Digital marketing has diversified considerably and is now available in more forms than was ever possible for traditional marketing strategies. It is also more cost effective and quicker than traditional advertising, and can take place across many platforms; social networks and email being the two most popular.

Email marketing is a great choice for businesses which are looking for a significant ROI, which is possible due to the relatively small initial cost of setting up a capable email marketing strategy. However the mechanics of email marketing demands at least a small amount of know-how from any business which intends to conduct an email marketing campaign.

Planning Your Email Marketing Campaign

A great email marketing strategy takes time, preparation, knowledge and creativity. For an email marketing campaign to be effective it needs to reach the optimal amount of people at the right time, and deliver the right content in the right way to increase engagement.

When planning an email marketing campaign you should always take into account the following factors:

• The quality of your leads and lists.
• What segments you need to be targeting to achieve your campaign objective.
• How appealing your content is and how your audience will respond to it.
• How relevant your product is – whether it’s information or an offer – to your audience.
• Where you want your subscribers to end up when they click your links.
• How well optimized your website is to receive visitors.

The last point is an important one. No matter how great your email marketing campaign is, if your website is sluggish, dull, over optimized or irrelevant your visitors will leave as quickly as they arrived. Your website needs to be optimized before you begin your email marketing campaign, not during, and certainly not after. When considering website optimization you will need to take into account the look, accessibility, content and visibility of your site, which may well mean implementing SEO and social media networking to boost your rankings.

Creating Your Marketing Emails

Your subscribers will fall into one, or both, of two categories; list specific and offer specific. Since each group will be more and less receptive to particular offers and information you must create emails which target each group accordingly. Diversification is your friend; by keeping your content as relevant as possible you will see a much higher conversion rate.

Planning and creating content is a crucial part of all email marketing strategies. Your subscribers need to be able to connect with your brand and product straight away, which is no easy feat for even the savviest of marketers. But by paying attention to current trends – such as the recent rise of infographics – and by following in the footsteps of other companies who have already conducted highly successful email marketing campaigns, you will gain inspiration for creating your own amazing emails.

Conducting Your Email Marketing Campaign

Once you’ve created your highly relevant and interesting email campaign you must determine the optimal time to deliver it to your subscribers. There is no set frequency for optimizing the delivery of your email marketing campaign since results are dependent upon a number of factors, such as the size of your company and subscriber list, and your product type. However data collation shows that both under and over exposure can do more harm to your campaign than good.

Sending too many emails is a sure fire way to lose revenue. How? By sending emails too frequently you may cause your subscribers to develop fatigue and turn off from your campaign. A good marketing email should not catch your subscribers off guard, nor should it seem too ‘salesy’. Great content and good timing can make all the difference between a sales email reading either like an advert or a useful bit of information.

Optimize Your Email Marketing Strategy Today

There’s only one dependable way to optimize your email marketing campaign if you don’t already have experience in this field. By employing the services of a professional email marketing campaign manager or company you will be able to utilize their experience and expertise alongside your own, to serious advantage.

About the Author: Amanda writes about online marketing, email marketing services and other tech topics for businesses.

The post Optimizing your Email Marketing Strategy appeared first on AddMe Blog.

Know the Difference Between Content Based and Reputation Based Spam Filtering

The last thing that you want is your email message going into the recipients Spam Box never to be reviewed. You need to know how filtering works and get familiar with this filtering before you even consider writing content for your emails or for the subject line. In the past, ISPs would sift through the content and block emails that said “free” or “open”. Now, new filters exist that will block emails coming from IP addresses that are already blocked. Your reputation is everything and you should keep this in mind when writing email marketing messages.

Keep Your Content Diverse

It is very tempting to send a single email to your entire subscriber list that discusses one product or service that you offer. The problem with this is that you are alienating a huge portion of your marketing list because only a few will be interested in the lone product or service you are promoting. You should only send emails on one topic if you have sifted through your database and can send emails based on demographics or a specific niche of clients. If you want more click-throughs, you should make sure you keep the content varied and diverse.

