The Profit is in the Follow-up
When you send an email newsletter out, do you know how much money that makes you? Do you track clicks, purchases or leads that are delivered to your site from your email?
It is all very well seeing a spike in traffic in your website stats package and see that visits to your site go through the roof for two days, but did they buy or leave their details behind?
Knowing this information is crucial to the success of your email marketing campaigns. Being an email marketing provider in Wiltshire, we work on a personal level with many clients to help them understand how their campaigns are performing. Walking them through the live reporting in our BeyondMail system, taking a look at sales generated from the email and so on. This tell us, and them, how the campaign did and what can be done next time to make it better.
Following up your email campaign is key!
If you send an email and you can see how many people, and even who, clicked on a link – you can see the people that didn’t also. A bit of jiggery-pokery with the data and you can use this information to pick up the phone and speak to people. Yes, I did say “pick up the phone and speak to people” – the old school way!
Don’t just think that because the email campaigns you are sending out drives your sales up and increases the leads you are generating on your site, that is all you need to do. There is profit in the follow-up.
A quick call to everyone that clicked and offer link for instance, will drive up sales. We have seen this with a number of clients. The reason for this is because you have warmed them up with the email, they took action and clicked, read the page you pointed them to and then you get a call in on the same day and mention it again. It is not a cold call. They have taken positive action and you are following up on that.
The flip side is for those that did not click your offer – you could call them and see what else you could help them with, knowing that they were not interested in the offer you sent them.
It is only with the live stats from BeyondMail that makes this possible. If you follow up the day after, because your email system updates overnight, you will get a poorer response than if the follow up was done the same day. Some of our clients send emails around 10am and then the follow up is done later that day.
If you want to know more about how we can help with follow-up’s and understand how we could help so you don’t have to find the time to do all this, visit our Why BeyondMail page and see our additional services.
So… what exactly is an electronic newsletter?
Just like their paper counterparts, electronic newsletters deliver written messages to a list of opt-in subscribers.
The main difference, electronic newsletters transcend paper to only exist on a computer screens.
Some electronic newsletters are delivered only via email while others are delivered only on the web. Most are delivered in some combination of the two.
All of the newsletters delivered through BeyondMail have a web version that can be automatically published to your website when you send it via email. Having both the methods available should suit all your target audiences preferences.
How do you publish an electronic newsletter?
Essentially all you need to do is decide on a topic, name your publication and start writing.
Blogs can back up your newsletters, or indeed provide content if you choose to use your email newsletter as a round- up or summary of recent posts on your blog. When you have your content sorted, you need is a delivery programme – like BeyondMail. One that will manage your subscribers for you. One that will provide you with live real-time stats. One that is easy to use.
To get start it’s easy! Create your FREE account today and get mailing straight away!
How Important Are Email Tracking Stats?
Any marketing or advertising activity should always be executed with the ability to measure the return you get from it.
Many people today are still using their desktop email client (such as Outlook or Thunderbird) to send marketing emails out to client and subscriber lists. Sometimes all the email addresses are on public view because they out the emails all into the ‘To:’ field. Clever people use the ‘Bcc:’ field.
Occasionally we come across people that say “I have a mailing list feature of my web hosting” or “Email marketing is included in my website” – sometimes it is… Great!
But in looking under the surface of both of these situations you invariably find that the one thing that is missing is the reporting.
- Do you know how well did your last email newsletter do for you and your business when you sent it out?
- Can you attribute any sales or leads from it?
Measuring of any marketing activity, as mentioned above, is crucial to your success.
If you know something works, keep doing it. Tweak it and see if it improves. If the tweak doesn’t work, try something else. If the activity just bombs out and flat fails, try again and then make a judgement on if it is worth continuing with – These are all decisions that can be made when you have measurement tools in place.
When you use your desktop email client to send emails it will send them and you can stop everyone seeing other people’s email addresses by using the ‘Bcc:’ field, but do you know how many people opened the email? Do you know how many people clicked on any of the links? Do you know who it was that opened and clicked?
Systems like MS Outlook and Thunderbird don’t give you these kinds of stats – And most mailing list functions on web hosting are the same. They will send the email but that is it.
If you are not in the know with these kind of stats you will not know if you can tweak or adjust it to improve it. Worst still, you wont be able to follow up all the people that clicked on your special offer link. It could be time, energy and money down the drain!
BeyondMail has in-built analytical tools that will show you the live status of your email campaigns.
