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Newsletters have been considerably popular vehicles of information for businesses, clubs, societies, and various organizations since before the Internet was even a concept. Although the advancement of technology could have easily caused newsletters to become obsolete, they survived - or rather, successfully adapted to - the digital age for one very simple reason: both subscribers and organizations continue to find them useful. In accurately describing the power f the newsletter, "useful" is actually a mild characterization of the many benefits that come from this medium. Newsletters grant organizations the opportunity to share current promotions and reviews of previous events in a friendly, journalistic tone. 

Why It Works 

While the underlying purpose of the newsletter is to increase subscriber interest and ultimately generate more business, the conversational nature and structure of newsletters gives companies the opportunity to build a more personal and relaxed relationship with consumers and partners. Although newsletters come with several inherently positive qualities, they have even greater potential than the average professional may be able to recognize and uncover. A newsletter is more than just formatting and content - it is an opportunity to expand your business and improve customer outreach. 

Staying Consistent

The potential for greater success is not something that an opportunistic company would or should take lightly. With managed email marketing by a well-trained and highly experienced email marketing agency, crucial marketing tactics and strategies can be applied to your company's newsletter to ensure a consistent message and maximum appeal to the consumer. Effective email marketing requires more than just creative content and an attractive newsletter design, but requires supervision from an educated and experienced email marketing consultant to integrate specific strategies, tactics and various idiosyncrasies involved in professional email marketing. 

Email marketing practices are not something learned overnight, either. Keeping up with popular marketing trends and monitoring the competition are two highly important elements of a successful managed email marketing campaign. Marketing trends aren't always black and white. In other words, what may be an effective strategy for one industry many not be as effective for another. Often, determining the most effective marketing strategy requires a continuous cycle of trial and error to create a solid set of appropriate tactics. With the fast pace of the Internet marketing sphere, these strategy trends change on a weekly, even daily basis. 

Get Results

Since time is money in the world of business, most companies can't afford to sacrifice the time (let along the effort or expertise) necessary to create effective newsletters on a regular basis. The cost of hiring a highly qualified and well-experienced email marketing consultant at Delivra is affordable and logical for businesses of all sizes due to the impressive return on investment (ROI) that comes with this business decision. The Direct Marketing Association reported that ROI for email marketing at $40.56 for every dollar invested in 2011. Although this figure is projected to decrease slightly in the year 2012, it is expected to still remain highly substantial at $39.40 for every dollar invested. With the promise of high returns and effective, competitive strategy integration, the question you should be asking is: Could my company's newsletter generate a more successful response and greater impact with the benefits of professional marketing? 

Email analytics help you to understand how successful your email marketing campaign has been. 

It goes beyond the basic email tracking of reporting the number of times your email has been opened, bounced or clicked through. It helps you ascertain your customer's individual behavior including browsing and purchase habits. Armed with such information you can create specific, targeted, and personal campaigns. In short, relevant to your customer.

Here are some basic ways email analytics can help you track your emails:

• Add Social Sharing Links: By adding links to social networks in your email you can use email analytics to track who is sharing your email. By ascertaining the number of “likes”, “followings” or “shares”, you get to know the success rate of your email.

• Adding Video Links: This is not much different from adding social links to your emails. Here you can use email analytics to determine which video links work and which do not with your email.

• Adding 'Calls To Action': Keep varying the calls to action in your emails. Use email analytics to track which calls to action works best with your target audience.

• Adding Relevant Content: Content matters - always! Be interesting and creative with your content to produce maximum impact in your reader's minds. Email analytics help you find out what type of content works best with your audience.

• Adding Successful Subject Lines: Your subject line should grab attention. It is the first thing your readers see. By tracking which emails has the most success rate you can decide if your subject line needs tweaking to make it more inviting or aggressive.

By identifying each users behavior, it becomes easy and profitable for you to tweak your email campaigns to suit their needs. With effective email analytics in place, you can quickly customize your email content to create highly relevant emails.

http://www.listguy.com/email-analytics/

http://www.stratigent.com/community/websight-newsletters/email-analytics

http://www.benchmarkemail.com/blogs/detail/5-metrics-to-track-with-your-email-analytics

In a world increasingly tech dependent, consumers still respond to seeing a friendly face. One of the best ways to show your clients the human side of your business is to include video in to your marketing efforts. We've talked before about how video and email marketing go together like bread and butter, but here are some tips on how to best integrate video into your e-newsletters and email marketing campaigns. 

