Lets take some time and go through some items that can help everyone improve their open rates and clicks.

“Free” is not a bad word

Everyone seems to think that using the word “free” in a subject line is taboo. It’s not some of our clients consistently see high open rates using the word “free”. Most ISPs are using far better filter technologies these days than to worry about the word spam from the past. So use the words that best describe what you are trying to convey to your email subscriber.

KISS

No we aren’t giving you a kiss, we’re using it for Keep It Simply Short. Long subject lines are quite often cut off on some email clients. Keeping subject lines below 50 characters, including the dreaded space bar can help you improve open rates.

Keep the most important information in your subject line first, this one eludes many advertisers but when you are offering “free shipping” putting that at the end will almost certainly pass people over since they won’t read that far or it’ll get cut off by the email client.

Here is a quick study of subject lines we’ve complied over 1000+ campaigns based on a subject line length. Here are their results:

You will notice a drop in opens and clicks for subject lines over 39 characters.  This particularly holds true for promotional subject lines, newsletter subject lines do tend to be somewhat longer.  With a longer subject line you have the room to introduce more than one idea.  This type of analytical testing is worth doing for your own campaigns.

Spend Time On Subject Line Creation

Too many times clients and their email campaigns focus on a single creation and that is the email it self. We’ve seen companies who average 25 times more in email creation than in subject line creation or sometimes worse, yes those folks out there who create a subject line 5 minutes before they send the campaign. We like to approach this much like when a magazine markets a cover, create 10 good subject lines / headlines and do some tests. Instead of just throwing darts at the dart board create some A/B/C tests to a small segment and see which one really works best.

Of course this takes time and it’s not as easy as just slapping some subject lines together but when time = money especially client money we’ll go ahead and take the extra steps and so should you.

When it comes to analyzing email marketing efforts many of us find ourselves asking the question “What’s a good open rate?” The easy answer is open rates  vary between 10%-40%, these are considered averages. In the real world, open rates tend to fluctuate based on a host of factors such as; send time, send date and vary with industry, list size, messaging, content and how nice the ISP was to you that day as well.

What does this mean for you or your business? The magic number to achieve is more up to your business model when it comes to open rates than a magic percentage. Lets face it campaigns based on insurance are not going to be quite as good as let’s say Apple giving away an iPhone in some contest. The best approach for finding a good open rate for your emails is to monitor your own previous and current rates and keep making improvements upon those numbers.

Some quick steps your business can take to improve open rates as well as click rates overnight:

Use Customer Data : Previous behavior is the best tool to find out what your customers will do next. If some of your customers only buy widget B and never respond to widget A emails, stop wasting time, effort and money on sending them emails they don’t want to see.

Personalize Campaigns : Pretty easy step but a lot of email campaigns never use it. One on one dialogue with customers breeds a better open rate than emails that look generalized and don’t really convey a sense of personalization. Including their name or some sort of personal touch is always best.

Test, Test, Test, Did We Say Test? : The number one flaw most campaigns never fly or get better is a lack of effort and testing we see it time and time again. Advertiser (a) ran a campaign it flopped, they changed 1 item it did better and they concluded that the campaign is not going anywhere and dump it, along with money and time. It takes skill and time to test different things out, since email is so dynamic trying only a few things is quite the let down on most campaigns. We’ve experienced far too many campaigns that start as flops and end in such success that our partners thank us for not allowing them to just quit after a single failure. Keep testing success does not happen on the 1st try, well at least not always.

Kracow Enterprises provides Pro Bono consulting / tech work to nonprofit organizations. We can provide high end skill sets to help assist your nonprofit in the Marketing Direction, Market Planning, ROI Analysis, Web consulting and Email Consulting.

If you would like to apply here is our current criteria:

• Have 501(c)(3) status
• Minimum of one paid staff member and minimum budget of $50,000
• Services that focus specifically on the Denver Metro Area community, Mountain Communities are acceptable as well
• Do not promote a specific religion, or religious or political beliefs

You can email us through our contact page and we’ll get back with you.

