The BillboardEmail Blog

14
December
2011

Staying Relevant in the Crowded World of Email Marketing

The world of Email Marketing is a crowded, ever-changing environment that can provide both feast and famine when it comes to email ROI. The fact is, when done right, Email Marketing provides 6-8 times the ROI of other marketing outlets.

To achieve the highest return on your Email Marketing investment, it’s important to understand the data you will be mailing to and make sure that, as the sender, you are doing everything in your power to stay relevant as the marketer.

Here are a few tips on maintaining relevance in Email Marketing:

1. Keep your content fresh and engaging. Over the weekend, I accessed an old Yahoo email address I hadn’t checked in some time. The inbox was flooded with content I did not care about, but there was one item that did catch my eye. The problem is, I realized the sender had sent me the same email with identical content many times over the last month. A month ago, on the first send, it was likely to have been considered fresh and engaging. After a month of the same thing, not so much.
    
2. Make sure and follow Email Best Practices. If you do not mail on your own, make sure the Email Service Provider you use to create content and send Email Marketing messages is following set best practices. As the world of Email Marketing gets more crowded, the line between those who do their best to maintain high email standards and those who do not becomes more and more apparent. Don’t be left on the wrong side of ISP spam filters! To access our white paper on Best Practices, click here.
    
3. Make sure the data you mail to is verified opt-in users and is relevant to the message. By opt-in users, we mean a user who signed up for an offer on a web site or through another method where they provided their email and knowingly agreed at the time of sign up to receive additional offers. It’s best to use your own collected opt-in data whenever possible, but there will be times where relationships are established and you have access to additional email data where you fall under the category of a 3rd-party offer the user agreed to receive when they opted-in to the email list. If this is the case, make sure your email matches the source of that data! For example, sending a video game offer to a list of users who signed up to learn about educational grants is a no-no. An offer for college textbooks to the same list is much more relevant and likely to result in more conversions and less complaints!
    
4. Know your data and segment your data. As you market more and more to your users, you should be able to identify users who are responding and those who are not. Knowing this can help you focus email campaigns directly to users who are responding to you and help you develop new, engaging content to try and appeal to those who have not yet responded. For more information on segmenting your data, click here.

20
November
2011

Email Marketing During the Holiday Season

The holiday season is a wonderful time of year for most of us, but for Email Marketers, it is a time of increased email deliverability issues. The volume of email sent in the United States and globally increases significantly around the holidays, especially at Christmas time. Studies done by groups like CheetahMail who monitor email traffic report:

“With ecommerce off to a record start thus far in 2011, brands are expecting the holidays to be just as busy online. One area where brands may push more marketing dollars - email. A new report from Experian CheetahMail predicts email volume will increase about 20% over the upcoming holiday season.” (Source: http://www.bizreport.com/2011/10/cheetahmail-email-volume-to-increase-20-over-holidays.html).

To deal with these deliverability issues, one important tip is to plan ahead for the busiest days of the holiday season. Days like Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and the Saturday before Christmas is the peak of the email season. They represent the best opportunity for you to market yourself to shoppers who will be looking for the best deals available. Plan for these days and make sure you have any potential issues taken care of to maximize your ability to get past spam filers that will be working overtime.

Make sure your feedback loops are working properly. Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and many other ISP’s offer feedback loops for free that allows you to maintain your email list best practices and a strong positive email reputation. At the holiday season, these feedback loops will be critical to keeping your lists clean.

Consider a redesign of your email creative and also what your email will offer the end user. Remember, the users in your email lists will receive increased amounts of email from many sources, so competition will be elevated as well. A redesign with a seasonal look and feel that is appealing to the end user will help entice them to view your email over the competition and will result in lower risk of spam complaints. Try out and test different creative to see which ones result in the best overall response. Offering seasonal deals will also entice the end user to engage with you and result in a higher holiday season ROI. Give them choice and a holiday deal they simply can’t refuse!

Above all, don’t get discouraged if an email campaign doesn’t go as well as you hoped! Make changes and keep trying. You aren’t the only one that will run into seasonal deliverability issues. The key is to remember that the holiday season is a time of opportunity for you and your brand, and following these simple tips can have a profound effect on your holiday marketing efforts.

Happy Holidays and Happy Mailing from all of us at BillboardEmail!