This doesn’t mean we should be sitting back on our laurels though, far from it. Instead we should be constantly looking ahead and working pro-actively to ensure that we’re maximizing our email marketing ROI.

With this in mind, we look at a few steps that, if done on a regular basis, could help you to improve your email marketing results.

1. A/B Split Testing

Here are some interesting stats for you. Did you know that according to findings from the Marketing Sherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, 61% of marketers do not routinely test email campaigns to optimize performance. In a 2009 report by Forrester Research, results showed that marketers who test well and consistently earn up to 20 % more than those who don’t. Whilst the first stat is worrying to say the least, the latter should be motivation enough to get back on track with testing your campaigns before you send them. A/B Split testing allows you to test two different variables at the same time. Subject line, call to action, body content, landing pages, images, background colours and time of day can all be tested against each other. Winning combinations are then tested against new variables on an on-going basis, which is then known as champion/challenger testing. This ensures that you always have most effective combination at any given time. Yes, it might initially be time consuming, but if you want significant results then this is part of what you have to do.

2. Segmenting

It’s highly unlikely that your entire data base is homogenous. The broader your target audience, the more diluted your email newsletter results are going to be.  However, if you segment (and target) effectively, you have a much better chance of maintaining concentrated results. The beauty behind segmenting is that it can be as done as simply or advanced as you want or need it to be. Gender, age and location might be effective enough for what you want to achieve, but some email marketers take it much further and start segmenting according  to industry, income bracket (if this is disclosed in a preference centre), purchase history, buyer behaviour and customer loyalty.

3. Triggered Emails

Triggered emails are relatively simple to set up and can be used for a number of different purposes. Some of the most common uses include: abandoned cart messages, email newsletter sign up confirmations, event registration and confirmation details, transactional messages, subscribers birthdays, updated user profiles and surveys and friendly reminder (‘remember us?’) emails. Triggered emails keep your subscribers up to date with information they need to know and also gives you the opportunity to engage with them and show them how much you appreciate their loyalty.

4. Aligning content, subject lines and landing pages

It might seem simple enough to achieve this, but it doesn’t mean that everyone gets it right all the time. Your subject line needs to clearly (and honestly) state exactly what your subscriber can expect to find in the body of the email message. You certainly won’t win any friends (or new subscribers for that matter) by having an enticing subject line and then a completely unrelated or misleading offer in the content. Follow through on your promises. The same applies to your landing pages. If your button says: ‘Sign Up Here’, then make sure the link takes them to the sign up form on your website. ‘Buy now’ should equally take them to the purchase/checkout page. You get the idea, double check your links to make sure they’re taking your visitors to the right places. Giving your subscribers misleading information will only ensure that in the future they ignore or distrust any other emails you send.

5. Email List Cleansing

When was the last time you went through your email database and removed any inactive or invalid email addresses? It’s time to get tough. Firstly, remove (but don’t delete) any subscribers who haven’t clicked on or opened any of your email messages in the last 3 or 6 months, depending on how often you send emails. Next, go through your list and check for any typo’s that might be affecting your bounce rate. Commas instead of full stops are one of the most common errors and are easily corrected. You should also remove any role accounts from your list, on which your efforts are surely wasted. These include addresses such as admin@companyname.com, accounts@companyname.com. You might be pleasantly surprised to find that these simple steps make a significance difference to your overall bounce rate.

Really what it comes down to is that you should be focused on bettering your email marketing all the time. For sure, it’s an on-going and sometimes frustrating process having to test campaigns, monitor your subscribers and scrub your database lists, but there is no doubt that these steps will help you to better understand and target your customers, which is of course, the ultimate goal.

However, does one actually out-perform the other in terms of converting? Unfortunately there isn’t a straight answer. Yes, plain text emails have an easier time of slipping through spam filters, but it also depends on your target market, segmentation and what message it is that you are trying to convey.

Perhaps first of all we need to determine what ‘conversion’ means for you. Your call to action could be:

• Clicking through to the desired landing page
• Downloading a report or white paper
• Subscribing to a newsletter
• Completing a survey
• Making an enquiry
• Ordering or purchasing a product or service or
• Requesting further information

Your specific call-to-action might determine the type of email message you send. Does your message rely heavily on visuals or images, or can you achieve similar results by directing subscribers to an external URL through a link in your plain text email message? Image heavy emails are considerably more difficult to get through to your subscribers. Spam filters zone in on them, they are often blocked by default, they can turn your once beautiful design into a something that looks like a two year child has drawn (read: messy and nonsensical) and the message can be lost completely if you haven’t bothered to include alt text.  If you’re going to go the image heavy route though, don’t embed them. This way, subscribers can at least decide whether they want to download them or not.