Don't bury the lead: 

Studies show videos lose consumers' interests within 60 seconds. If you have something important to say, do it fast. Lead with the most important information and let the rest fall into place naturally. If you're announcing a new product line, don't tease it with a 30 second intro, go ahead and say what it is you're focusing on and then go into more depth on it. Don't worry about being flashy or artistic, a simple video of a person standing in front of a plain backdrop can be just as effective as a Flash-filled animation. 

Fill it with facts: 

Consumers will devote more time to a video when it gives them actual information instead of just wasting their time with unimportant details. Unlike traditional e-newsletters, consumers can't skim through and pick out the parts important to them. With a video, they can either listen to everything you have to say, or click away. There's no equivalent to subheads in a video, so save the minute descriptions for a different format, or at least put it at the end. Once you start going into product dimensions, you're likely to lose viewers. Remember - you only have 60 seconds, and each second matters! 

Take a shot: 

You don't need thousands of dollars worth of equipment just to try out video email marketing. If you have a laptop with a webcam and a decent microphone, you can easily film it yourself. Just look directly at the camera and speak in a natural voice. Be confident in what you're saying, but not so confident you begin channeling Billy Mays. Once you're satisfied with the quality of your video, consider where it's going to live on the Internet. Having a dedicated landing page will let you see how many people are coming to your site exclusively because of the video. It will also let consumers follow a logical path from their first moment of engagement to their final conversion. 

Video email marketing can be a powerful tool in your arsenal. It's important to remember that, like with any tool, it can't stand alone. Using a variety of approaches in e-newsletters can keep your content fresh and exciting for consumers. 

Since the advent of social media, Internet marketing has evolved at a rapid pace. These dramatic changes have caused many people to question whether professional email marketing is still a profitable component of the marketing campaign. It's true, email marketing has company in the Internet marketing sphere, but those who disregard its marketing potential will miss out on a consistently performing opportunity despite the increasing success of social media outlets. 

Although social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others give users the opportunity to communicate through messaging features, studies have shown email still retains its popularity. During an earnings call in January 2012, Google claimed to have 350 million active Gmail users. In October 2011, Hotmail claimed an identical user base, while Yahoo! reported a figure relatively close at 310 million users -- and this is just coming from the three major hubs. Studies also show most of these users are checking their email every day, which makes this medium a tremendous marketing opportunity for businesses. 

When it comes to the value of email marketing, most companies don't need much convincing. Data has shown they are already willing to invest large sums toward professional email marketing strategies. Forrester Research has projected companies will spend approximately $1.676 billion on managed email marketing in 2012 and approximately $1.649 billion on social media in the same year. These statistics indicate many companies have equally assigned values to both email marketing and social media marketing. Actually, with email marketing leading by $27 million, it appears this component is considered slightly more important than social media marketing alternatives. 

So, we can see email still has a large user base and is still considered highly valuable by American corporations, but does it pass the test of being effective for generating sales? According to Adrian Mullan of WebProNews, email marketing is not only effective for generating online sales, but offline sales as well. A reported 59 percent of email users claim to have made an offline purchase after receiving an email promotion, which indicates that while one email advertisement may not lead to an immediate sale, it certainly leaves an impression on the buyer. Further research reveals that the average shopper comes into contact with an item nine times before making a purchasing decision. This means each marketing technique plays a key role in encouraging a sale. Leaving email marketing out of the equation can cause this exposure to fall short. 

Unlike social media, managed email marketing through an email marketing agency has a unique value because it ensure a personalized and continuous relationship with the consumer. Maintaining the relationship with current customers is highly important, since studies show acquiring a new customer is eight to ten times more expensive than selling to a current customer. New sales are certainly not to be disregarded, but keeping up with current customers through email has proven to generate repeat sales estimated to be four times more profitable than the first purchase. 

To take full advantage of the many benefits that come from managed email marketing, an experienced and educated email marketing consultant is essential. With proper execution, your company can soon begin to see why email marketing truly does matter. 

