Mobilize Mail Opinion

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).

                 

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.

                 

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.

                 

A client has asked us about changing the FROM address in their emails so they can provide a more descriptive text to help with subscriber recognition. We thought about this question for a while and decided to run a couple of tests to see what would be the impact of changing the FROM address.

Now before we begin the FROM address field in an email can comprise of two parts:

The senders email address such as "Newsletters@mobilizemail.com",

A text part such as "Mobilize Mail". The text part if provided is sometimes displayed instead of the email address.

So for a FROM address you could have: "Mobilize Mail <newsletters@mobilizemail.com>".

In most modern email clients this would be displayed as:

If you did not have a text part in the FROM address then the email would be displayed like this:

When you click the reply button your email client is normally smart enough to use the email address that was supplied within the FROM address.

Best Practices for the FROM Address

The most common best practice around the content of the FROM address is to provide something that will spark some form of recognition with the subscribers such as your business name or your full name.

In the example above the FROM contains "Mobilize Mail" which alerts the subscriber instantly to who sent the email. The subject line also provides a good indication of the intent of the email.

Now, what happens if after a while you decide to change the FROM address to something else?

For example:

That should not be a problem should it?

Well there are a number of considerations to think about before you make the leap. For example what if the subscriber added a rule in their email client that located your emails based on the FROM content?

Below we can see a subscriber has created a mailbox rule for any email that contains "Mobilize Mail" in the FROM field.

By changing your FROM address you may in fact be damaging your existing relationship with the subscribers by making their existing mailbox rules redundant or worse causing your emails to be deleted or moved to the trash folder.

How did the email clients like the change?

One thing that we were interested in was how an email client would deal with a change in the FROM address if there was a current address book entry.

For example below is an Entourage address book entry for "Mobilize Mail".

When an email is sent to the client this is how the FROM address currently appears:

Now lets change the address book entry for Mobilize Mail to "Joe Bloggs" as below.

We then send the same email again to this subscriber with the same FROM address which is "Mobilize Mail <newsletters@mobilizemail.com>".

Below is how Entourage now displays the FROM address. Entourage completely ignored the FROM address in the email!

We can see from this example that Entourage will display the details within the address book for the sender not what has been added to the emails FROM address.

This could be a pain for some email marketers who frequently send out emails using the same email address but change part of the FROM address.

In order to see how some of the more popular email clients dealt with changes to the FROM address with an existing address book entry we created the following simple test:

1. Create an email campaign with the following FROM address "Mobilize Mail <newsletters@mobilizemail.com>" and send to the test email lab.
2. Once the email arrived add the senders details (in the FROM address) to each email clients address book including the text part which is "Mobilize Mail".
3. Send the second email campaign and change the FROM address to "Mobilize Mail Newsletter Service <newsletters@mobilizemail.com>".
4. Finally send the third email campaign but only have "newsletters@mobilizemail.com" in the FROM address (no text part).

What we are looking for is if the address book entry overruled the change in the FROM address of the email. The findings are below:

Apple Mail:

No problems with Apple Mail.

Entourage:

Bummer! The Entourage address book controls the FROM address!

Eudora:

Gmail:

Interesting. All 3 emails are grouped by the "Mobilize Mail" contacts entry which works like an address book. When the email group is clicked all 3 emails are expanded – see below.

Lotus Notes:

Lotus Notes is happy.

Outlook 2007:

All good here.

Thunderbird:

Changes showed up in Thunderbird.

Windows Live:

Yahoo! Mail:

Our testing identified only one email client namely Entourage that refused to display the emails correct FROM address if there was an existing entry in the address book for the recipient.

Gmail grouped the emails together based on the "Contact" entry which is not great but at least the correct FROM address details are displayed when you click on the email group.

Our Tips for the FROM Address

Even though only one of the email clients refused to display the emails FROM address (namely Entourage) and instead displayed the address book details you should still seriously think before you change your FROM address text or email address.

Subscribers these days create rules to help them manage their email which includes rules using the content of the FROM address.

We recommend that caution should be taken to any decision to change the FROM address details. If you do need to change the details then warn the subscriber in at least one email prior to the change so any changes they need to make can be done at their end.