Make Sure Your Schedule Is Not Getting You Blocked

No one wants to open their email inbox and see 10 emails from the same company. If you send too many email marketing messages, you are bound to get blocked by the recipient. You might think that it is best to email your clients only once every few months. If you wait 3 to 4 months between marketing messages, your brand is not likely to be on the forefront of the consumer’s mind. You have to learn the proper balance and consider sending messages monthly so that you do not under or over do it.

Be Consistent With Day and Time

You might think that it does not matter what day or time you send your marketing messages as long as they are delivered in the recipient’s inbox. What you do not know is that there are two very important reasons why you should be consistent. As previously mentioned, ISPs are looking at several different factors to add your messages to a Spam list. Being added to this list can damage your chances of succeeding and can cost you money. If the ISP sees that you send messages at odd hours or on different days, you are increasing your chances of getting a Spam flag added to your IP address.

Another reason why to stay consistent is because your customers will start to anticipate when they will receive your email marketing messages. If you have compelling content in the message, they are much more likely to open the email to see just what you have to say this time.

You have to be very careful when you are implementing email marketing into your marketing initiative. You will need to experiment with subject lines, proofread your work, and research which strategies are most effective.

The post The Best Strategies for Email Marketing appeared first on AddMe Blog.

The reason is because email newsletters, in the mind of many, border all-too-closely to spam and other unsolicited email. Though email newsletters, if done well, can be a great benefit to the recipient as well as the sender, a poorly-done newsletter can actually damage your reputation and unsell your site or product.

Unfortunately, the difference between a newsletter your subscribers look forward to getting and one they toss in the spam folder is often a minor one. But by simply following these best practices, you can help ensure your newsletter serves as a positive, routine contact for your subscribers and not as a recurring annoyance.

1. Clarity Before Subscription

Far too many newsletter subscription pitches fail to include what is actually in the newsletter. Why should the reader subscribe? What will they be getting? And how often will they be getting it?

Not only are better-informed readers more likely to sign up for your newsletter, but they’re more likely to stay as they know what they are getting into. Compare that to subscribers that are surprised at the volume or content of your newsletter and either unsubscribe immediately or begin to junk your emails.

2. Double Opt-In Only

Every email address on your subscriber list should be obtained through a double opt-in process only. This means that they have requested a subscription on your site (or some other means) and then confirmed that with an email sent to their account.

Email lists that don’t use double opt-in are simply too prone to abuse as anyone can sign up anyone else. This, in turn, puts your newsletters in the hands of those who never really wanted it, turning what should be a legitimate mailing into spam.

Always remember spam is in the eye of the beholder so it’s important to make sure the recipient won’t see it that way.

3. Send at the Best Time

One of the most common ways for your emails to be treated as spam is to have them appear in an inbox filled with other spam letters.

Though there is no single best time to send your newsletters, you typically want to do so when your readers are active on their computer but not too busy.

For example, if you reach out to a business audience, the ideal time might be right after the morning email clean out but before lunch. Likewise, if your audience primarily checks email at home, it might be early evening, shortly after they get home from work.

Understand your audience and learn the best time to send your newsletters to them. You can even further segment this by requesting additional information from your subscribers and then target different readers at different times for maximum benefit.

4. Easy Unsubscribe

It’s a sad truth that, of all of your subscribers, some 91% are going to want to eventually leave your email newsletter (PDF). It’s just part of the life-cycle of an email newsletter.

Making this part of the process is critical to not angering your readers. After all, just because someone is unsubscribing from your newsletter does not mean they won’t purchase your product, read your site or otherwise participate in your community, it just means they no longer want that particular element and and it’s best to not upset them lest they leave completely.

Furthermore, the easier it is to leave, the less likely readers are to mark your newsletters as spam and the less likely they are going to be filtered out for others.

In short, a clear exit helps everyone out.

All in all, there is no reason to be too nervous about newsletter marketing. Though it can be risky if done poorly, if you operate with good faith, make sure people know what they are subscribing to and let them leave when they want, the risk is fairly minor.

While it might mean putting the brakes somewhat on your lists’ growth and being a bit more careful with how you use it, a well-built and well-maintained list is, in the long run, worth far more than one most merely toss into the spam folder.

Best of all, it creates something people look forward to getting and eagerly open, meaning they are a willing audience. That, in turn, is something that almost every advertiser dreams of.