 

What could be more appropriate in finishing up our series on industries benefiting from email marketing than a spotlight on government? With the upcoming presidential electing approaching rapidly, political interest and publicity is on the rise. Organizations involved in government on multiple levels can all use this heightened interest to their advantage through professional email marketing. In fact, many of them already are. 

It's so easy to see why managed email marketing might be appealing to governmental entities. For one, an email marketing agency can specially tailor an organization's marketing campaign to approach the issues in an effective, personalized manner. For example, say a government-sponsored public housing sector was looking for support in expanding a certain kind of housing into another district. Residents of the affected district would have to be approached from a  more sensitive angle than those in surrounding regions unaffected by this expansion. Under the supervision of an experienced email marketing consultant, candidates can depend on customized messages regarding these types of sensitive political subjects. 

Complementing the personal approach taken through email marketing, government also has the advantage of cost-efficiency when integrating this strategy. In an environment where government funding is increasingly limited, this components especially appealing. In addition to the more obvious reasons why an organization in a governmental entity might find managed email marketing useful, the strategy has already proven to be effective for governments in other less immediately obvious ways. 

According to several studies comparing the efficacy of email marketing among multiple industries, government ranks higher than the majority of measured industries in several components of email marketing. One particular study, conducted in December of 2010, revealed open rate of 25.66 percent for email marketing campaigns of governmental entities. This rate is higher than ecommerce at 14.98 percent, recruitment and staffing at 15.21 percent, sports at 19.54 percent, and even business and finance at 15.47 percent. This high open rate indicates subscribers are both interested in the issues and concerned about what the local, state and federal government agencies have to say about these issues. 

The click-through rate for the government is also comparably stronger at 5.37 percent for all emails received. This statistic might seem low from a general standpoint, but it ranks nearly 2 points higher than the average click-through rate of 3.7 percent. Since click-through rates indicate how compelling the message is to the reader, this puts government at a significant advantage in terms of general public interest regarding government issues. Government also has considerably lower rates for abuse complaints and unsubscribers at 0.04 percent and 0.20 percent, respectively. 

Ensuring the public's awareness and involvement in government issues is an important component of building stronger communities and a stronger country. With managed email marketing, this goal is made easier than ever for organizations in government, while also offering a convenient outlet for the public to receive word and speak their peace as well. 

Email is an integral part of marketing. But if not used properly it can turn into spam. Or worse, it could end up alienating your customers and prospects who are already tired of seeing ‘sales’ emails in their inbox.

So how can you make email prospecting effective? Like in the sales process, the first thing you should be doing is to build trust. Email prospecting should be used to initiate conversations, generate interests and create awareness about you, your company and your products. Some pointers to keep in mind when prospecting via email include:

• Keep your emails short: Long emails are usually not read until the end and usually gets deleted without a second thought. They look intimidating and your prospects may not find the time to patiently go over it. Therefore, it is necessary to keep it simple and short.

• Have a short subject line: Your subject line should be comprised of just a few words rather than a long sentence. It should be clear, purposeful and should relate to your email.

• Personalize your email: Compose your email as you would to your friends and colleagues. You can use short sentences and informal language, but not at the risk of sounding sloppy. It doesn't have to be a standard template either - make it creative by adding the contact information of the Business Development Manager they will be talking to if they respond. 

• Pique your prospect's interest: Your email should spark your prospect's interest. This means your message should be about them and not about you. You can highlight a specific problem or interest you think your prospect is facing right now and suggest a solution for it.

• Show what you can do: Rather than just telling them you know about their problem and offering your solution for it, show them exactly how you can help them. Illustrate with an example or better yet, with customer testimonials or third-party product reviews.

• Make it easy for them to connect: Make it easy for them to act immediately adding “reply”, social share buttons, or including important links on your website for contact info, etc. 

At Delivra, we have perfected the art of creating email campaigns to build brands and sell products. Consult with our email marketing experts to create a campaign just right for you.

Yes, you read it right. It's time to drag and drop those boring, pre-iPhone emails into your trash, and head to the creative department for something that screams - 'Look at me'. Your customers and prospects get a trillion emails in their inbox every day and the chances of them reading yours rests on one factor alone - RELEVANCE. 