We can show you to the second, who has opened your email and how many times. What links they clicked on and even if they forwarded it on or shared it in the social media ether.
Our system also links into Google Analytics. So if you sell products on your website, you can track any sales that result from a click through from your email.
Gathering this kind of information enables you to see at the push of a button, the most popular links, the most loyal subscribers, those that could be interested in that special offer… and much more.
There is so much you can do with this kind of information.
How can you not see the importance of email marketing stats and tracking now?
Create your free account on BeyondMail by clicking here and get emailing today.
Email Marketing: Reducing SPAM
If you have had experience of HTML email marketing before now, you will know that not all the emails you send, will get through to the end user or subscriber.
The biggest barrier for email marketing is the differing levels of SPAM quality scoring. Some SPAM filters will let the email through and some wont.
One of the ways that you can ensure that your email is a little more SPAM proof is by using as little £ or $ symbols as you can.
The odd one in the email is ok. But when you start using them to say things like “Save ££££££’s” or “Earn $$$$$$’s” – this is what they will throw your email out for.
There are lots of ways to ensure you fit into the ‘approved’ run of the SPAM filter. If you design and code up your own HTML email, feel free to create your own FREE account of BeyondMail and test your email using our own Design and SPAM Filter system. Create your account today and test away.
Email Marketing: What does “permission-based” mean?
When using our email marketing program, BeyondMail, we always ensure that clients use lists of data from which permission has been granted for communication via email. This is called permission-based email marketing.
Permission-based email marketing occurs when emails are only sent to persons who have requested to receive them, such as customers that have bought from you, people that have subscribed from your website or from business cards that you picked up from a networking meeting and you got the verbal agreement to add them to your mailing list.
The opposite to permission-based email marketing is SPAM. This involves sending out unsolicited email promotions to people that you have not had agreement to send to.
Permission based email marketing is used effectively every day by huge numbers of organisations to increase sales, build the value of their brand, and strengthen the relationships they have with their clients and subscribers.
The success that achieve is due to the fact that they are operating out of a permission-based email marketing strategy – They are only sending emails to people that have requested to receive them.
Email Marketing Still Delivers Real Value!
WOW!
Can I say it again?
WOW!
We put together an email campaign that was sent out on behalf of a client yesterday. The email was introducing a new product into the marketplace – ‘the official launch’.
The email went out to their existing customer database, who previously bought products from them and who they have built up a relationship with.
An hour and a half after the email went out, we had recorded a whopping £5,000 worth of sales.
Checking the email and website analytics this morning, less than 24hours after the send, they have had over £10,500 of revenue generated from this one email! Now at the end of the day it’s up to £12,000 of revenue!
We can accurately attribute this revenue to this marketing channel because our email marketing programme, BeyondMail, tracks each of the individual subscribers open, click and purchase. If a subscriber therefore opens your email, lands on your website and then buys something in the same session, we can see it all. A session is the period of time when a subscriber, after clicking your email, visits your website before they close their browser window. Knowing that people may click and visit your site, they may come back later to purchase at another time. This is a different session. So with these stats, there is bound to me more sales in addition to this.
It’s simple really – Email Marketing Still Works!
Building relationships with people and using a retention based marketing technique like this is an easy sell. Do you consider your current clients and customers as potential customers for new sales? Or do you always focus on getting new clients? It is much easier for someone to make a decison to buy from you if they already know you and trust your service!
If you are interested in having a trackable system that can show you just how much return on investment email marketing can give you, call 01793 238697, tweet us @_toinfinty or visit www.beyondmail.co.uk.
With our BeyondMail system, we offer a personal service from our team of email marketing experts, rather than the faceless support of an online form offered by the giants of the email marketing world. Our prices are as competitive as theirs. Request to see our rate card.
Remember the BIG bonus… you get to speak to ‘real’ people if you want to – on the phone or in person at our offices in Swindon.
We can get you up and running within 48hours of uploading your email list and campaign. Our mailing tower even negotiates with internet service providers to give more chance of your email not getting blocked by any spam filters.
Call now on 01793 238697 if you want personal human support and advice, trackable live stats, and emails that will get through to your customers.
Testing Email Marketing Campaigns – The A/B Split Test
We have just scheduled an email campaign to go to over 63,000 customers for one client and thought that I would share with you the importance of something we have set up in this campaign – A/B Split Testing.
With all marketing tools it is so important to test the activity that you are doing and then respond to the results in the right way. It it worked, think about doing it again. If you have tried it a number of times and you got nothing from it… re-think what you are doing, or consider it to be a non-effective way of marketing your product AND STOP. Ineffective marketing is just like purring money down the drain.