This guest post is written by Lior Levine, a marketing consultant for a web hosting company that provides a list of the top 10 website hosting companies available online. Lior also consults for an international company that provides innovative new cancer treatments.

The post Top 4 Best Practices For Doing Email Newsletters appeared first on AddMe Blog.

So what types of features should you be looking for in an email marketing solution?

1. List Management

You may think you’re only ever going to be working with a single mailing list but that will quickly change once you really get involved with email marketing in a serious way. The email marketing solution you choose should allow you to handle multiple lists in the simplest possible way.

It should also allow you to create autoresponder sequences and a single broadcast mailing to the same list with just a few clicks – the more intuitive the package is the better. In addition it should allow you to segment your list so you can target just specific groups within your mailing list. We found this very important when we did the marketing for a customized cancer treatment startup I worked for.

Remember you want this to be as automated as possible so there’s very little work for you once you’ve generated the opt-ins to your list.

2. Double Opt-Ins

Because of the splurge of spam that caused the creation of the Can-Spam Act in 2003 you must, must, must have an email management solution that works with the double opt-in process. This basically means that once the person signs up to your list they’re sent a second email asking them to confirm their subscription and at least this way you’re completely minimizing the amount of unwanted opt-ins that you receive.

You’re also staying clear of any legal issues or potential complaints against you. Any solution that doesn’t offer the double opt-in feature should be avoided like the plague.

3. Tracking

Once you’ve created your list you’re going to be emailing your customers and readers and an important aspect of this process is checking what’s called your Open Rate. This tells you of the number of e-mails you sent out how many were actually opened and read. This type of analysis is critical to ensure that you’re writing the most effective and enticing subject lines possible for your email campaigns.

Also if you’re including any links in your emails for products or services you’re recommending or just sharing resources with people then you’ll need to know how often these links are actually being clicked to measure your click through rate. Again this is an important part of analyzing your email promotion efforts – it allows you to fine tune what you’re doing so you can improve your next broadcast to your list.

Getting email marketing right isn’t rocket science but getting the right solution in place at the very start is the key to success here. There’s nothing more frustrating then creating a list with one provider and then realizing that they’re not going to be able to offer you what you need.

Then you’re going to have to try either migrating your entire list or worse again asking your customers and clients to opt-in yet again to an entirely new email management system. Neither one of these is fun and the entire process can quickly become a nightmare that involves people simply opting out of receiving any emails from you at all.

Look at what solutions other successful email marketers are using and simply follow their example – they’re using it because it works.

About the Author:
Lior Levin is a marketing consultant for a psd to html company and for few other Internet companies.

The post 3 Must-Have Features For Email Marketing appeared first on AddMe Blog.

First of all, I’m assuming at this point that your recipients will recognize you from your “From Label”. I’ve written why your From Label is very important
in your email marketing campaigns. If they are familiar with who the
email is coming from, you’ll have better luck getting your email opened
with a catchy subject line.

As a retailer your email marketing
campaigns are probably all about selling. If you sell your own products
or products from other manufacturers, you’ll be trying to announce new
products, new seasons or discounts and sales. You’ll want your
recipients to act fast, so you may want to try expiration dates in your
subject line. We even see businesses using hours in the day in their
expiration time periods.

You’ll see that some of these subject
lines are a bit vague like “An Exclusive Offer for You”, however
sometimes that might get more opens than if you talk about a specific
product. That’s something that you need to test for yourself in your own
campaigns.

Offer, Offer, Offer

Enjoy this Special Offer at Our New Location

25-40% off – Email-Only Offer – Today Only

Invitation-Only 2 Hour Event Starts 11:30 AM CT

Ends Today! 20% Off Friends & Family

Top 10 under $10

Free shipping – offer ends in 3 days

Free product with purchase of [product name]

[New Product] has arrived. Order now before we run out.

Earn double points for [insert product or action].