The deadline for contacting us and starting an application is April 1st, 2012. (Projects begin in the Summer of 2012.)

So just for this brief period we are going to give you a list of 20 words you need to look over and remember if your consultant keeps using them over an over in a conversion while trying to sell you something…

So here we go, if your consultant loves these words there is a good chance he doesn’t know a lick except the “buzz words”

1. Value Justification
2. Real-Time
3. Personalization
4. Success Metrics
5. Benchmarking
6. Social Media
7. Optimization
8. Impact Analysis
9. ROI
10. Work in Progress
11. Short Term Solution
12. Visibility
13. Content Optimization
14. Usability
15. Value Stream
16. Twitter
17. Best Practices
18. Online Budget
19. Engagement Metrics
20. Lifelong Value

We had one potential explain to us how email marketing was becoming to large of a cost and the return on investing just wasn’t in his sights or the near future as we joked a bit on the phone.

They started hearing the rumors that email marketing “was dead”. So, even though their own open rates had not declined, and their own click-through rates had remained steady, and, in two cases, the web traffic that was attributed to email marketing had actually increased, they still decided to put their efforts into other marketing tactics.

Long story short they wanted to get back into email marketing, well if they could afford to at least….

Three things always come up when a business wants to get back into email marketing because they stopped for whatever reason.

1. Funds, how much and how long before they dry up…

2. Haven’t sent an email to the old subscribers in awhile… how long is too long?

3. What was the old plan, lets stay away from that plan.

Here are some easy tips for rekindling your email marketing program.

First and foremost if you haven’t sent an email / newsletter to your past subscribers as long as it hasn’t been 6 months you should still be ok, if it’s been longer we hope you have good records and good contacts no one likes mailing old data period. Sometimes your own subscribers haven’t even realized you left…

Just send out a welcome letter saying something to the affect of “We apologize for our absence” or “Hope you’ve missed us as much as we’ve missed you”.  Should be enough and it gets you right back into the scope of things.

If it’s been awhile, let you subscribers know what you offer and why they are getting that email. Do a quick re-introduction to your services so they’ll remember who the heck your company was. Remind them of why they were getting them in the 1st place and best of all time for a good deal or some good news to start with, no one likes to get an email that is just plain Jane and boring.

Email marketing is still working and working quite well. If your business is not turning a good return on investment over time perhaps it’s your email marketing plan not email itself that is the issue. We didn’t say it, it’s just the way it is….

The fact is, email marketing is still an exceptional tool for small business marketing. It’s inexpensive, it’s easy to track and measure, and it’s still very effective. If you’ve fallen victim to the false rumors that email marketing is a dying channel, you should definitely consider reinstating your email marketing program.

So you have a large database of email addresses of your active and possible customers. You want to star emailing them a newsletter. Where do you start?

Start by just reading over the CAN-SPAM Act just Google the term. For those of you who don’t want a big read into it here is quick outline.

1. Don’t use false or misleading information – Meaning your “from, To and reply-to” information needs to be correct not made up so people can contact you and see where the emails are coming from.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines – Describe what you are offering without lying
3. Use a physical address – You need a physical address in your emails, a PO box or something it’s really not that hard to accomplish
4. Opt Out -  Opt people out ASAP, don’t wait the standard amount of days do it instantly most systems can handle this now

First and foremost you’ll need to get permission. Just collecting email addresses doesn’t mean people have signed up for your newsletter it’s a big point some people miss.

Next is deciding what type of platform are you going to use there are quite a few options these days and it really comes down to. You can search “email service provider” and get a ton of results.

We’ve setup clients on a range of hosts from Aweber, Vertical Response, Constant Contact, and other custom solutions depending on needs. This step will depend more on the amount of emails you plan to send and the amount of subscribers you have and are building on a day to day basis. Features are important as well but only if you are going to use them. A lot of services sell some neat features but don’t go overboard if you don’t need them.

