Mobilize Mail Opinion

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

Business promotional or product and service marketing emails sent to your email list is now a game of cat and mouse. Why? Well, many countries around the world are implementing Anti-Spam legislation.

ISP’s and businesses are installing incredibly harsh ant-spam rules and email filtering software at the front door of their email applications so getting your email delivered to your email list is hard work.

How do you know if your email is been delivered, opened & read? Email Performance Measurement is now a vital component of the ROI process of email marketing campaigns and is easily accessible when you utilise the appropriate systems to send your email, namely Email Service Providers (ESP). ESP’s like Mobilize Mail specialize in getting your Marketing email campaigns delivered and provide you with the statistics on how the email campaign performed.

To increase your email campaign success rate consider adopting the following 10 tips.

1. Opt-in or Opt-out? ‘Opt in’ is the term for permission based emails. When a person has given you permission to send emails of a promotional or commercial nature it is said that they have “opted in” to receive emails.When a person has not given you permission it is called “opt-out” and therefore the email is unsolicited and can be viewed as SPAM.
2. Unsubscribe. ‘Un-subscribe’ – present this word in all your marketing emails with the removal process instructions provided to allow the email recipient to halt future receipt of emails on that topic or from that sender.
3. Provide Relevant Non-Sales Content in Your Emails. Studies have shown that on average a person will subscribe to regular email communication from up to 10 providers on a given topic of interest. Therefore your email communication is fighting for attention every month.Presenting relevant non-sales content like news and interesting articles in your emails will set you a part from your competitors and reduce the ‘unsubscribe’ rate.
4. Work on your Subject Line. On average people will spend a second scanning the subject line of each new email they receive. Therefore your email has a second to spark some kind of recognition with the reader!Ensure your subject line contains a familiar word to get recognised. The aim of the subject line is to get the recipient to open your email message.Analysis of data from our client base suggests that subject lines of less than 50 characters achieve higher open rates than those of 50 or more characters and if you have a large of amount of AOL subscribers reduce the length of your subject line to 40 characters to meet their email client requirements.
5. Watch your HTML. Every time you email a newsletter or promotional message out to your email list remind yourself that not everyone has the same email client. Here are some examples of different email clients – Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Outlook, and Eudora. Some people use web based email clients such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! AOL has an email client which is notorious for being very controlling on email presentation.Sending HTML emails is the norm these days and most people like to receive well formatted and presentable HTML emails. However! HTML is displayed differently with each email client. For example what looks great in Outlook or Outlook Express may not even be readable in Lotus Notes depending on how your newsletter or promotional email is presented.This is quite a technical subject and if you are interested in more information please contact me and my team can give you the nerdy details. But from a business viewpoint my most important tip is never write your content in Microsoft applications like Word and then send it to your email subscribers.

   What Microsoft applications do is add a whole lot of ugly Microsoft formatting under the covers that you may not see but your subscribers email clients will. It is risky insomuch as some email clients can not handle the format and strip it out which then destroys your HTML content and email presentation.

   Our recommendation is if you are going to send out HTML emails then create the HTML using applications that generate well structured HTML.

6. Watch your Content! To understand how important this tip is you need to be aware of SPAM filters. These filters are sometimes added to mail servers and personal email accounts. The filters look at each email that arrives and applies certain rules to the email. Points are awarded to a score card that the filter keeps to ascertain if your email is SPAM. Your email will be marked as SPAM when it reaches the limit of points and either will be added to the junk email folder or refused delivery to the subscriber’s mail box.The rules used by most major SPAM filters look not only at the source of the email but the content. Here is an example of how SpamAssassin (http://spamassassin.apache.org) works at a high level. SpamAssassin is one of the major SPAM filters on the market today.SpamAssassin has a score card that has a watermark of 5 points by default. That means if your email gets awarded 5 or more points your email will be classed as SPAM. The watermark can be configurable but normally 5 points is used.

   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
7. Process your Bounces. A bounce is a special email that a mail server sends back if the person cannot be found, or the persons email mail box is full or other events that caused the email not to be delivered to the recipient.When you receive a bounce email my tip is to process that bounce. Open the bounce email and look for keys words such as “recipient unknown”, “no user located”, “mail box full”, “denied”, “no user known by that name” etc…Once you get an understanding of the bounce reason and if its related to anything about the “recipient is not known” or “the user does not exist” or any clue that the user is not around anymore this means that the email address you have is now dead – it is useless. This means you need to remove it from your mailing list. If you do not and you keep sending emails to that mail server and it keeps telling you via bounces that the person doesn’t exist in time you may be blacklisted. If you are blacklisted then your emails will not reach anyone within that business or ISP.
8. Test. Before you send your email campaign make sure you test the formatting and layout first by sending yourself and your friends the email. Look at the subject heading – does it entice you to open it? Ask your friends if they the subject enticed them? What about your email content? Your friends will more than likely have different email clients so what did your email look like in their email client?
9. Add Links in Your Email. If the purpose of your email is to get the subscriber to end up on your web site then you need to add lots of links within your email.Instead of providing the full article within your email why not provide the first paragraph then a link to the complete article back on your website?
10. Watch your Frequency. Always keep an eye on your unsubscribe rates if you change the frequency from what your subscribers expect. Even better if you want to increase the email campaign frequency from monthly to fortnightly first create a separate mailing list then invite your existing subscribers to join that mailing list as well. That means you get to keep the subscribers who are quite happy with once a month and you can satisfy the more hardcore ones who can’t get enough of you!

Summary

If you view email campaigns as one of your marketing channels then you really need to understand the risk you pose to your business by not adopting best practices when sending email.

Being blacklisted is not nice and almost impossible to remove yourself from. There are thousands of blacklists in the world and many ISP’s and business first check to see if you are on a blacklist before sending your email through to their clients and staff automatically.

Imagine if you become blacklisted with Xtra. That means every email that comes from your mail servers will never each a customer or prospect with an Xtra.co.nz email address.

Final Word

These days because of the complexity associated with sending commercial emails and the risk of being blacklisted businesses are moving to Email Service Providers (ESP). An ESP is a company which understands all the complexities of sending email and provides the necessary functions and features to make sure your email campaign gets delivered successfully.

An ESP will send your email campaigns on your behalf using advance technology required for sending emails. The ESP will provide statistics on the success of your campaign such as who opened your email, what links were clicked within the email and by whom, who forwarded the email to someone, who unsubscribed and the reason why etc…

Here are a few tips for writing articles, newsletters, business updates for email:

1) Keep It Short. Online Writing Needs to be Shorter than other Writing

1. All words must serve a function.
2. Replace long words with short words.
3. Avoid meaningless jargon, frills and the tendency to inflate to appear important
4. Link to extended information hosted on web pages

2) Use Title, Sub-Titles, Bullet Points and Bold Face for ease of scanning content and digesting the information.

3) Personalise the language using “active voice” over “passive voice”
construction. An active voice example is: ‘We are developing new
features’. A passive voice example is: ‘New features are in development’.

More Tips For Your Email Marketing Messages

Should You Include Your Brand Or Not (click here to read)

Subject Lines ­ Short or Long What Works Best (click here to read)