Last Chance: Get up to $25 now

Save 10% on your next order

Enjoy [season] with rates from $65

Service Notice: Exciting new changes at [your company]

An Exclusive Offer for You

[Your company] October Specials

Last minute deals, special offers, and new [product name]

Act Now to renew your [subscription name]

Online only: 25% off friends and family

Introducing our latest…[product/feature here]

[Product name] Promotion week. Save 25%

Extended for a day! Get Free shipping through Friday

Stock up and save 15%

Limited Supply: Limit 2 [product name] per customer

Ho-ho-ho: The [your company] holiday catalog is here!

Email subscriber exclusive: [Product name] sale is here

Ends Today: Take 20% off your entire order

Private Sale Ends Today

Your choice of amazing items $50 + under

Great gifts for [Dad, Mom, etc]

Best Sellers every [girl, boy, man, woman, dog, etc.]

Everything you need when the temperatures [rise, fall]

Free Shipping–Limited Time Offer

Catchy & Creative

Sometimes all you need is a little vase lift  (retailer selling vase’s)

We’ve got you covered from head to toe (retailer selling hats, shirts, pants and boots)

How La Perla got its name (retailer selling lingerie, telling a story inside the email)

Temperatures Fall, Style Rises (retailer selling coats)

Celebrity Favorites (selling accessories that Hollywood is wearing)

Did you remember to get a gift? It’s ok, we did. (retailer wanting to get people to register for gift reminders)

10 Gift Ideas for your little ones (retailer listing top 10 suggestions for kids)

Manhattan View for a Song in the Shower (retailer selling shower curtain with Manhattan skyline on it)

Take your pick: Our 9 Favorite Dresses (retailer suggesting by popularity)

Coolest modern desk on the job…for $149 (retailer including price in the subject line)

Score Great Savings on Game-Time Gear: HDTVs, Furniture & More (retailer selling TV’s with a sports slant)

Party Like it’s 1999 Aged Cabernet Special (wine retailer)

In our store: Last minute Mother’s Day combo ready to go (retailer getting the last minute shoppers with a catch “combo to go”.)

Adorn Your Home Now & Through the Holidays (Home decor retailer)

Mind-Blowing Grenache (wine retailer)

Bring this email to a Gap store and win! (retailer trying to get store traffic)

I hope this gets your creative juices flowing. You can also find some great holiday-specific subject lines here. If you’ve got some great subject lines that have worked for your business, comment and let us know. 

Send Your First 250 Emails Free - Increase your customer sales with email coupons, newsletters and sales announcements from VerticalResponse, an award winning email marketing provider.

The post 50 All-Time Great Retail Email Subject Lines appeared first on AddMe Blog.

1. Put an offer on the back of your business cards to get people to sign up for your newsletter.
2. Tradeshows – Bring a clipboard or sign-up book with you to tradeshows and ask for permission to send email to those who sign up.
3. Include a newsletter sign-up link in your signature of all of your emails.
4. Send an opt-in email to your address book asking them to join your list.
5. Join your local chamber of commerce, email the member list (if it’s opt-in) about your services with a link to sign up to your newsletter.
6. Host your own event – Art galleries, software companies (one here has a party every quarter and invites the neighboring businesses), retail shops, consultants (lunch & learn) can all host an event and request attendees to sign up.
7. Offer a birthday club where you give something special to people who sign up.
8. Incentivize your employees – Give them $ for collecting VALID email addresses.
9. Giving something for free like a PDF? Make visitors sign up to your opt-in form before you let them download it.
10. Referrals – Ask you customers to refer you, and in exchange you’ll give them a discount.
11. Bouncebacks – Get them back! – Send a postcard or call them asking for their updated email address.
12. Trade newsletter space with a neighboring business, include a link for their opt-in form and ask them to include yours in their newsletter.
13. SEO – Make sure you optimize your site for your keywords. You need to be at the top of the natural search when people are looking for your products or services.
14. Giveaways – Send people something physical and ask for their email address as well as their postal address.
15. Do you have a postal list without emails? Send them a direct mail offer they can only get if they sign up to your email list.
16. nclude opt-in forms on every page on your site.
17. Popup windows – When someone attempts to leave your site, pop up a window and ask for the email address.
18. Include a forward-to-a-friend link in your emails just in case your recipient wants to forward your content to someone they think will find it interesting.
19. Include a forward-to-a-friend on every page of your site.
20. Offer a community – Use Ning as your easy-to-set-up community and have your visitors interact and sign up for your newsletter.
21. Offer “Email only” discounts and don’t use those offers anywhere but email.
22. Telemarketing – If you’ve got people on the phone, don’t hang up until you ask if you can add them to your newsletter.
23. Put a fishbowl on your counter and do a weekly prize giveaway of your product – then announce it to your newsletter. Add everyone who put their card in on to your newsletter list.
24. Include an opt-in form inside your emails for those people who get your email forwarded to them.
25. Tradeshows – Collect business cards and scan them into a spreadsheet. Make sure you ask permission to send email to them, then mark the card.
26. Use Facebook – Host your own group and invite people to it, then post new links often. From time to time, post a link to sign up for your newsletter.
27. Use Facebook – Post the hosted link from your newsletter into Linked Items to spread the word.
28. Use Facebook – Include an opt-in form on your Facebook Fan page.
29. Use Twitter – Twitter the hosted link of your email campaign every time you launch.
    If you’ve got any additional ideas, let’s hear them!

