Anchor Computer

In 2011, more than 70% of worldwide email traffic was spam. As spam filters become more efficient at keeping our inboxes clean, an alarming 20% of legitimate email marketing messages are being blocked in error.

Are your email marketing messages making the cut?

Incorporating the best practices below can help improve your inbox deliverability and reduce the number of emails being blocked from ever reaching your contacts.  Simply put, better inbox deliverability means improved email marketing performance.  Reach more contacts and increase your email opens, clicks and overall response.

Here are 6 best practices you can use today to prevent spam filter blocking:

1. Short, relevant and enticing perform best for subject lines.

The goal of your subject line is to entice recipients to open.   Including a specific offer in your subject line works well, however, most email programs will only display 5-8 words or 60 characters (including spaces).  Anything longer will be cut off and not viewable.   Also, it is very important to avoid spammy words or symbols. For example:  multiple exclamation marks, multiple dollar signs, Affordable, Apply Now, Dear Friend, Free, Save $ and many others.

2. Keep email creatives at a maximum of 600-650 pixels wide.

Designing emails with a width of 650 pixels or under is best practice.  Anything over 650-700 may have your recipients scrolling around to read your message. This is especially true as 52% email recipients reportedly view emails from their email program’s preview pane (ClickZ). It is recommended that you keep key content towards the top of your message, logos left aligned, and calls to action above the fold (or within the top 300 pixels).

3. Avoid using “spammy” words in body content. 

In addition to your subject lines, spam filters are also screening the content of your email.  Try to avoid using common spam triggers, like ALL CAPS, multiple exclamation points!!!, and the words “Save,” “Free,” and “$,”.  Some additional words you may not want to include are “Dear,” “Click here,” “ Affordable,” “Dear Friend,” and many others.  Avoid taking a chance and run your email through a spam-testing tool before you send it out.  You may be surprised at what may seem to be a commonly used word, is actually getting your emails marked as spam.

4. Use images in moderation.

Using one large image, in place of text, is an old trick spammers use to get spam words passed the filters. It is best to use a majority of text in your email messages and keep text/image ratios high to avoid getting your emails blocked.

5. Ask to be added to your contacts “safe-senders” list.

To ensure your email subscribers receive your email, ask them to add your email address to their safe-sender list or  “whitelist” you. There is a good chance that email subscribers never receive your emails because their spam filters blocked your message.  Asking them to add you to their “safe-senders” list may help stay you connected.

6.  Your images will most likely be blocked.

ALWAYS use alt image tags to avoid sending blank emails.  If your email subscribers receive a blank message from you or tiny red x’s, they may be alarmed and hit the spam button.  It is best to never include important information or calls to actions in images, in case they are blocked.

A recent study has shown an increase in email marketing click-thru rates by up to 20% for marketers who personalize subject lines.

Imagine the possibilities… if you were to go beyond first name personalization and engaged customers based on their interests, lifestyles and buying behaviors.

Here are 3 ways you can market to customers on a more personalized one-to-one level, and bring your ROI to new heights.

1. Data Enhancement: Send messages and offers that appeal directly to your customer’s needs….

Enhancing your file with demographic data allows you to add valuable information and segment your offers based on your customer’s interests, lifestyles and buying behaviors.  Marketing that directly addresses your customer’s wants and needs are more valued and more likely to get a response. For example, you probably wouldn’t get a great response if you sent a promotion on pet food to a household without pets.

If you are marketing to consumers, overlay information such as age, marital status, presence of children, income, homeowner, buying behaviors, and lifestyle interests.

If you are a business-to-business marketer, choose from firmographics such as number of employees, sales volume, and SIC codes.

2. Customer Profiling: Get to know your customers better!

Taking a “snap shot” of your marketing database allows you to identify the key characteristics that make up the customers on your list.  Profile customers based on key demographics, lifestyle, purchase history, and even predict who will make their next purchase.  You can also define your “best” and most profitable customers, and target new prospects just like them.  Aligning marketing efforts with customer profiles is a great way to gain insight on who your customers are, so you can communicate on a more one-to-one level and boost your marketing ROI.

3. CRM Retargeting: Deliver highly personalized web ads to your offline contacts (CRM).

CRM Retargeting leverages your offline data and delivers custom online display ads to your contacts as they surf the web.  Serve custom banner ads across 98% of major websites, based on your customer’s wants and needs.  Increase your ad relevance by enhancing your contact data using the data enhancement and customer profiling services mentioned above.

Use retargeting to improve your current online display advertising performance, increase the effectiveness of your email and direct mail efforts, and keep your brand in front of customers – driving them back to your website.

Maximize campaign relevancy and personalization in your marketing today!  Anchor can help you develop and implement programs that deliver specific messages, to specific customers, at a specific point in time, then track and evaluate results.

