Posts Tagged email marketing software
Tactics to help retain your email subscribers
With the World Series starting tonight in New York, it is hard not to have baseball on the brain.
This reminded me of a post I wrote way back in April that compared baseball with the different ways for you to retain your subscribers.
As the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies battle it out for the MLB title this week, I thought it was a good time to revisit this post and list all the key points to help you out.
Tactics to retain subscribers
• Remind subscribers of the value and benefits of remaining on your list. Don’t be shy. Brag about how great your service is and all the top features you offer. By making this clear, a subscriber will be more likely to stick with you.
• Survey your list of inactives regularly to see if you can return them to active status before making that final cut. If they show no interest, at least you tried your best and can move on.
• Sell them on the benefits at the point of sign-up. Make your message as enticing as possible.
• Stay on the top of subscriber’s minds through regular mailings. If you don’t keep in touch often enough, you will certainly fall out of memory fast.
• Promote other communication channels to allow your subscribers to follow you in other networks, besides email. Include your network accounts (Facebook profile, Twitter ID, etc.) in the administrative footer of your messages and feature them prominently in your welcome programs.
• Always show interest to your clients. A personalized message can do wonders when trying to retain customers. Ideally your product or service will speak for itself but anything extra that makes a customer feel special and appreciated will go a long way.
• Increase the choice a customer has by providing more information beyond your usual service. In terms of your business, this could include offering complimentary services, discounted rates or sneak previews of upcoming features if they remain on your list.
Reasons you need to focus on inactive clients
It is very important to focus on inactive subscribers and decide how you will go about retaining them or moving them to the inactive list for good.
First of all, you are spending your money to send them emails that they don’t even open. Save the extra credits for those clients that open your emails.
Secondly, repeated mailings to inactive mailboxes are a bad email practice. How often marketers send emails to non responsive users is one of the factors that determine the sender’s reputation with your ISP (In this case SimplyCast).
To learn more about how SimplyCast’s email marketing service can help you boost your email marketing efforts and retain subscribers, please visit SimplyCast.com.
Oh and in case you were wondering – Yankees in six.
Add comment October 28, 2009
Break up your email marketing routine
Whether it is at work, in a relationship or even what you eat for lunch, everyone at some point falls into a rut. Before you know it you are just going through the motions while weeks or months pass before you even realize it.
The same can happen with your email marketing efforts.
When was the last time you actually thought about what you put in your emails?
Every week you add fresh content and promotional offers but do you ever stop and think, “is that all I need to do?”
Not everyone will experience the obvious signs for change like response rates declining, unsubscribes increasing or subscribers becoming inactive.
But that does not mean you should stay the course as if nothing is wrong.
Successful email marketers understand that shaking things up is key to keeping subscribers interested in their service or product.
If customers know what to expect from you, they probably won’t bother reading the message after a while.
Here are some tips you can use to evaluate and refresh the contents of your future email marketing campaigns.
Take a good look back
For an ongoing email marketing campaign that has gone flat, take a look at every individual email over the past several weeks. Now, ask yourself these questions:
1. If I opened up every single email, would they look different?
2. Do the offers tend to feature the same few products?
3. Does the design look the same from week to week?
Look for habits you can break
Change the offers. Create new offers or promotions. Especially if the offers tend to cover the same few products or features. Maybe your subscribers would like to know about something else.
Change the depiction of the offers. Try adding or subtracting information about your product or company. This could pique subscribers’ interest and move them to want to learn more from your website. For instance, swapping out product features for customer testimonials may put old products in a new light. Everyone likes to read what other people have to say about their experience. You could also reduce long copy to a few key bullet points that could work better in driving subscribers to your site.
Try out simple design tweaks. Change a background color, highlight a call-to-action or try adding smaller or larger images that match the email message. Implementing more eye candy will certainly help draw people in as long as you don’t make it look like Atlantic City. SimplyCast’s email marketing software features over 1000 free templates to choose from so you definitely have options.
Go text-only for a few campaigns. Think of plain text as a real change of pace. The occasional plain text email can increase clicks simply because it stands out from fancy HTML emails. The effect doesn’t last forever, but it keeps subscribers on their toes. It will also make the next HTML email look a lot better in comparison.
