So far you have defined the reasons why you want to contact your subscribers and the frequency with which you will contact them via email.

Now its time to work out what type of content you will be sending them that will not only stop them from unsubscribing but create a perception that encourages the subscriber to react the way you want them to.

The best approach we can recommend in order to provide great content to your subscribers is ask yourself the following two questions:

“What would I be interested in receiving?” and “What would I not be interested in receiving?”

Common sense in this area is fundamental to success. For example would your subscribers be really interested in an email that only contained the following:

1. How fantastic your product/service is.
2. How many awards your product has won.
3. How fantastic you are.
4. How bad your competitors are.
5. How fantastic you and your products/services are together.

Would you like to receive an email from a business that just contained sales talk?

We wouldn’t and we know most of your subscribers wouldn’t either.

What they would like however is:

1. Interesting and helpful information about the product/service they are interested in hearing about.
2. Great deals on your products/services.
3. Other news or information covering the topic of interest. For example if you are providing information about computers then a good idea is to supply information about topics that would be of interest such as the latest virus or the latest gadget.

A Word on Personalisation

Personalisation can be very powerful when used within email content. For example using “Hello Marc” instead of just plain “Hello” gives a perception of intimacy with the subscriber and makes the subscriber feel that the message is purely for them.

However you can quickly go over the top with personalisation and in fact scare the subscriber off! For example if you are a mortgage broker and through legitimate means you knew if your subscribers had mortgages with the top banks:

“Hello Marc,
Since you live in Wellington, New Zealand and have a mortgage with BNZ we would like to offer…”

Now as a subscriber would you be worried about what the mortgage broker is doing with your private data?

Research conducted by the College of Business at the University of Illinois on the subject of personalisation within emails further enforces our recommendation.

1. Displaying a recipient’s personal information just for the sake of it can backfire: recipients may feel threatened.
2. If you do display personal data, only do so where there is an explicit connection between this data and the email’s content. Like this:
   “As a resident of Wellington, we’d like to invite you to the opening of our new store in town.”
3. The more useful your emails, the more recipients tolerate sub-optimal practices.
4. Most important:Personalisation is more about tailoring your email’s content based on what you know about the recipient (demographics, past clickthrough behavior, purchase records etc.) and less about showing off to recipients how much you know about them.

Placement of Important Information within Your Email

When thinking about the content for your email campaign we suggest you prioritise the different topics in order of their importance. The more important the topic the closer to the top of the email it should be.

Research has found that information “above the fold” will have higher clickthrough rate than information at the bottom of the email. It makes sense but not many people put it into practice.

“Above the Fold” is a term used to define the part of the email that appears in the preview pane of an email client (see image above for an example).

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.

I have exciting news – we have added a Social Media Tag Library in your Mobilize Mail Account.

You can now reap the rewards by gaining more visibility for your business through email marketing.

Each time you mail out to your database (mailing lists) you can gain more views of your email content with the Social Media links in your email template – or in the message.

Image of links in a message.

You may be thinking right now…but what is Social Media?

The short answer is Social Media is a term coined for websites that provide platforms for interacting and networking. Some well known examples of social media sites are Twitter; Facebook; LinkedIn. You may have accounts with these sites, and your mailing list/database of clients, prospects will more than likely have one or many accounts.

With these accounts your email recipients can click a Social Media link (in your email message) to share your email message content with the people they are networked to through their social media account.

For example we have a twitter account called www.twitter.com/businesstalk. When we receive an email message that provides a social media link to Twitter (Twit This) we can click the link and share the email message with our 6000 followers.

You can see why this is big news!

You send a message to one person and they can share it with lots of people by clicking a link in your message and you can find out who shared your message by viewing your email campaign statistics. You may even wish to reward these people for sharing your emails with their networks.

Contact us ( support@mobilizemail.com ) to add the Social Media Links to your Template – a 15 min job.

Further Reading on Social Media

A Business Owner’s Perspective on Social Media – read article

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)

We are very pleased to announce a new feature has been added to your Account.

Our Feature Request email was very well received a few weeks ago and it has kept our development team very busy. Due to popular demand the feature we now have – is a default value for a subscriber attribute!

Before this feature was added to your Account

Prior to this new feature – the personalization of your messages for example “First Name” would present an empty space if the subscriber did not have a value for “First Name”

For example:

If you had “Dear [First Name]” within your email message (as seen in figure 1) and the subscriber did not have a value for the “First Name” then the message would go out with “Dear ,” as seen in (figure 2).

Figure 1

Figure 2

From today onwards our new feature applies. If a subscriber does not have a value in an attribute you want to use within your email then a default value can be added!

Figure 3

In the example above the email message contains the default value for the “First Name” attribute and was used because the subscriber did not have a value in the “First Name” attribute.

To set a default value for an attribute update the “Default” field within the subscriber attribute form.

Figure 4

Its that easy!