As more email messages fill our inbox, we spend little or no time reading them. This does not mean email marketing is no longer effective. It only means we, as customers, have become smarter in picking only those messages relevant or ones adding value to us. You can increase relevancy by paying more attention to the following:  

Creative Subject Lines - Grab their attention instantly by using bold, and short, subject lines relevant to the reader. This way they do not get trimmed when accessed from a mobile phone. 

Concise and Interesting Content - Your email content should be easy to read and to share. It should easily direct the customer to the landing page. 

De -Spam Yourself - When irrelevant messages fill their inbox, customers hit the Spam button. Win back your customers with reactivation campaigns and tailored messages to interest them. 

Use Social Networking - Study your customer's social activity. How often do they share content? What influences them? Who do they share with? You can personalize your emails by capitalizing on these insights. 

Design for Small Screen - The messages you send are often getting read in your prospect's mobile inbox first. Design your messages to fit mobile marketing. 

Test Your Emails - Test your email marketing message. Key elements like the subject line, content, images, landing pages, design, address, etc. should be tested before you send your email. 

Need help crafting email messages that grabs your propect's attention, contains relevant content, and leads to action? Call the email marketing consultants at Delivra. 

I get asked a lot if Delivra sells email addresses.  The short answer is NO.  We are a permission based email service provider - this means you can only send to opted-in email addresses through our system.  However, since I talk to thousands of people, some have experience with purchasing email addresses.  Allow me to share some of their wisdom:

If the price seems too good to be true, it probably is.
I've heard prices ranging from pennies to several dollars per email address.  What seems consistent is the cheaper the price, the less effective the emails are.  

Ask, "how are you going to send to the recipients?"
Apparently, there are companies who will sell you the email addresses but won't send to them.  This should be a red flag in my book.  It probably means the company knows the email addresses are bogus.  They don't care though because by the time you figure this out, they have already cashed your check.

If the company is going to send to the recipients, how are they going to get in the inbox?
Just because a company will send to the recipients, doesn't mean your out of the woods.  Yes, typically the emails they are sending to are opted-in.  But they aren't opted-in to receive emails from you.   These are generally recipients who didn't check or uncheck the box that says "Please send me emails from your affiliates".  This opens the floodgates for the recipient to receive emails from ANYONE.  Once they receive your email, they won't know you, and will typically mark your message as spam.  This hurts not only you, but also the sender.  Their IP reputations are usually so shot, the message won't even get into the inbox.

My open rate is WHAT?!
We've all heard the industry average open rate is around 20%-25%.  That's when you are applying email best practices.  Purchasing a list is definitely not email best practice.  So what should the open rate be for these types of engagements?  I've heard numbers ranging from 0%-2%.  And even though they opened it, it doesn't mean the recipient is engaged...more like enraged - which will lead to that person marking your message as spam (see above).  

I understand that companies want to grow their list.  There are lots of good ways to do just that.  I just don't think purchasing a list is one of those ways.  If you'd like to find out how Delivra can help grow your list (the right way), give us a shout, we'll be glad to help!

Here's a picture of some puppies I found on the internet:

Have you ever experienced absolutely outstanding service? You know, the kind that leaves you feeling like, "I want to do business with this company forever." 

Well, let me tell you about my recent flight to New Zealand. I boarded a wide body, Air New Zealand plane in Los Angeles preparing for the 12-hour overnight flight. 

Shortly after taking my seat Mary-Jo, the concierge, introduced herself and handed me her business card. She said, "Louise from Kenningston Tours asked me to look after you during the flight. If there is anything you need, please let me know." She then handed me an envelope. 

I opened it and read the enclosed hand-written card, "Dear Neil. Have a wonderful trip. Thank you for your business. Louise." 

Holy Cow! I've been flying for years as part of the usual cattle call crowd. It never occured to me this level of personal service was possible let alone available. 

Back in the office now I'm thinking about what Delivra's email marketing consultants can do to raise the service bar skyward. 

My colleagues Doug, Lavon and I traveled to sunny Hollywood, FL last week for the ever-exciting Email Evolution Conference sponsored by the EEC. In her last blog post, Lavon described it as an "email pep rally" and she's spot on.