The very nature of online marketing makes it easier to measure and test any marketing or communications activity. Tools such as Google Analytics help you to see the volume of traffic (the people) coming to your site, where they came from and how long the stayed. Even right through to purchase or showing you the most popular content on your site.
Our BeyondMail email marketing system is another tool that allows you to measure and test the effectiveness of your email marketing.
Not only can you gauge the level traffic that is coming to your site from any email that you may send out, right down to who clicked what and when, it also enables you to test and refine your campaigns to develop them into more profitable ways of marketing online.
A/B split testing essentially measures the results from things such as different subject lines, different email content and also different from addresses. All of these three items will have different impact on the success of your email marketing campaign.
With the client mentioned above, we have scheduled the campaign to send the same content, but to use two different subject lines.
Subject Line A will be sent to 12,000 customers, Subject Line B will be sent to 12,000 customers.
Which ever produces the highest open rate in a 4 hour period will be declared the winner and will then be sent on to the remaining 39,000 customers.
Why do this?
From the initial split test we will see which subject line was more effective in encouraging subscribers to open the email. If one proved more popular than the other, then we would be able to then send the one that worked the best to the remaining list of customers. This will maximise the potential of a greater return for this email campaign.
If you would like more information on how you can also test email marketing campaigns that you may be about to send out – contact toinfinity on 01793 238697 or email us here.
Phishing Concerns in Email Marketing
A definition from Wikipedia. Phishing: In the field of computer security, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.
It now affects your email marketing
In a promising move, some email clients are building phishing detection right into the software itself. I’m sure that like me, most of you have received a few PayPal or the Bank phishing scams in your time.
Phishing scam detection as now been added to both Mozilla Thunderbird and AOL 9.0 – and more to follow I am sure.
This will impact on how you or your marketing agency design your email creative.
So how do they know If you are a phishing scam or not?
The email client you use to read your emails will look for a link in your campaign where the display text is a URL (such as www.toinfinity.co.uk). If the displayed link is different from the actual URL, the user is alerted that it may be a phishing scam.
The problem
Most email marketing software providers change every link in the code of your campaigns so that they can track link clicks for you. This means that even when you have a link like:
It is changed to something like:
This change will mean that your email may get flagged as a phishing scam.
The solution
Avoid using a URL as the display text for a link in any HTML emails. Use a word or phrase which describes the link itself. Such as:
Even though it will be changed by your email marketing provider to look like this:
You won’t ever be identified as a potential phishing scammer.
Email Newsletters – what are they about anyway?
Why is it so important that your orgnisation has a regular newsletter? What is their purpose?
We have listed three main reason for thinking about getting a newsletter up and running – or that old one you used to find the time for, resurrected and started up again.
1. Keep in touch and say hello
Clients, customers, members and other interested parties are the lifeblood any organisation. Now so many are on email. What better way to stay in touch with them than through a perfectly designed and branded newsletter? A newsletter allows you to introduce new products, announce events, offer special discounts and encourage referrals.
2. Attract new customers
Unless people have an immediate need or came to you through a powerful referral, most potential customers won’t buy or engage with you right away. Your newsletter can offer people the opportunity to learn more about you, your organisation and your products and services. You can also learn more about them through their behaviour and interaction too.
3. Establish Your Expertise
No one knows more about your business than you do – which makes you an expert. Share your nuggets of knowledge through your newsletter to deepen your relationship with your existing customers and convince potential customers that you are the answer to their problems.
Other points for reference…
What exactly is an electronic newsletter?
Just like their paper counterparts, electronic newsletters deliver written messages to a list of opt-in subscribers. The main difference, electronic newsletters transcend paper to only exist on a computer screens.
Some electronic newsletters are delivered only via email while others are delivered only on the web. Most are delivered in some combination of the two. All of the newsletters delivered through Beyond eMail have a web version that can be automatically published to your website when you send it via email.
Having both the methods available should suit all your target audiences preferences.
How do you publish an electronic newsletter?
Essentially all you need to do is decide on a topic, name your publication and start writing. Blogs can back up your newsletters, or indeed provide content if you choose to use your email newsletter as a round-up or summary of recent posts on your blog. When you have your content sorted, you need is a delivery programme – like Beyond eMail. One that will manage your subscribers for you. One that will provide you with live real-time stats. One that is easy to use – For more info visit www.beyondmail.co.uk.
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