email of customers you already have addresses for, can work best for some businesses.

iPost:
In your experience, how many companies realize the importance of a strong email list when launching their first email marketing campaign?

Dave Chaffey:
In my training workshops I always start by stressing the importance of data quality as the foundation for email marketing before going on to the sexier creative stuff.

Many companies don’t have a strategy to grow their in-house list and improve its quality. I know some companies who have tens of thousands of emails, but they’re not qualified or profiled to know how to target.

In my book I briefly review the type of measures that companies should be reviewing and improving for example:

• Email list coverage of database %

• Permission %

• Profile-depth (which fields available to target)

• 180 day subscriber activity % (best measure of engagement)

iPost:
Fill in the blank:  the most important component of a strong email marketing strategy is____.  If applicable, how does this differ from any other marketing strategy?

Dave Chaffey:
Great question! Easy answer, it’s “Relevance”. No surprises there… Not so different from other digital strategies like search. That’s why you need a communications strategy so you can become more relevant to your subscribers.

So how do you become more relevant? Here are three ways:

• Ask your customers what they want through a survey

• Watch what they click on, for example, in an enewsletter or on your site and give them more of that

• Follow-up through relevant triggered emails for related products after they buy – dynamic content insertion can help here.

iPost:
Your book, Total Email Marketing, offers practical tips designed to improve email campaign results.  Since this book was published, what tips have you developed that you wish you would have made it into this book?

Dave Chaffey:
I hope that many of the fundamental principles of communications strategy, targeting, creative template layout and deliverability haven’t changed. But some areas which are interesting and effective right now are the creative use of pre-headers, product ratings, video and “share to social”.

Simply, many emails just aren’t interactive enough.  Even basic polls and customer opinions can help. Engagement is the name of the game if you want to avoid the dreaded ‘Emotional Unsubscribes’.

Not Just Another Marketing Blog proudly launches its interview series, “Email Marketing Thought Leaders.”  These interviews, featuring insight from the industry’s most esteemed professionals, will help us provide you with tips and tricks you need to take your

We launch our series by speaking to Jim Sterne.  Author of the books Advanced Email Marketing and producer of the world’s first “Marketing on the Internet” seminar series, Sterne is an internationally known speaker and consultant to Fortune 500 companies.

Below, we discuss what changes about email marketing in a recession, and answer the question, ‘regardless of economic climate, do the fundamentals ever truly change?’

iPost:
What changes about email marketing strategy in a recession?

Jim Sterne:

Targeting becomes all the more critical when times are tough. People are forever overwhelmed with email they do not want and as they are doing more work with fewer colleagues, they have less time. Their tolerance is near zero. Marketers have to focus on providing value from start to finish. Instead of being entertaining or interesting, all email marketing messages have to be useful. That doesn’t mean they should only be discount coupons, but they must be as relevant as possible and that means targeting.

Make certain that your messages are relevant (segment well), timely (no general info, but serious and valuable offers) and curb your frequency (test the response to sending less often).

iPost:
What tips would you offer to companies to improve email marketing in slow economic times?

Jim Sterne:
Tip #1: Segment, segment, segment.

Being relevant is about knowing what your recipients care about. They do not all care about the same thing. They are not all interested in the few things that you care about. Any segmentation is good – it allows you to narrow the message to the recipient. You can segment on geography, weather, age, gender, purchase history, stated preferences – anything. And if you cross-reference those segments and send out a unique offer to North Eastern men over 50 who have bought twice this month and love flannel, then you are wildly relevant and will be richly rewarded.

Tip #2: Fire your subscribers.

Chances are excellent that you love watching that opt-in subscriber number climb and climb. Feels good, right? It’s fool’s gold. Your subscriber data looks great until you realize that you are not accounting for churn. It takes a tenth of a second to delete an email from a familiar source while it can take up to a minute to unsubscribe. If you send me one message a month, a year’s worth of deletes still costs me less than 2 seconds. If I really want to skew your numbers, I’ll click on the Junk button and never be bothered with your messages again. You’ll never know.

So fire your subscribers. Send them ample notice that on a certain date they will be unsubscribed unless they re-opt-in. It’s up to you to explain why they should bother.

iPost:
Conversely, what is the single biggest mistake companies should avoid with their email marketing campaigns during slow economic times?

Jim Sterne:
Avoid hitting the panic (send) button again and again like a rat in a cage. Email marketing is not a simple food delivery mechanism that cranks out sales whenever you crank out another blast. The more messages you send out the more people you will alienate. Resist the urge.

iPost:
List, creative & offer.  Which fundamental is most critical to email marketing success during a recession any why?

Jim Sterne:
Your list is your friend. These are the people who raised their hand and expressed enough interest that they were willing to allow you into their email inbox. But your list may be the least critical of the three. If your creative is great, it can (not will) become viral. That can leverage your list and let everybody know about your offer. If your offer is uninspiring, there’s no hope for you.

iPost:
Your book, Advanced Email Marketing, helps readers prove the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.  For those launching email marketing campaigns during a recession, what metrics demand the most initial focus, to either define a campaign as a success or make improvements?

Jim Sterne:
Your very first focus should be email bounce rate. If you’re sending out messages that are going to bad addresses, you may find yourself on a blacklist. People subscribe to black lists to help keep spam at bay.

Next up is your open rate. If nobody is opening your messages, you haven’t got a change.

Everybody cares about clickthrough rate and they should. This is the pro-active step that sends a clear signal. Open rate could simply reflect that you have created a subject line that is intriguing. If they delete it after one look, you have not done your brand any favors. Clickthrough says that are interested enough in the offer to find out more.

Engagement is next. If they hit the landing page and then wandered off (website bounce rate) then they are not engaged. Engagement is a metric that you have to determine based on your own situation. It could be number of pages viewed, number of survey questions answered, the time they spend on your site or it might even be something like:

Sales! Yes, whether they actually bought something because of your email is probably the best measure of success. For those who do not sell online, substitute sales with Contact Us page views, calls to your special website-only phone number or lead qualification form. The real measure of success is if your email is bringing you more customers more often.

iPost:
Wild Card – Anything else you would like to add?

Jim Sterne:
Back to square one: Whom are you mailing to? What do they care about? What’s in it for them?

But, just like those fresh off Spring Break kids who must suddenly contemplate life after college, email marketers in 2009 should be considering a more practical and, dare we say it, sound business approach if they want to continue receiving a paycheck. Let’s take a look at why – now, more than ever – you should segment your email list, protect against opt-outs and spam complaints, and which segmentation approach is the most practical.

My February byline in smallbiztechnology.com covers:

• Why should you segment? To avoid disaster
• Why should you be especially worried about opt-outs and spam complaints in 2009?
• Segmenting your list will reap rewards
• What segmentation approach is most practical?

Too often email marketers try to go from one end of the segmentation spectrum (blast away) to the other end (micro-segmentation). This extreme swing often bogs them down and, even if they are able to pull it off, often doesn’t yield better results than a simple, macro segmentation approach. After all, most marketing teams are stretched thin and stressed out in today’s crazy economy.

In my new byline in iMedia Connection, I offer a sane approach to segmentation that revolves around:

• Understanding the true barriers to implementing your marketing strategy and choose the strategies with the best benefit-to-barrier ratios.
• Pursuing strategies that use objective data for all of your customers rather than subjective (self-reported) or incomplete information.
• Implementing the strategy in a graduated approach (simple to complex, broader to narrower, general to specific).