With most of the above systems, an email service provider is going to ask you to make sure your subscriber list is opt-in. This means on some ESP’s that you are going to have to send an email to allow the email subscriber to opt-in again. This is quite terrible but there are ways to assure the ESP that your list is already opt-in and we accomplish that for our clients quite frequently. No one wants to triple opt-in their list yet again it’s silly and stupid to be frank.

The last step in starting to email market is going to make sure you can offer top-notch content to subscribers in a format that won’t be sent to junk which means creating a real newsletter with real content not copy and paste jobs as some small businesses are use to. Setting up your mailing to start off slowly and building up.

If you have 100,000 subscribers to not send them on day one, build a plan start out with 1,000 emails for a few days making sure your complaint rates are low and building up from there. Even on a ESP you do not want to mail all your subscribers right off the bat you will break a complaint rate threshold especially since you’ve never mailed before, building up volume is key to a good start.

Last service you will need is the ability to scrub data for bad emails. Bad emails consist of a lot of different categories but just because your email is opt-in doesn’t mean people that regularly complain about spam cannot subscribe to your list. You need to always be assuring yourself that your list is as clean as possible through constant maintenance.

Email deliverablility is an ongoing process, these days all the big names in email Yahoo, Hotmail, Google, Aol and Comcast to name a few are always in the process of changing the email game and it’s not a sharing process. Even the best IP reputation and the cleanest sounding emails will get flagged it’s just part of the way email works now days.

If you are new to email marketing, you might wonder how hard can this all be? Just slap together some creative for the body, toss in a subject line and send away right? You’ll quickly find out that a large portion of your email subscribers are never getting your mail and the next question to come up is always why. Unfortunately when you run campaigns that send out thousands or even millions of emails, not all of your subscribers are going to get that mail. Even the best laid programs sometimes suffer as much as 10% of recipients not getting the mail due to a host of reasons.

It all comes down to getting your emails in front of someone that can click a link to your product or advertisement, but if that email never arrives then well you’ve got a problem. There quite a bit of reasons emails never arrive after you hit “send” lets take a look at a few of them.

1.) Email Bounces

Lets think of an email bounce as an email that is “return to sender”. Your email was sent successfully but it was sent back because of a few reasons. The main reason for an email bounce is because your recipient no longer available (hard-bounce) at that email address anymore. Sending too many of these cuts in delivery because it looks like you are sending to non-existent email addresses thus you must be sending to old emails or worse you harvesting emails from the net to send to. Once you these type of bounces delete them ASAP. It does no good to keep sending to emails that don’t exist.

The next set of typical email bounce is a “soft bounce”. Soft-bounces are a science onto themselves but for the most part they are either the mail server is slow and your mail is getting delayed, the mail server from say AOL didn’t answer because you sent far too much mail and your reputation wasn’t good to start with or just some type of error because you got blocked because of reason x.

Dealing with bounces every day is a must getting them handled so they don’t continue to cause problems is a must.

2.) Anti Spam from Users and Other Sources.

Anti-Spam is pretty much what it sounds to be. A user or service has setup a “block” of some sorts to prevent your emails from getting through. Since spam is the number one source of email these days preventing it is on the minds of everyone. Most anti-spam takes form of some kind of software, service or just plain filter setup by a user on say Hotmail or by Hotmail themselves. The problem with anti-spam is well it’s not perfect, the problem for email marketers is that even if your users want your mail the service your users use might not depending their anti-spam techniques which varies widely.

So lets take one example you’ve got users on AOL, say 1000 of them. They all might use AOL to log on to check mail or they might use AOL to send the mail to their own personal emails. Now instead of one anti-spam filter to get past you’ve got AOL and their own personal network servers with whatever anti-spam filters they also have.

You can now being to see why email deliverability becomes on ongoing task and why having a good knowledge base helps a lot.

