Create interactive surveys from your Mobilize Mail account. Take advantage of our Survey Triggers feature to be alerted to specific survey question responses. Download your survey results to other applications or graphing tools.

Create Surveys From Your Account

With Mobilize Mail you can create surveys within your account and send the survey to your subscribers in minutes. Re-queue your survey message to reach new subscribers or deliver your survey in an auto responder message.

You can also engage our team of experts to assist you with your Surveys – providing ‘hands on’ and ‘hands off’ options for your business.

Easy-To-Use and Option Rich

The survey feature is packed with options for you.

A survey can support unrestricted HTML code, JavaScript, images and other formatting options.

Each survey can be custom branded.

Flexible Question Choices

Survey questions can be presented as a free form textbox, radio buttons or a drop down list.

You can have unlimited questions for your survey and up to 20 responses for each question. The questions can be presented in any order you.

Survey Triggers

Mobilize Mail provides a unique feature for surveys called “Survey Triggers”. A survey trigger can be applied to a question and depending on the subscribers selected response to that question additional tasks can be performed e.g. send an email stating the subscribers selected response option.

This is a valuable feature for feedback when you need to know if a subscriber selected “No” to a question e.g. the question may be “Are you happy with our customer support?”.

Skip Logic

Our surveys support skip logic at the question and page level.

With skip logic your respondents can bypass irrelevant questions so the survey is faster to complete and more targeted.

Easy To Add a Survey to Your Messages

Once you have created your survey – you need to get it out to your intended recipients. With Mobilize Mail you can select the survey tag in our TAG library to any email message created and delivered from your Account.

Visual Presentation of Statistics

View in real-time the survey results either in text or graphic form.

Download the survey results straight to your spreadsheet application for further use.

Key Techniques for Growing Your Mailing Lists:

1. Website home page ’sign up’ subscribe facility – and thoughout website
2. Signature Link in emails
3. Subscribe Link in all Mail Out messages
4. Lineage in all marketing campaigns
5. Run regular subscription promotions

Website Subscribe Facility

A high percentage of website visitors never go beyond your homepage so put the ‘call to action’ on your homepage to capture these visitors on your mailing list. Once they are on your mailing list you can communicate with them (compliantly) on a regular basis with relevant information. Two very effective methods of capturing your website visitors onto your mailing list are:

1. An animated banner as seen in figure 1. The animated banner is hyperlinked to the subscription page so the visitor can self subscribe to your email communication.

(figure 1)

2. A text link – as seen in figure 2. The text is hyperlinked to the subscription page for self subscription.

(figure 2)

Ensure you have the subscribe facility also on other key web pages throughout your website. Repetition is good! (contact us at [business:Mobilize Mail] to discuss your options)

Signature Link in Emails

Ensure you have a hyperlink to your subscription page in your email signature and your signature is attached to your email replies as well as your new messages. An example of a hyperlink subscribe email for our own mailing list is:

Email marketing tips and news

The actual URL link to the subscription page is hidden behind the “email marketing tips and news” so it is more attractive and in theory/practice results in more clicks to view the webpage.

All members of your team can be driving your key message and increasing your mailing lists by adding a link in their email signatures e.g. 5 members of your team sending out 50 messages a day = 250 emails with your mailing list subscription link.

Subscribe Link in all Mail Out messages

All mail outs should contain a link to your mailing list subscription page. You may send ‘text only’ or non-template messages occasionally – we suggest you ensure there is a link to your mailing list subscription page so these messages enable new subscriptions.

Lineage in Marketing Campaigns

In your print, tv or radio marketing campaigns put in a few words about your newsletter subscription. E.g . “Visit our website and sign up to our finance tips and latest news”

Run Regular Subscription Promotions

Once or twice a year a promotion to grow your mailing list can drive the numbers upwards. Consider providing a discount or free gift for subscription. I know a business that provides a free e-book to every people subscribing to his newsletter and he now has over 15,000 relevant subscribers.

Five easy steps for you to take immediately to replace the unsubscribed subscribers and grow your mailing list in 2009 and beyond.

Now that you have defined a reason as to why you are emailing people you need to work out a mail-out frequency and stick to it!

We recommend for commercial emails not to have a weekly mail-out frequency. If you do then be prepared to see your mailing list quickly dry up. Ask yourself if you would like to hear from a business every week.