Send Your First 250 Emails Free – Increase your customer sales with email coupons, newsletters and sales announcements from VerticalResponse, an award winning email marketing provider.

The post 29 Ways to Collect Email Addresses for Your Business appeared first on AddMe Blog.

For
businesses that market to consumers, you’ll probably find buttons like
“Sign Up Now” or “Buy Now.” If you’re marketing to businesses and you
offer a white paper you might use the text “Download Now” or if you’ve
got a tutorial for your viewers to watch it might be “View the Demo.” At
any rate, an “actionable” word will usually work better than a passive
one on your button. Instead of saying “Free Trial” you might try
something like “Start Your Free Trial.” All of these things might seem
subtle, but they also might get your readers doing what you want them to
do. 

In the end, it’s all pretty scientific, so as always we suggest you test both and see what works for your own audience!

Some great resources I found for creating buttons:

Best Practices for Using Buttons 

35 Creative call to action buttons for inspiration

How to Make an Effective Call to Action Button

Are you seeing a better response with buttons?

Send Your First 250 Emails Free
- Increase your customer sales with email coupons, newsletters and
sales announcements from VerticalResponse, an award winning email
marketing provider.

The post Use Buttons instead of Links and Increase Your Clicks appeared first on AddMe Blog.

ROI (Return on Investment) – Your ROI is
the measure of the profit you make and/or costs saved at your business.
For your email marketing campaigns you calculate cost of sending email
plus time.

ROI = [(Payback - Investment)/Investment)]*100

So
if you made $780 on your email campaign, your time was worth $50 to
create it and it costs $15 to send it it would look like this:

(($780 – $65)/$65)*100 = 1100% ROI (which is really good!)

If you want to take it a step further subtract your cost of your products or services as well.

Open Rate – Your open rate is simply the number recipients who opened your HTML emails. It is typically
measured as a percentage of the total number of emails sent,
although
calculation methods may differ. The open rate is considered a useful
metric for judging response to an email campaign but it should be noted
that open rates for text emails can’t be calculated AND some email
clients don’t display images as a default which would under report your
total number of opens.

Above the Fold – The
bottom of your browser window or the bottom of your email before you
have to start scrolling is commonly referred to as
the “fold”. These viewable areas should be where your most important
information should be located since it’s the first thing your viewer
will see.

Preview Pane – Email programs like Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, and Mac Mail allow
users to view email through a preview pane before your recipient clicks to open. The preview pane is
important to bear in mind when composing the opening lines of an email so you can get your recipient’s attention fast.

Copy – Your copy is simply the text of the email you write.

Hosted Email
- A hosted version of an email allows users to view the email message
as
a web page, ensuring that all formatting remains intact.
VerticalResponse does this for you for free you just need to include the
“hosted version” link. Hosted versions of your email are also great for
you to send your Twitter and Facebook followers to when you launch your
campaign.

Spoofing – Email spoofing involves forging a sender’s address on email messages.
It can be used by malicious individuals to mislead email recipients
into reading and responding to deceptive mail. These fake messages can
jeopardize the online privacy of consumers and damage the reputation of
the companies purported to have sent the messages. Spoofed email often
contains phishing scams. VerticalResponse doesn’t allow for this in our systems.