There were three extremely prominent themes for this year's conference that I picked up on:

1. Rededication to Email Marketing Fundamentals
2. Mobile Marketing
3. Email Marketers are FUN people! (an observation, really)

It's somewhat of an oxymoron to say marketers need to rededicate themselves to email marketing fundamentals and yet have their eye on the new "shiny object" which is mobile, but that's reality. Marketers are faced with these priorities every day.

The key then is to tackle realistic, bite-sized projects to move you closer to your overall goal. (you do have email marketing goals, right?)  It's unrealistic to think you'll return from a conference to employ every single tactic you fell in love with. And, sometimes tactics you love may not be right for your space.

So, here are my top three realistic takeaways and tactics from the conference:

• If you've not read Seth Godin's Permission Marketing since 1999 or ever- do it NOW!
• Budget for an email audit. If you have internal analysts and email experts who can block off a week or more for an email audit- Bravo, you are among the very fortunate. For most marketers, email is just one of the many tactics which fall under the job description. If that's the case, make sure to carve off some budget for an indepth email analysis each year.
  An email analysis should paint a clear picture of how you're performing in all key areas of email marketing (i.e.List Growth, List Health, Engagement, Deliverability, Analytics and ROI) as well as clear recommendations for improvement and measurement.
• Mobile adoption in unavoidable. According to Jessica Harley from GiltGroup, over half of their email is opened on a mobile device. Wow! How many of you know what percentage of your subscribers are viewing your emails via mobile (this includes tablets)? If you don't know, find out now.

Intimately knowing the successes and deficiency of your email program will enable you to employ more advanced -shinier- tactics. For more ideas and themes from the conference check out the full agenda, including my presentation called, Combining Text and Traditional Marketing Channels to Boost Subscribers and Sales. We were very lucky to have our wonderful client, Anthony Scott with us from the Eiteljorg Museum to present their personal story with Text 2 Subscribe.

Until next year EEC...

Gosh, it has been a while since my last post... but things have been a little busy at Delivra. And, there's one thing in particular making us smile.

For the past couple of months, we've been focusing on our own email marketing program. As a best practice, we believe it's very important to do a data clean-up every year, as well as evaluate all email content being sent. What was a relevant email schedule last year (or even last month) may not be so relevant anymore, and this is exactly what we found.

To ensure our data was clean, we did a re-engagement email campaign to our subscribers. This consisted of a few emails over the course of three weeks which asked email subscribers to update their preferences.




Once we had the data in place, we were ready to start drafting content and send schedules. One of our goals for this process was to do a better job incorporating highly relevant and personalized content in our emails.

Delivra's email marketing software has a feature called Conditional Content. What this feature allows us to do is create one email and swap out pieces of content or images based on data unique to the recipient.

For our own emails, we decided to use this feature to swap out Account Owner information. Many of our retail clients use this feature to swap out product information based on things like region, buying behavior, age, interests, occupation...the sky is the limit! Here's an example of what our email looked like:



Overall, the email "felt" good but ultimately, it's up to the data to let us know how we performed.  Some of the basic metrics we look at:

• Open Rate
• Click-through Rate
• Engagement Score
• Unsubscribes

We look at these metrics compared to data collected from previous mailings, we call these baseline metrics. Having these metrics are super important when you change any aspect of your strategy.

Finally, we can't forget the ultimate intent of the email. Our goal for this particular email was to raise awareness about new software features and gauge interest among our client base. In order to collect this data, we created a unique form-submit landing page that funneled info into Salesforce, our CRM. As the clients filled out the form, they were immediately put in the appropriate campaign and their Account Owner was notified.

Such a simple user experience, and yet, it allowed us to gather feature interest and another layer of data to determine the success of the mailing.

So, what were the results of our efforts?

• 14% increase in Open Rate
• Doubled our Click-through Rate
• 5% Conversion Rate for people interested in new features.

All of this goes to show that with a little effort and a lot of thought, you can take an existing list and re-invent results.

 As the Super Bowl makes its way to Indy, it's hard to miss the preparations taking place around the city. Personally, I can't wait to see how well Indy hosts such an event. As an email marketer, are you trying to get in on the Super Bowl action too by sending out an email to your subscribers about the big game? 