A fortnightly mail-out frequency is risky but if you have great content that your subscribers love more than their family pet then go for it.

However based on our experience a monthly mail-out frequency is standard and generally the expected norm. This does not let you off the hook in terms of providing great content – that is still very much expected from your subscribers.

When you setup a mailing list within your account make sure you add in the “List Description” field the mail-out frequency so your subscribers know what they are letting themselves in for. The “List Description” field is mentioned in the confirmation emails the subscriber receives.

It is important that you put some effort into creating a clear and effective email marketing strategy as it can make the difference between a rapidly growing mailing list (that helps increase your sales and build stronger relationship with your subscribers) or result in the potential of losing your subscribers and getting your messages blocked before they reach your subscribers inbox.

When you send an email from your business to your subscribers you are in fact presenting your business officially to each subscriber. How the subscriber views your email will decide how the subscriber also views your business. An email that contains sloppy formatting, poor or irrelevant content could set a negative perception in the subscribers mind about your business.

Subscribers now expect a well designed email message with informative content that adds value to them. Competition is fierce these days especially with globalization. The subscriber knows they are in control of the relationship. So it is vital to your business to only send well formatted and informative emails.

In this series we will cover the basics of good ethical email marketing.

Step 1: The Reason

Have you ever asked yourself this question?

“What do I want to achieve from emailing my clients and prospects?”

This may sound very Zen but in order to build a solid house one must first have a solid plan.

We asked some of our clients this very question and here are some of their replies:

“I want to be able to alert my customers to new products and services as soon as they come online.”

“I want to provide fantastic educational content to my subscribers so they have a great feeling about my business and end up wanting to buy my products!”

“We see email as providing a quick and efficient way of staying in touch with our seminar attendees after the event. By creating a mailing list of attendees we will not lose touch with them but in fact continue our relationship with them through email. This will enable our company to alert people to new events without having to do too much cold calling!”

“I want to be able to create autoresponders that automatically email them each month so I stay in touch with my subscribers without much effort.”

If you define a reason or two as to why you are emailing your clients and prospects then the rest of the work in creating your email marketing strategy becomes far easier and more enjoyable.

Another point to remember is subscribers are very smart and it won’t take them long to ignore your emails and your business if they learn you have a motive similar to:

“I want to bombard my subscribers with endless emails about how fantastic and vital my business is to their lives. I also want to sell my list to my mates so they can send information about their businesses as well!”

The next step in our series will focus on the frequency of sending emails to your subscribers.

Earlier in the year we updated our 2008 article titled – New Year’s Resolution – Grow Your Mailing List. How did you get on – did you manage to deploy our key techniques? If so, right now you’d be witnessing new people joining your mailing list on a regular basis and you’d be getting the benefits from reaching more people every time you mail out.

There is another key technique you can use to grow your mailing list/database – inserting standard and custom tags in your emails. Are you aware that there is a fully functioning TAG library in your account?

You can access the TAG Library by clicking on the link that is visible just above your HTML editor – in your create message area of your account.

Key Tags For Your Email Template = Forward, Subscribe, Feedback

A good starting point for utilising the TAGS in your account is to add three standard tags to your email template. These tags assist your existing mailing list subscribers by encouraging them to provide you with ‘FEEDBACK’ or ‘FORWARD’ your message to a friend. All generic email templates can also benefit from having a ‘SUBSCRIBE’ tag too. An ideal position for these tags is on your email template menu bar.

While the feedback tag is not as well used as the ‘forward’ and ’subscribe’ standard tags – I suggest it is also utilised. While the focus is to push information out to your mailing list/database, getting information back can provide your business with valuable insight. To get tags put into your email template – please send an email to support@mobilizemail.com (special rate – we will update your template with tags for just $45).

The ‘forward to a friend’ tag when clicked allows the person to enter in the address of the person they wish to send the message to. The message is then sent to that ‘friend’ in exactly the original format so it renders well. Clicking ‘forward’ on your email client often distorts the presentation of the message when it is viewed as a ‘fwd:’ message. When you log into your mobilize mail account the last email campaign statistics on your home page will present the ‘forward’ tag statistics for every message that tag is included. The same applies for the ‘Feedback’ and ‘Subscribe’ tags just like your current measurement where you can view the ‘open’ and ‘unsubscribe’ statistics.