Phishing – In a phishing scam, a spammer, posing as a trusted party such as a bank
or reputable online vendor, sends email messages directing recipients
to Web sites that appear to be official but are in reality fraudulent.
Visitors to these Web sites are asked to disclose personal information,
such as credit card numbers, or to purchase counterfeit or pirated
products.

Targeting – Targeting gives you the
ability to deliver emails to those most likely to respond to your
emails, based on a variety of things like their geographic, demographic,
psychographic
and behavioral information.

Whitelists – Whitelists are usually created by an ISP (internet service
provider) and are made up of commercial emailers (including ESPs) who have
been approved to send email through their gates. The ISP requires a list of IP (internet protocol) addresses that
email will be sent from, and in some cases a test period where the
commercial emailer will be approved or rejected. VerticalResponse is on all available whitelists.

Web Friendly fonts – Almost all web browsers are capable of displaying four primary fonts
properly: Times, Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana, as well as their
variants (Arial Narrow, Times New Roman, etc.) If a web developer
decides to stray from one of these fonts he or she risks browser
compatibility problems and the prospect that their pages may render
inaccurately when viewed through certain web browsers.

Got any other terms you were wondering about? Let us know!

Find out more about VerticalResponse.

The post 11 Email Marketing Terms You Need to Know appeared first on AddMe Blog.

I recently received a special offer from an email marketing company which I won’t name and shame, I clicked through one of the links in the email, which sent me to a 404 error page (page not found), hmmm. I then go back and try another link on the page – the same again… “The page cannot be found”.

WOW…. I’ve been sent an email advertisement from an email marketing company and all the links are broken, great first impression. This all could have been avoided if the creative was tested correctly.

Testing Email Creative

Testing is non-negotiable when sending a mass email campaign / solo email to a list, and should only take an extra hour of your time.

To help with this I’ve provided a quick email test list for you to check off each time you’re about to hit the send button.

Email Check List

• Spell check subject line and email copy
• Click on ALL links in the email making sure you’re being sent to the correct landing page
• Check your email against spam filters i.e. Spam assassin
• Create a “test” list and send the email to this list making sure it arrives in one piece and is still formatted correctly.
• Check you have included a unsubscribe link
• Check the reply to address
• Make sure you’re contact details (physical address, phone and fax number) are also found within the email

Follow these simple 7 points and you should start seeing a much better open and click through rate (plus less complaints) from your email marketing campaign.

Good luck!

The post Test Your Email Creative! appeared first on AddMe Blog.

I’ve complained about email auto responder once before, though I think this was over Twitter. The reason being that when we shoot out our newsletter I get 1,000′s of thank you emails etc; all of these auto responders.

Granted this is a nice, reassuring message to get when you’ve just sent an email to someone, knowing they received your message and will get back to you in 24 hours (though I’m yet to see too many people reply within 24 hours).

Look at this from a commercial aspect, what about the value of an auto responder / thank you email when someone has just signed up to your mailing list?

For those of you (which should be all) that have signed up to the AddMe newsletter, you know that I send out a confirmation email and the latest newsletter.

1. Let the subscriber know we have their address in the database

2. Welcomes the new subscriber to the list (otherwise known as the AddMe family)

3. They’ve asked to join the mailing list so let’s send them out the latest newsletter, some reading to tide them over till the next newsletter comes out.

4. They may have been interested in a service or product we’re offering and requested more information.

The 4th point is where an auto responder is perfect from commercial use!

Let’s say you have a customer who is interested in buying product x, they’ve read your website and figured they might have a use for this in later days, weeks or months so they sign up for your email newsletter.

Tracking where they sign up from (Product Page X) send them out a customized email, informing them of added benefits of product x or possibly a special offer enticing them to “buy now”. You’d be surprised how an incentive can help bring that sale over the line.

Creating such a auto responder can require some coding though some tools and email marketing programs that can support such a facility, one in particular I would recommend is ConstantContact.

The post Make Email Auto Responders Work appeared first on AddMe Blog.