Papa John's is. As a sponsor of the NFL, it's' not a huge surprise they are, but I was interested in how they were incorporating the email aspect. (For full details about the giveaway, click here to read the full article from PizzaMarketplace.com.) In short, they are doing a Coin Toss Experience with fans where America guesses whether the coin toss will result in Heads or Tails. If they get it right, everyone enrolled in their Papa Rewards program will receive an email with instructions on how to claim their reward. 

Planning on sending out a Super Bowl email? Here are a couple of things to keep in mind: 

1. Make it fun. You are going to be in the inbox with a lot of competition. Not that this, in particular, is anything new, but you'll be competing with several other companies trying to get a piece of the Super Bowl pie. 

2. Rewards. To keep people engaged with your email through the Super Bowl and beyond, include a reward. Papa John's is engaging their audience by incorporating a poll, a reward, and a follow-up email. 

3. Buzz. Once you have established your contest, reward, or poll, etc, start creating some buzz around it. Share the news on social media, blog about it, add a CTA on your website, and send reminder emails. Talk it up! 

4. Test, test, test. You'd hate for a big email campaign around the Super Bowl to flop, wouldn't you? Be sure to test first. 

What examples have you seen of Super Bowl emails? I'm always interested, so send them my way! 

Recently, I received a direct mail piece from my dog's veterinarian. It was a Healthy Pet magazine featuring William Shatner (Of course?). Although it was a direct mail piece, there are still relevant lessons that can be transferred to using personalization in emails. See the image of the piece below.
I enjoyed several aspects of the mailing...

1. Personalized Image. The picture of the dog on the front looks exactly like my Henry - down to the crazy pug eyes and the tongue always sticking out. It was perfect and got my attention right away. 

2. Name. I noticed they had included Henry's name on the front as well. (Even though it was spelled wrong, but more about this later.)

3. Last Visit. If you glance through the pages, you notice the vet also included the last appointment date we had.  I added it to my planner right away as a reminder to schedule the next one. 

Here are some factors to consider if you plan to use personalization in your email program...

1. Correct Information. Using personalization can be tricky. You need to be sure you have the right information before deciding to incorporate it. For example, I loved how they used Henry's name, but part of the effect was lost on the fact I was distracted by the misspelling. If you are going to use personalized pieces in your email be sure you have the correct information for everyone in your database. Otherwise, it may not turn out well when sent. 

2. Permission. This is a tidbit specifically for using personalization in emails - make sure you have permission before sending them any kind of emails. Using personalization will be the least of your problems, if you have not previously obtained permission. 

3. Social Media. There were several mentions on the mailing to visit their Facebook page. I assumed it meant for my specific veterinarian, but no. When I got there, it was basically an empty site. I made it to the appropriate one, but still it lost some of it's pizazz. When incorporating social media into your email, be cautious of all sites and aspects. You don't want your subscribers to go astray. 

IBM recently unveiled another of their Five-in-Five series. If you've never heard of it, IBM makes an annual prediction of five trends or innovations that will alter the modern technological landscape within the next five years.

After predicting increased biometric security and actual mind reading powers, the last point in the series caught my eye: We're going to see the end of impersonal email.

Due to the amount of data that can be stored and analyzed quickly, every single mailing can, and will be, personalized not just to a recipient, but personalized towards what the recipient will find most relevant.

An article discussing the Five-in-Five series analyzed an opt-in procedure categorizing recipients' email request based on their driving, shopping, and eating schedules. Emails were specifically targeted to individuals based not only on their personal history, but also targeted based on when they were most likely to ‘need’ those emails, i.e. before leaving the house to go to the mall or deciding where they should meet with friends for lunch.

Delivra’s demographic fields allow our customers the ability to send email tailored personally to the recipient, and to the recipient’s interests. How much do you know about your recipients? How engaged are they? Are you utilizing all of the demographic fields available to better target your email campaigns?

I was asked this morning "why is email marketing a great tool for businesses?" Wow - where do you begin? But, my answer remains consistent, email marketing is still one of the most powerful 1:1 communication channels a marketer has at their disposal.

Think about it... start making a mental list of all the communication channels available to you:

• Online (Website and Blog)
• Face to Face
• Telephone
• Direct Mail
• Social Media
• Brick and Mortar
• Email
• Other?