You can start growing your mailing list now with these standard tags in your email template… contact us. Our next blog post on tags will detail use of tags for customising your email messages.

The good news is 52 percent of your website visitors actively respond to online advertising – according to a recent study by iProspect.

The study also suggests there is a close relationship between online advertising and search engine marketing where iProspect says:

“Internet users initially respond to online display advertising as follows:

       
1. 31% respond by directly clicking on an ad.
2. 27% respond by searching for the product, brand, or company by launching a search on a search engine.
3. 21% respond by typing the company web address into their browser and directly navigating to the website.
4. 9% respond by investigating the product, brand, or company through social media venues.”

 

Reading between the lines this information tells us that we will more than likely get a greater response to our online advertising with a website that ranks well with search engines.

Nearly half of direct clicking of an online advert triggers a follow up internet search on the business. How does your company perform on a Google search? Does it come up on either the first or second page using key words that describe your business?

There are strategies you can take to improve your website search ranking results including SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), active participation on social media sites including discussion forums, and paid search engine marketing.

The iPropsect study also revealed that 33 percent of online adverting response is converted to actual sales. Of course this is not true for all online campaigns – greater success would come from marketing your service or product to a targeted audience.

Email marketing can also provide an effective online advertising medium with small static banners, and the highly effective text banners strategically placed in your emails.  Suppliers to your business may be willing to advertise in your emails – essentially paying your email marketing costs!   Or if you are part of a referral network equally all network partners would benefit from marketing to different databases.

For more information on banner advertising in your emails Contact us for more information on banner advertising in your emails.

Email sign-up web pages have often been overlooked when businesses are looking for ways to improve their interaction with customers and prospects. Your email sign-up web page is just as important as your web site home page in attracting people.

With that in mind we have provided some tips that you can implement right now.

1) Add testimonials to your sign-up page. Most people will read testimonials from people who have already dealt with your business so why not add some of the key testimonials to your sign-up page. If you have positive feedback from your email campaigns add those comments to your sign-up page as well.

2) Show how your email campaigns have benefited your current subscribers. If you have the data add statements such as "Our subscribers on average save $300.00 per year on purchases by taking advantage of discounts offered only to email subscribers." – this is of course if you provide exclusive discount benefits to your email subscribers only. Or if you don’t offer exclusive discounting what about "Our newsletter articles helped subscribers sell their home 30% faster".

3) Display the current subscriber count of your mailing list(s). People always want to feel like they are not missing out on something so if you can say something like "Over 5000 people have benefited from their email subscription with us. Why don’t you join them?" that is a powerful incentive for people to join and not miss out.

4) Use your company branding on your sign-up page. If you have a professional looking web site and use a third party provider to host your sign-up page don’t neglect to have the professionalism extend to your sign-up page as well. There is nothing worse than visiting a professionally crafted web site only to be directed to a dodgy looking text based sign-up page provided by some bulk email marketing service. With Mobilize Mail your sign-up web pages can handle all your web site branding assets such as CSS, images, Flash and JavaScript requirements.

5) Provide detail on what your subscribers are going to receive and the frequency of the emails. No one likes signing up for a to a companies "monthly" newsletter only to be spammed every 7 days by the business and their "partner companies" with useless garbage they did not expect to receive. State the email frequency on the sign-up page such as weekly, fortnightly or monthly and don’t forget to stick to that frequency! Another great idea is to provide a web version link to an existing email message so people can see the type of content and style they will be receiving.

In summary your email sign-up page is an important part of your web site so it should be designed to get the maximum amount of signups by having a professional look and feel and provide incitements such as testimonials or benefits to being on the mailing list.

Click here to learn more about how we can help you with your email marketing…

Mobilize Mail added an additional feature to your account and it is providing you with more mailing list subscribers.

The new feature is a reminder email sent to the person who did commence but did not complete the subscription process to join your mailing list.

The results of a review conducted by our support team show that up to 80% of subscribers who did not complete the subscription process the first time did complete the process after receiving the second confirmation email. This is fantastic news for you and we are delighted to have this feature working for you even though you were more than likely not aware of its existence.

Two Step Subscription Process

To increase the quality of your subscriber mailing lists Mobilize Mail supports a two-step subscription process also known as “Confirmed opt-in”. This stops unwanted emails such as spam trap emails from entering your mailing lists.

