Posts Tagged ‘Email List Management’
Posted by George Palatine on April 29th, 2009
Communicating with your customers via email marketing is one of the most cost effective marketing channels a company can utilize. Unfortunately, bad email addresses that result in a hard bounce are a way of life for email marketers. I mentioned a few weeks ago about how you can use 3rd party services to analyze your post deployment in-box receipts. This is still a great solution for assistance in managing challenge/response triggers, identifying customers who reply back to your message or bounces that provide some type of forwarding information. But what about all of the others?
If every customer on your list is important to you (and they should be), it might be time to roll up your sleeves and do some low-tech list hygiene. The first thing you need to do is identify your hard bounce addresses. You will need to include in this query as much data about your customer as you have on file. Preparing this report should be quite easy if you have a well developed CRM solution in place, otherwise it may require a little IT assistance. (If possible include sales history so you can focus on your top customers first.)
So now that you have your list (and any supporting contact information) you will need to identify all the ways (outside of email) you can communicate with these individuals in order to get an updated email address.
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Posted by Nic Winters on April 6th, 2009
In today’s world of digital communication, most of us have experienced being bombarded by too many emails – sometimes too many just from one sender. In my last blog post on email marketing strategy, I described ways that you can safeguard your brand and email reputation through the utilization of user roles. Yet another way to protect this is by monitoring and controlling the number of email touches you make to each individual on your list.
At first glance it may seem unlikely that over-mailing could occur under your watch, however if you have been listening to all of the email marketing best practices out there you likely have begun to segment your lists to send more relevant content. As you split your list into segments you may have many email addresses that are on multiple lists, causing list overlap and the chance that you might be emailing the same address multiple different newsletters or promotions. In larger corporations, perhaps your corporate level shares a customer list with rep offices… both levels then emailing to those same addresses.
You may still think this would only be a minor complication if all of these stars align, however just think how you would feel if another email marketer sent to your own email address 5 times in 3 days. Just one bad “overkill” experience like this can be enough to push some individuals on your list to hit that unsubscribe button.
With a feature like SubscriberMail’s Message Frequency Filter you can remove this risk of over-mailing by setting message frequency rules. This tool gives you the ability to set a limit of sending a set number of emails to an individual email address over a selected number of days. Thus, if a campaign is scheduled to deploy to a list containing an email address that has already hit its limit for a set time period then that individual address will be removed from the mailing. After filters are applied you can then monitor the results over time with reporting tools to see how often you are hitting these limits (letting you know if you possibly should tighten or loosen the filtering criteria).
Has your company had any issues with over-mailing? – leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!
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Posted by George Palatine on April 1st, 2009
It is pretty typical for companies to use a functioning but not monitored email address as their “from name” in an email marketing strategy. Examples of this are the common “info@” or “sales@ “ structure. If a company has a large list or sends frequent mailings it is possible that this inbox could receive thousands of reply-to messages. Some of the more common include out of office replies and the dreaded “hard bounce” undeliverable, but what about the others -customers who do not pay attention to the “do not reply to this message” text, change of address notifications, challenge/response triggers, etc. Developing a plan to monitor these messages could provide some significant benefits.
A study of a B to B publisher done by Bamboo Cricket (a 3rd party service who can monitor/respond to your inbound email) found that as much as 6-8% of the sender’s outbound email volume resulted in an inbound response. As one would expect, most of these messages were non-essential, but over 9% were, in fact, high value communications requiring a human response.
If these results are typical, lets say you sent a message to 100,000 recipients, you would receive a “reply” from 6,000-8,000 of them, of which 540-720 would be high value communication. Would you let your call center or customer service department ignore 700 inquires? In this economy it is important to take advantage of every opportunity to build loyalty and retain customers.