Aside from picking up the telephone or having a face-to-face meeting, what other channel can provide real-time, personal, 1:1 communication? Even direct messaging via social media relies on email to deliver the communication.

But, the reality is, this channel is a cluttered one. The key to email marketing success is to respect the people you communicate with. Gone are the days where success is measured by the volume of your list or how many emails you can send in a given day. That's just spam.

Successful email marketers invest time, lots of time, segmenting their lists and developing content to resonate with their audience. These marketers are quick to purge disengaged email addresses and are quick to reward engagement.

So while email still remains a great 1:1 communication tool for businesses, the qualifications for success have absolutely changed. Don't waste this powerful channel on an unreemarkable email.

The other day, I received a "Happy Birthday" email with a special coupon for a percentage off my meal. This happened to be from a restaurant I frequent and so my response was one of excitement.  The only problem was...my birthday is not until JULY. They must have made a mistake and I became torn on how to respond. Within a few hours however, I received an apology email from them.  They said the birthday coupon was sent in error BUT they believe we should treat everyday as a special celebration of our birth and because I was a special customer, they would like me to use the coupon anytime. I smiled and appreciated this response. 

So what did this say to me...

First, make your customers feel special. Mention or refer to their past business or loyalty to you. The more specific you can be the better. 

Secondly, use personal language.  Talk to them as you would an acquantiance or friend. When I receive emails using redundant or professional verbiage considered "boring" I find myself glossing over words and the intent. Be professional, but be real too. 

Lastly, offer something you would like to receive yourself. Ask yourself, "Would this offer excite me if I received it?" "Would I want to open this email and utilize this offer?" 

A great example for a restaurant would be offering a free dessert of their choice. Afterall, who hasn't ever heard the saying, "I scream, you scream..we all scream for ice cream." 

A great way to grow your subscriber list is to include an email sign up form on your website. Delivra offers the tools to create the form code needed for an email sign-up form that filters directly to your database with Delivra. They will then be subscribed to receive your emails.

What to consider when setting up your form: 

1.       Choose the demographics to be collected, such as first name, telephone, etc.

a.       Only collect information you plan on using to personalize your emails or information to evaluate a mailing. Asking for too much information will deter people from taking the time to fill out your form.

2.       Decide if new sign-ups will get a hello message.

3.       Incorporate a redirect URL once they click submit.

a.       A redirect page could provide a thank you or a reward for signing up.

Are you a Delivra client and need step by step instructions on setting this up? Contact Support for more information. (support@delivra.com or 866-915-9465)

If you are not a Delivra client, click here for other email marketing best practices. 

I recently wrote a piece talking about some of the changes I've seen during my time here at Delivra.  One thing that hasn't changed during my time here is my email address.  My work email has remained constant for these past 8+ years.  

When asked the question, "What is the best time of day to send a marketing email?" I generally answer, "It doesn't matter." 

My response is based on personal use habits and review of various mailings made by Delivra clients. It's with this history that I was pleasantly surprised to find a study done by EmailVision that dispels the myths of best time of day to click the send button. 

Quoting directly from the report: 

Different types of campaigns show little sensitivity to the time of day when the campaigns are sent. The answer as to why timing is not so sensitive lies in how people engage and process their email inbox. 

In a small poll we ran, 94% of people said that when returning to their inbox they scan all new or recent unread emails. This means your position in the inbox is relatively unimportant. Your email will be scanned for a delete or read decision regardless of whether it's the top email or number 25. Your email will live and die by much stronger factors than time of day such as: 

• Subject line and from name
• Content relevance
• Previous experience of your emails
• Brand loyalty and engagement 

Trying to time an email to a 2 to 5 hour slot is relatively unimportant. Your email will be deleted based on the above factors and not whether it was first seen at 10am or 2pm. 

More important than time of day timing, is timing with regard to the customer lifecycle. Right message, right person, right time is often quoted. However, time doesn't mean 9am or 10am. Perfect timing is reaching the customer when they are actively: 

• Identifying a need
• Researching options to fulfill a need
• Deciding which offer to choose

Conclusion: Lifecycle timing is important but send time is not.