One down side to the two-step subscription process is that a certain percentage of subscribers fail to click the activation link within the confirmation email, which is needed to confirm their subscription to your mailing lists, and is a compliance requirement so you can prove the ‘opt in’ by the person.

The good news is Mobilize Mail provides a service within your account that when configured will resend the confirmation email a second time. The setup takes less than 5 minutes and runs automatically without any more work from you (’set and forget’).

The service is called the “Resend Confirmation Email Service” and is located within the “Subscriber Services” section of your account. The feature provides many configuration options including the number of days after the initial subscription process start to resend the confirmation email.

The service also provides reporting on the number of times the confirmation email was resent and from that the number of completed subscriptions.

The service works!

The Mobilize Mail support team reviewed over 100 client accounts to see how the service helped in increasing the completed subscription rate and on average the review showed of the subscribers who received the second confirmation email 80% confirmed their subscription!

Mobilize Mail’s Smart Landing Pages provide additional email marketing solutions for existing and new customers. This case study presents a real client example of a Quote Submission Form. All Things Finance (client) provides the market with finance solutions. The client’s web site houses an online quote submission form designed and developed by Mobilize Mail.

Customer Needs:

Provide an online quote submission smart landing page that:

1. Allow web site visitors to apply for a loan online.
2. Store the quote submission data in a safe and secure database.
3. Automatically process the submitted quote and send automatic confirmation emails to All Things Finance staff and the person who submitted the quote.
4. Allow for updates and extra features to be added to the online quote form with no impact to the other web site features.

Mobilize Mail Solution:

The online quote form is a Mobilize Mail Smart Landing Page hosted on a Mobilize Mail server. The quote form has the exact same web site branding as the main web site.

Figure 1

The Quote Submission Form provides fields for the web site visitor to complete (Figure 2).

Figure 2

When the form is submitted, the data from the online quote form is added to the client’s Mobilize Mail account. As soon as the information is in the client’s account a number of additional tasks are triggered including sending the client and quote form applicant a confirmation email containing the completed form in a client branded HTML email (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Additional business logic has been applied to the client’s quote form solution for example the quote form displays additional questions to the applicant as a result of a particular response in one data field.

Another email trigger has been set to another data field on the quote form to alert the client when the response is negative.

Benefits of the Online Quote Form Smart Landing Page

A major benefit for pushing the quote data to the client’s Mobilize Mail Account is the enablement of automatic messages (auto-responders) for reminders, renewals, and anniversaries; keeping the Quote Form applicant close to you and your business.

The information captured on an applicant or subscriber can also pre-populate data fields on additional smart landing page solutions e.g. Promotions, Reward Programs, Event Registration & Management.

A recent report on what the major spam filter’s flag as possible spam states that by a long shot any emails that have a higher ratio of images to text will be flagged as spam.

Also in the report there are some interesting findings of other text or phases that can greatly penalized your email content by the spam filters:

1. The phrase “extra inches” will get you a score of 3.1 spam points by SpamAssassin. Which sends your email very close to the 5 points needed to mark your email as spam!
2. Using “Dear” as your initial greeting for example “Dear Bob”. Using “Dear” will get your email awarded 2.7 spam points. That’s halfway to the “your email is spam”. Instead use something like “Hello” or “Howdy”.
3. Be careful on your unsubscribe message as well. Having “Stop further distribution” as your unsubscribe message will get you 3.1 spam points! For Mobilize Mail clients you do not have to worry as the unsubscribe message we automatically add to the footer of your emails is the least likely to get spam points.
4. “You registered with a partner” – yesh! This smells of unwanted and unsolicited email. Chances are if you are adding this statement within your message you are not using a permission based mailing list.

As you can see you may not be a spammer but if your message contains phases and text that spammers use there is a very good chance your emails will be marked as spam.

Keep your message clean from spammy phases and text for example:

Tips for your email content:

1. Refrain from adding too many images to your email
2. Spam-like words – Free, guarantee, credit card, no money down, financially independent or free etc…
3. Watch your subject heading
4. Red text – Get the red out. Red is a loud color and can be hard to read. It is also a spam tactic that may trip an email filter.
5. All capital letters
6. Excessive punctuation
7. Excessive use of “click here” especially in all capital letters
8. Excessive use of $$, and other symbols
9. Misleading (or missing) subject line

Read our article on 10 ways to improve your email marketing