There is no question that personally reviewing thousands of inbound responses can be a lot like panning for gold. You could spend all day with nothing to show for it, or perhaps you may find a few nuggets. Whether you develop an entire plan around this process or just do an Nth message sampling, you may find that “there is gold in them there replies. ”
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Posted by Rob Ropars on March 23rd, 2009
In part one of this story we discussed some of the ways you can build your list. Did you miss part one? If so, please click here to read that posting before continuing.
And without further ado…Five more tips for list building…
5-Point of Sale – If you are in a retail environment and use a point of sale system with a keyboard, your vendors may have already incorporated an e-mail field into their system. If they have not, it may be easy for them to add the field (make sure they provide enough characters in the field for long addresses to avoid truncation). Strongly encourage staff and/or incentivize them to actively request and capture this information. Some of our customers have had good results by offering employees a monthly reward of a gift certificate for the employee gathering the most names.
6-CRM – Many organizations use a variety of tools to help manage the relationship they have with their clients, and to insure that information is being shared throughout the organization. Make sure that the email address field is on the initial data entry screen, and that the individuals collecting this information from customers are actively encouraged and perhaps even incentivized to ask callers for their email address and permission for the company to mail them in the future.
7-Forms – Most companies have a wide variety of forms that customers fill out in order to do business or conduct a transaction. Prominently featuring an email field on these forms, along with a checkbox to opt-in to corporate email communications can yield a large number of new addresses. Your ESP should have an easy way to mass import or data enter individual records (SubscriberMail offers both options).
8-Counter Forms - Customers waiting at a sales or order counter should have the opportunity to add email addresses to a form if it’s provided. Have a local print shop print these in pads as opposed to sheets (as they are less likely to be misplaced or taken away as a piece of scratch paper, plus they are highly visible). As another example, restaurants can utilize these forms at diners’ tables. These can also be used at events if you sponsor something remote from your store/office. Let people showing up sign up at the event.
9-Kiosks - In addition to point of sale, call-ins and counter opportunities, consider having kiosks set up around your location to allow visitors to enter their data directly into your web site form. They may not be ready to buy today, but this allows them to give you permission to try and get them back through the door later.
Conclusion:
There’s an old adage about inertia and things in motion tending to stay in motion. At SubscriberMail, we’ve found this also applies to new subscribers. You may well find (as some of our clients have recently discovered) that a new subscriber is much more likely to open, click and convert to sale than a regular customer who’s been receiving your email for months or years. They’re out there waiting for you: open your doors and invite them in!
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Posted by Rob Ropars on March 13th, 2009
In today’s economic climate, maximizing the ROI of marketing efforts has become paramount. In addition to ongoing list hygiene best practices, you should be pursuing ways to improve the size of your opt-in file. The more quality opt-ins you acquire (noting that I mean opt-in not purchased/rented lists of so-called “opt-ins”), the more potential buyers at your disposal.
What are some of the best ways to build your email marketing list? In today’s posting, we will look at four ways to grow your file, and in a few weeks we’ll look at additional ways in the conclusion of this series.
1-Referrals – Including a forward to a friend link will give your most interested recipients the opportunity to share with people they know (and you don’t). Like many ESP’s, SubscriberMail has a special link that will guarantee a clean copy is sent to the friends. They will need a place to sign up which leads me to the next item-an opt-in form.
2-Web site – Your site is going to be one of your best sources for new email addresses. Install an email capture field on your front page (or any other high traffic pages), and consider collecting additional data after the email address is entered, by directing them to a second page (or follow-up with them later via email to obtain the additional data).
3-Sales people – If your sales people have captured e-mail addresses of leads, and they are not in your CRM system, make sure they get permission to email them and then enter them into your system. If nothing else, it will give them another reason to touch base with their prospects.
4-“On hold” recordings – Do you have an “on hold” recording? If so, augment it to include a message about your email program. Let callers know that not only do you have a free email available, but also that it contains latest news and potentially exclusive offers only available via the email (always a good way to add value to your emails). Clearly state the web address where the form is or encouraging them to let the call taker know to sign them up right away then and there.
Watch for part two in a few weeks with five more ways to build your list…
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