Every email program collects a group of “unresponsive subscribers.” These are the people who have not unsubscribed from your list, but never opened your emails, clicked a link, or have not responded in a long period of time.  Identifying your “inactive subscribers” and setting a strategy in place to win back their business can improve your list performance, and your ROI.

There are many re-engagement strategies you can try. But first, you must start with identifying who your “inactive” contacts are.

To keep it simple, most can define an “unresponsive subscriber” as anyone who has not responded in six months or more.  You can also segment “never responders” from “former responders.” This will depend on your business model.  For example, how often will your customers need to purchase a television, or furniture for their home?  The real key is to find ways to define the different kinds of “unresponsive” email addresses so you can approach them with tactics and messages that will work best.

Test What Will Grab Their Attention – Win Them Back

Once you have your “unresponsive subscribers” segmented, it’s time to test. Try at least three different approaches (see below) and see what will work best to recapture their attention.

Here are some offers you can begin testing:

Spark Their Curiosity – Send A New Format
Send them a creative that is different from your typical format they may be use to seeing.  Offer a simple text format that gets right to the point or send creative with fewer images.  This may help if subscribers are viewing your emails on a mobile device, or if they are viewing your email with images blocked.

Ask them to Opt-In Again
Sometimes all it takes is to ask them if they still want to receive your emails.  You can give them a call, or a simple email with little graphics asking them to “click if they would like to continue receiving emails.”  You may want to include an incentive or a sample of the valuable information you will be sending them.

Send an Offer They Can’t Pass Up
It may be worth your while to win back a customer by sending them something free, or a really great offer.  The more overboard your offer is, the more you are likely to get them to take action.

Get Personal
Personalize your email on every level including subject lines, content and images.  If you have purchase history, or website search behavior for these contacts, it might be best to offer highly relevant offers promoting similar products or accessories that compliment past purchases.  Speaking to contacts one-on-one is a great way to re-build your relationship.

Did They Change Email Addresses?
As your contacts change their email address, do not lose the ability to communicate with them via email. ECOA (Email Change of Address) processing will check your bounced records and try to provide new deliverable email addresses for people that have moved, changed jobs, added extra email addresses or changed their Internet Service Provider.

What Do They Have In Mind
There is nothing better than getting direct feedback from your “nonresponders.”  Sending a survey is a great way to get this information.  Ask them what they like and dislike about your email communications.  Do they like the design?  Is the content relevant?  Are you sending too often?

Regardless of the percentage of “unresponsive subscribers,” putting a re-engagement strategy in place can offer you great insight for winning back business.

Spending on digital data and services has reached $840 million this year, almost doubled from 2010, according to the Winterberry Group. 

As digital spending continues to increase, email marketing remains the top channel for most marketers. Its low-cost and easy to measure performance has proven to produce the best ROI for acquiring customers and building relationships. However, finding effective ways to add new email addresses and keep data fresh is a challenge many marketers share on their to-do-lists.

Here are 10 simple and cost-effective ways to help grow your email list:

1. Offer Subscriptions to Your Blog Readers
If visitors are reading your blog, they will most likely be interested in receiving your emails. Add a sign up form for readers to opt-in to receive blog updates and email offers. You can also team up with affiliated blogs, guest write, or allow their audience to join your list – this could be beneficial for both parties.

2. Build Your List While You Build Your Social Following
Add a sign up form on your company Facebook and LinkedIn pages. You can also send a tweet to your followers with a link to join your list.

3. Take Emails Viral – Encourage Social Sharing
Include social sharing buttons in all your email promotions and newsletters.  Keep it simple and reward subscribers to forward content to friends or “share the email” on social networks. Include a landing page to allow recipients to sign up.

4. ‘Be a Thought Leader’ on Social Networks and Forums
Regardless of what industry you are in, there are most likely discussions being had across the web that are related to the products and services your company offers.  For example, if you are a b2b company, search for related discussions on LinkedIn.  Answer questions and offer information specifically related to your products or services.  Include a link to sign up for more details.

5. Exchange Value for Value… Offer Incentives for Signups
Offering free white papers or case studies is great for lead-gen and email sign ups. When visitors click to download your offer, they will be presented with a simple form requesting the email address where they would like to receive their whitepaper.

6. Capture Web Visitor’s Attention and Email Addresses
Place your sign up form on every page of your website and keep it above the ‘fold’ line (eliminate the need to scroll down).  This will ensure, regardless of entry page on your site, that you will capture their attention of readers and drive them to sign up.

