Posts Tagged ‘Email Marketing Strategy’
Posted by Nic Winters on January 16th, 2012
If you have taken the step of including personalization in your email campaigns (even if this is limited to including the recipient’s first name, their sales rep, etc.), your goal was likely to make your emails take on a more personal tone. An additional step that may be the right fit for your email marketing strategy is personalizing the landing pages you link to within your emails.
These personalized pages could be limited to a handful of different versions of your landing page that include slightly different offers or a page that utilizes merge tokens to pull the recipient’s email address or other information into form fields.
When you go to incorporate these personalized URLs (PURLs) into your emails, you can achieve this goal using the same approach used to insert recipient first names and/or other data fields into your emails. With the personalization tokens provided within your SubscriberMail account for each data field you can personalize the URL for a hyperlink as well (inserting the token at the point within the URL where differentiation occurs to make the content of a particular data field related to the PURL pull into the link).
Contact the SubscriberMail Client Support team at support@subscribermail.com for more information regarding how you can incorporate PURLs in your email messages.
Posted by Nic Winters on February 17th, 2011
When collaborating with clients on their email marketing strategy, the team at SubscriberMail regularly focuses on different methods of testing email campaigns. However, testing can be fruitless without an understanding of your results!
After the deployment of a campaign, users can pull a bevy of data-rich reports that identify percentages related to clicks, renders, etc. But for users more involved in the reporting process and less involved in message creation, clearly interpreting the differences in results for A/B tests related to design or content changes can be difficult without a visual representation of the messages themselves.
To help assist those that have been outside of the in-depth design/construction of the email tests, we urge our clients to utilize our Click Overlay Report to help visualize which items in the message have generated the most click activity (as click data is displayed in callout bubbles over the actual design of the email).
Contact the SubscriberMail Client Support team at support@subscribermail.com for more information regarding how you can visualize email results with the SubscriberMail Click Overlay Report.
Posted by Nic Winters on December 6th, 2010
At SubscriberMail we often get asked by future clients if we have integration with X, Y, or Z web analytics packages. Instead of designing features solely related to one or a handful of web analytics packages, our Development team has designed with flexibility in mind. The SubscriberMail web analytics integration utility allows clients to specify the exact parameters for the appended code related to their web analytics package that should be inserted into each link related to their website’s domain. This additional code allows the analytics software to identify web traffic that is originating from a particular email campaign.
By integrating their email with a web analytics package, clients are able to follow click activity from their emails to website traffic patterns and potentially website purchase activity. This connection enables email marketers to relate sales directly to their emails and thus generating a value associated with email campaigns to help measure success and justify driving more resources toward their email efforts.
Contact the SubscriberMail Client Support team at support@subscribermail.com for more information regarding how you can relate your email campaigns to website activity via web analytics integration.
Posted by Dave McCue on October 18th, 2010
Emails viewed in preview pane windows—or those that extend below the fold when viewed in full—often see a lack of reader engagement with content closer to the bottom of the message. Many recipients make the decision to stay or go based on what they see near the top of a message without scrolling further, thereby missing out on potentially valuable content.
If your email messages tend to be on the longer side, including a table of contents near the top of each message is a good way to present recipients with all of the available options in your message. Through the use of HTML anchor tags, clickable items in a table of contents can lead recipients to the point in the message where the content appears, eliminating the need for any scrolling.
For example, if I have “Summer Sweepstakes” listed among my table of contents, I would link that item like this:
<a href=”#Sweepstakes”>Summer Sweepstakes</a>.
Further down in my message code, I would insert an anchor with a name attribute at the point where my Sweepstakes content begins, like this: <a name=”Sweepstakes”></a>.
This second anchor would serve as the destination point for users who click on the Sweepstakes link in my table of contents. Using this approach, recipients who don’t scroll down in the message will at least get an idea of what lies below, and may decide to engage with content they otherwise might not have seen at all.
Posted by Rob Ropars on August 4th, 2010
Too often, email marketing turns into a numbers game. Trying to meet aggressive sales numbers can often lead to desperation and the dreaded email “blast” approach. We consider “blast” to be a four-letter word and it represents a major failing of too many email campaigns.
When you take the “blast” approach, your email campaigns essentially look a scattered, unfocused mess. You’re hoping that enough emails stick to something to yield results. In some cases, email marketers have done enough of these deployments that they can predict and rely upon the results to meet their numbers. This then seems to be a reliable, profitable plan.
In reality, when you “blast” to your full email list you’re bombarding your recipients with information and offers that may not be needed, wanted, or applicable. When you look at your click and conversion rates, you’re looking at an overall average across your file. If anyone asked you to rank recipients based on how likely someone is to respond, you’d be unable to fully describe them.
Every marketer knows, even without looking at their email file, that there are differences between recipients (age in the file, gender, income level, purchase frequency, purchase quantity, purchase value, and more). By “blasting” them, you’re forcing the same message to all of them as if these differences don’t matter.
By taking advantage of targeting and segmentation methodologies, you can separate your email list based on selected criteria, depending on what data you have available and then analyze the campaign results. You’ll be getting stronger and more valuable results by focusing your efforts and seeing big returns in the process!