3.) How to improve deliverability

Practice good email hygiene, remove out of date email address, remove bounces for email addresses that don’t exist immediately (you’d be surprised how many people do not follow this), look at emails that bounce several times and find out why and remove them if you are on a users filter for not wanting mail. Many users still do not use a unsubscribe they just filter your mail to delete it or worse they click “this is spam”.

Talk to the ISP, if you are mailing on your own and not through some sort of ESP (Email service provider). Setup an abuse@yourdomain.com you’ll need it if an ISP is going to send you mail about having issues with your mailing practices. Get in contact with an ISP if you have issues mailing to your users who happen to be their users aka Hotmail, Yahoo etc..

If you are just starting out keep the volume low. It’s quite an easy process and it says hey I’m not a spammer in bold color characters! Start out mailing 1,000 users or less for a few days then if everything is going well start another push to a higher limit of 10,000 and keep it going. Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and other major networks like to see volume increase over time not in a single day it helps trust us.

Consider an ESP or an Email Consultant that can push you in the right direction. The costs are usually always far less than wondering why for the last 2 weeks none of your email campaigns are being delivered.

Last of all try and cross your fingers sometimes it does work. Good luck on mailing.

1.) Try not to limit yourself to selecting a potential candidate based solely on the fact that you want to hire someone from your city or zip code and can’t live without that, limiting choices based solely on a geographical choice is not wise. These days web meetings along with a wide array of choices for communication makes it easy to forgo the face to face meetings. Sure face to face is great and it builds trust faster but it also limits choices and that is never a good thing in the world of selecting the right person to do consulting work. Any decent consultant ( dare we say decent) after you start services should be more than willing to come to you to sit down for a meeting even it costs them a bit. Good clients like good email marketing consultants are in it for the long-term profit for a mutual success.

2.) Determine and figure out exactly what you need from the email marketing consultant before you start a search for one. The worst possible thing that can happen is you hire an email marketing consultant for one task and realize that you hired someone that is an expert in field (x) but you need someone in field (y). Are you looking for a free-thinking consultant that gives you ideas or someone that can listen to your own ideas and adapt them to your business? Know what you need beforehand and you’ll save in time and money in the long run.

3.) Don’t ask for reports or reviews. What we mean to say is when you are hiring an email consultant the last thing you want is some PDF with nice charts and such that goes on and on about how this or that client does so well. What you should be asking is more fact finding questions. How much do their clients mail? How many campaigns have they optimized? You want to find out if that email marketing consultant has experience in large campaigns (250,000 emails+) or just small ones? An email marketing consultant that has optimized 10,000 campaigns over a long term period might see patterns that a similar consultant has not.

4.) Spend a few minutes talking on the phone and we mean phone vs. email. A lot of subtle things can be had on the phone while in an email, without understanding the person behind it it’s very hard to gauge a personality that you might to work with.

5.) What a lot of email marketing consultants hate and the one’s without work will do. It’s called spec work or Speculative work or tests. Don’t do it, sure it seems you might get some type of test work performed from some email marketing consultants but it all ends up the same at the “beginning” but now you are just 2 months behind instead of on your way to profitability. The more someone is willing to jump through hoops to take you work the more you should be asking is why didn’t anyone else jump through these hoops for this as well.

6.) Budget, budget and budget. Everyone hates to talk to about budget but the one question you need to ask from any email marketing consultant is what is the minimum. Many times these vary greatly and it doesn’t hurt to ask. Better to find our early that the minimum budget or commitment is far higher than you thought, now you can decided if it’s time to find more budget or a more cost effective email marketing consultant. Many good ones go quick so unfortunately for clients the price keeps climbing.

7.) Last but not least is the 1 year contract commitment. No email marketing consultant worth his/her salt is ever going to need to ask you to sign a 1 year commitment unless they are specifically saying they will not solicit work from your competitors in your industry field. Many email marketing consultants work for a wide variety of companies and industry areas, some take on competitors others do not. If you choose one or the other the big difference will be in price, I think you can guess which that would be.