7. Save a Tree – Take Print Materials Digital
Be sure to add a web url to all printed materials. Even better, QR codes are a great way to encourage people to “Scan to Sign Up”.  They can simply scan the QR code with a smartphone on your printed material and go directly to a sign up form where they can opt-in to receive your emails.  You can also encourage direct mail recipients to receive emails and opt-out of direct mailings. Capture emails from offline touch points such as business cards, sell sheets, presentations, flyers, postcards, brochures, trade show displays and more.

8. Stop Traffic – Ask for Signups During Events and Trade Shows
Events are great ways to network and connect with targeted prospects.  Whether you are attending an industry conference or online event or webinar, take advantage of the opportunity to build your list and ask for email addresses.

Hosting a webinar is an excellent way to build highly targeted lists.  If you don’t have the resources, team up with a partner and co-host or simply ask them to promote your company’s landing page as a resource to their audience.

9. Fill-in Data Gaps – Invite Contacts on Your Database to Receive Emails
Whether you have built a database that is filled with postal addresses, missing emails or have outdated information, email appending can potentially match email addresses to those contacts and reactivate them to receive your email offers.

10. Make Email Acquisition a Team Effort
Bring your customer service department, billing and sales team to join in on the effort.  While they are speaking to contacts on the phone, have them ask for their email addresses.  Ask them to add website urls on all transactional forms.  You can also create a company-wide email signature that includes a link to your sign up form, encouraging email contacts to stay informed, receive special offers and join your list.

Adding one or all of these tips will get you on your way to implementing an effective strategy to grow a quality email list for your marketing campaigns.  Start building your list today!

Email Marketing "Open Rates"

The average email campaign “open rate”  declined by 9% in 2010,  while click rates have increased or remained the same. 

Did you know that “open rates” are not a perfect measure, and some opens may not even be recorded?  If you are using “open rates” to measure the success of your email campaigns, it is important you have a good understanding on how “open rates” are determined and may be affecting your campaign reporting.

Many marketers believe that “open rates” are simply based on the number of emails opened.  This is not the case.  In fact, the definition of email “opens” is the number-one misunderstood and misused metric in the email marketing industry.

What do images have to do with opens?  Image blocking is one of the main factors that affects the accuracy of your “open rate” reporting.  Most email marketing software tracks open rates by adding a tiny gif (image) to every HTML message sent.  When the email is opened, this image is downloaded from the web server and reports back that an open has occurred for that reader.  However, recording an “open” can only happen if the reader’s email software can display/download images.

In order to cut back on spam, email mailbox programs and free web mail providers such as AOL and Gmail, block images by default and prompt readers to choose whether or not they want to download the images for each email they receive.  This means readers can still read your email messages without viewing images and therefore, opens are not accurately reported.  Image blocking has had a major effect on how legitimate marketers measure campaign open rates.

Email preview panes, another factor to consider that is affecting your open rate accuracy.

Many of your readers may use an email client that has a preview pane, such as Outlook and Gmail.  A preview pane allows your emails to be displayed and will download images automatically.  This will register as an opened email, without the reader to ever have to read or click on it.

What’s the bottom line? Although “open rates” are not 100% accurate, the metric can still be a good measurement for tracking campaign responsiveness when used in combination with other metrics – especially click-thrus.

Using the “open rate” as a general metric will help determine changes in regular campaign activity when a rise or fall occurs. For example, when AOL decided to disable images for all customers who receive emails on AOL.com,  marketers saw a significant drop in their open rates which alerted them a change had occurred and allowed them to differentiate a change in the campaigns render rates – not an overall drop in campaign success!

Be proactive in getting images viewed! Increase open rate accuracy and deliverability by asking your readers to add your from address to their address book.  If your from address is in the address book, your images will automatically display!  This may also help keep spam complaints low and increase your chances of being Whitelisted!

Tips for Designing HTML Emails

A recent report from  eROI, revealed that more than 1/3 or about 38% of marketers don’t test their how their email campaigns appear across different email clients and browsers.

There is nothing worse than creating a well constructed HTML email message that rendered perfectly in your web browser only to find it mangled when viewed by customers with a Gmail, AOL or Hotmail account.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when designing emails:

1. Use tables for layout. You’re welcome to try “div” tags for positioning and layout, but our research shows that tables are more consistently supported. But do very simple layouts, avoiding lots of nested tables.

2. Use inline styles liberally in tables. In fact, you’ll find you can get the best mileage out of inline styles in “td” tags. That way you are setting up little style regions within each table. Think of these inline styles as miniature style sheets. This allows non-technical users to swap content in and out of pre-formatted cells in a modular fashion.

3. Avoid background colors in table cells that contain other tables.

Proper Handling Of Images

1. Define background images using background. Instead of the inline background-image call. Gmail, among others, will ignore any URL attribute in an inline style. Keep in mind, though that if the background image is ignored, the default color is going to be white. That means your white text on black backgrounds will disappear. Stick with text colors that are visible against a white background.