Consider content other than offers. Your customers don’t always want to buy things. But most subscribers like want to learn new things. So trying an email that focuses on content can really grab attention. This could include blog posts from your website, articles on your company, or how to use the product better. If people get the idea that you are not just trying to bombard them with deals and special coupons, they may take the time to open the email.
Monitor any change
After making any of the previous changes, watch your email marketing campaigns to see if response changes among your subscribers. You can test old vs. new examples head-to-head to identify what works best. If the new changes actually decrease response rates, you can quickly go back to what was working before.
But for the most part making basic changes should improve response, if only because the email looks a little different than before.
Email marketing is a very successful medium but you have to remember it does not fit in the set it and forget category. Don’t be afraid to try out new ideas and steer your email marketing campaigns in a new direction every once in a while.
3 comments May 6, 2009
How to create an effective email subject line?
Having a strong subject line is key to the success of your email marketing campaign. The “subject line” is the first test recipients use to determine if they should invest time in reading your message. Furthermore, subject text is commonly used by leading spam filters as way to reroute messages to the junk box.
Investing time in creating and testing your email subject text can help increase your open rates significantly. Since subject text is important, we have outlined 5 best practices to help improve subject line creation:
1. Relevancy: using seven words or less and maximum of 50 characters to state the reason for sending the email.
2. Context: subject line must support the “from” line, if you sell t-shirts online, the from address could be Lisa, T-Shirts.com Inc.
3. Urgency: creating a sense of urgency in your subject line can help you increase your open rate. Example: “Limited time offer, blue t-shirt sale.”
4. Personalization: Including the person’s name or company name in the subject line has been found to be an effective way to increase readership.
5. Testing: testing your subject text with co-workers can provide you with hints to tweak your final text prior to sending. Also, incorporating the learning from past campaigns will improve your overall results.
If you have specific questions, please post it on this blog or contact your SimplyCast account manager for assistance.
6 comments August 22, 2008
8 Steps to Optimize Your Email Marketing
1. Anatomy of emails
Anatomy of an email marketing message When writing for email marketing, you must focus on three key areas: the “Fields”; the “Body Copy”; and, if applicable, the “Landing Pages”. All require virtually
equal attention.
2. Understand the “Fields”
These are what you see when an email drops into your inbox. Like an envelope, the Fields give you a hint of what’s inside. With business people and consumers receiving multiple emails each day, the Fields are increasingly used to judge whether an email should be opened — or trashed. Fields of most concern to email marketers are the FROM field, the TO field, and the
SUBJECT field.
3. Set a singular objective
Email is the wrong media for a diluted marketing message. Your purpose for writing — whether that be to make an offer, or announce a special — should be strong and crystal clear.
Rambling, saying too much, introducing extraneous information, or adding complementary offers will drive down response. The reason is, many Internet users will quickly scan your email message to determine if it’s worth reading. If it doesn’t come to the point, and stick to the point, your prospect will simply delete your message and move onto the next.
Used effectively, email is a powerful relationship building medium.
4. Target. Target. Target.
The flexibility and economies of email allow you to target with precision. So, make the most of this advantage. For example, if you are making an offer applicable to two different audiences — IT professionals and marketing managers, for example — write two versions of your email marketing message. The more you customize your email to specific target groups, the more successful your efforts will be.
5. Write to target
Develop a thorough understanding of the and sensibilities of your target market before you write. This will help you select a style and tone appropriate to the audience — be it business professionals, college students, or homemakers.
6. Focus on building the relationship
Email marketing is not a hit and run medium. It works best when you use it to build sustainable relationships with prospects and customers. So, each time you write an email marketing message, remember that you’re building a relationship in addition to trying to generate a lead, hit, or sale.
Building a solid relationship with your email marketing list will lead to higher response rates in future campaigns.
7. Plan for rapid fulfillment
Sluggish fulfillment leads to dissatisfied customers. So, make sure you have all the internal resources in place to handle fulfillment of premiums, leads and other responses to your email marketing campaign. You may be surprised at the amount of response you receive from your efforts — often within hours of your emails being transmitted.
8. Think in two parts, not one
An email marketing campaign has two parts, not one: the email your customer receives; plus the hyperlink embedded in the email that he or she clicks on to respond to your offer. This link takes the customer to a web page with a reply form (to email marketers, this is called the landing page). The landing page requires almost as much attention to writing and design as the
email itself.
1 comment May 9, 2008