2. Don’t use images for important content like calls to action, headlines and links to your web site. Outlook, Gmail and others turn images off until allowed by the user. If your entire email is graphical, all your recipients are going to see is a lot of broken images.

3. Provide alt text for all images.

4. Declare BOTH height AND width parameters for images. Outlook Web Access especially needs this for your table layout to display properly.

Specific Elements That Can Not Be Used:

1. External or embedded style sheets (those contained within the “style” tag above the “body” tag). This is the most important thing to avoid. Many email services cut everything above the body tag and disable external style sheets.

2. JavaScript. There’s no better way to have your email marked as spam. Not all email clients can handle the scripts, and most web-based systems disable scripts as a general rule to prevent malicious code from being executed on a system.

3. Table width greater than 600px. Considering most email is viewed in a preview pane table width of 600px or less is the industry standard

4. Embedded video. This will work with special coding in Apple Mail, but the most popular web-based email clients – Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail are choosing to disable HTML video from playing. So play it safe and link to a web based player.

This should get you headed in the right direction to better looking, better converting email.
Remember to TEST emails across ALL browsers!

Did you know Anchor provides Full Service Email Campaign Management?
Our email marketing team helps manage your email marketing program -  from data to delivery!  We work with companies of all sizes, from small local businesses to well-recognized retailers.

Let Anchor help maximize your email marketing today!
For more information, contact Donald Monell at 631-306-9361 or email:  DMonell@AnchorComputer.com.

Email Marketing Glossary and Common Terms from A-Z!

A/B Split Test: A method used for testing the response of sending two different email campaigns to two equal segments of an email list. Marketers can then track the response rates based on which results where most successful.  The remainder of the list is sent the best performing email campaign. An example: testing two different subject lines.

Absolute URL: A URL that gives the exact location of a target page or document including the “http://www” part of the Internet address.

Above the fold: The top part of an email or web page that can be seen, without scrolling down.

Acquisition Cost: The cost of generating a lead, determined by:  campaign expenses, divided by the total # of leads, sign-ups or conversions.

Alt Tag: An HTML tag that provides alternative text when non-textual elements, typically images, cannot be displayed.  Also useful for search engine indexing, slow Internet connections, and any ESP’s displaying emails with the graphics disabled.

API: An Application Programming Interface that enables two software programs to integrate and communicate with one another.  An example: list management through an ESP’s interface.

ASP: An Application Service Provider is a business that offers Internet-based software to customers over a network.  An example: Email Service Provider or software as a service (Saas).

Auto Responder: A set of pre-designed emails that are programmed as time-delayed messages and are emailed automatically as a response to a request.  An example: subscribe and unsubscribe confirmations, welcome emails, and customer support emails.

Authentication: This process refers to ensuring a valid identity on an email to prove and protect email sender identity and an email sender’s legitimacy and to cut down on spam and phishing scams.

Bayesian Filter: A spam filter technique, sometimes embedded in the mail server software itself, that is adaptable and “learns” to identify new patterns of spam, beyond the subject line, by examining character strings, words and punctuation of both valid and spam email.

Blacklist: List of domains and IP addresses that have been reported or accused of sending SPAM. Blacklists are often used by organizations and ISPs as part of their filtering process to block all incoming mail from a particular IP address.

Bonded Sender: A type of delivery insurance or stamp of approval for email marketing companies that is offered by a private email registration service, guaranteeing email delivery and whitelisting to its clients that follow stringent email guidelines.

Bounces: A message that is returned to sender due to an invalid or presently not working email address.   See: Hard Bounce and Soft Bounce.

Bounce Rate: The number of bounced emails returned divided by the total number of sent emails.

Call to Action: A desired action that is requested of prospective clients and customers by an advertiser’s marketing message.

CAN-SPAM act of 2003: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act.  A Federal law that requires the following in each email: a legitimate header, a valid ”From” address, a straightforward “Subject” line, an unsubscribe/opt-out link with instructions and a physical address.  It also states that all unsubscribes be removed within 10 days of receipt.  For more information visit: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm

CAUCE: An anti-spam advocacy group called Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Use.

CMS (Content Management System): is an application designed to store, format, reproduce and manage Web/intranet data.

Conversion Rate: The number of recipients who completed the desired action divided by the number of emails sent.

Confirmed Opt-In: An additional step to the opt-in process when subscribers are sent an email after signing up for an email list. Subscribers must confirm that they want to subscribe to the list by validating their email address. Only subscribers who take this additional option are added to your list.

CPM (Cost Per Mille/Cost Per Thousand): is commonly referred to the cost per 1000 names on a list rental or impressions on a banner advertisement.

(Click here to view expand glossary)