With the increasing difficulty that email marketers face in reaching their subscribers inbox, many find that plain text emails make it easier to slip through the spam filters. While they might not provide as much eye-candy as their html counterparts, if they’re getting through, it means you have a greater chance of engaging with your subscribers the way you intend. And if you’re engaging, you’re probably converting too.

Another thing we need to take into consideration is the increasing number of people who access their email on a mobile device. You might be surprised to find a significant percentage of your subscribers do this (if you haven’t already, you should do a short survey to find out which of them do, or add the option to your email preference centre and segment accordingly). Right now, there are still a few problems with html email rendering on mobiles. No doubt it’s gotten easier but for now, quite a few marketers prefer to still use plain text emails for their mobile subscribers. There’s less risk and it increases the chances of their messages being read and acted on. Plain text emails generally load faster (or seem to because they are image ‘free’) and if you’ve optimized your copy, they should be easier to read on the screen. If however, you’re intent on using html then stick to a single call-to-action image and make sure the message you want to get through is absolutely clear.

Because html and plain text conversion can depend on your target audience and segmentation you should experiment (sorry, I mean test) each version against each other. Be sure to also test different variables, notably subject line, calls-to-action, body content and landing pages, all of which can be changed in both plain text and html emails. This way, you can see for yourself which version converts better for each type of message and decide from there whether html or plain text is best for you.

When it comes down to it, there is no denying that a beautifully designed html email that renders correctly, has a clear call-to-action, links to all the right places and has the necessary bells and whistles sticks in people’s minds. However, if you’re still in the learning stages of creating email campaigns, then take your foot off the heavy html pedal and stick to content and a layout that you know will reach your subscribers. Don’t worry, email marketing is a long term ‘relationship’ and there’s plenty of time to impress them at a later stage with your awesome design skills.

We’re only half way through the year so it’s too early to start drawing any conclusions on this but in the meantime let’s look at what you can do to help optimize the effectiveness of your time sensitive messages so you can make the most out of them.

Your message could be a 24-hour daily deal or it could have a week long expiry date, what’s important though is that even if the offer has expired or  the item has sold out, the subscriber still receives a relevant message when they open the email. This message can be one of a number of things.

If the item has sold out, then this needs to be clearly indicated when the subscriber opens the email.  Something along the lines of: “This item is now out of stock/no longer available, sorry you missed out this time”, or “Our apologies, but this item has sold out”, is fine. To compensate though, you should have recommendations of a similar product in the same price bracket that your subscribers might be interested in. By giving an alternative, you’re lessening the blow of missing out on the special offer in the first place.

This brings me to the second point. If you run promotions once a month for a limited time, such as over a weekend, then it’s a good idea to let your subscribers know a few days before the event that they should watch their inbox for details of an upcoming offer. Think about something like: “Watch this space, our super sale starts in 2 days”, or “Don’t miss out on our next sale, starting 15 June”. This way, they know what’s coming and if they’re interested they have the opportunity to do something about it before the offer ends. This of course makes for a better user experience, just be careful not to get overzealous with the reminders or you might do more harm than good.

The alternative messages that render when an item has sold out or the offer is finished are known as ‘intelligent content’ but right now there is a lot of buzz in the email marketing industry to create emails that self-destruct (delete and archive themselves) once the expiry date or time is reached. This is a very interesting concept and could potentially take the dynamics of email marketing to a whole new level. We can’t wait to see how it develops further, so watch this space.

To get you going, we’ve summed up some of the best questions you can ask yourself to help you identify whether or not you’re engaging with your subscribers in the most appropriate way.

1. Are you giving them with high quality content?

Consistently conceptualizing and delivering quality content that gets you top results every time is by no means easy. What worked yesterday might not work today, and to be honest, sometimes you just have a mental block that you can’t get through. In times like these, you need to have content to fall back on and you need to have it on hand immediately. Many people resort to old school methods like keeping a notepad and pen in their bag, so they can jot down ideas as and when they come up, but as long as you’re writing down content ideas somewhere then it doesn’t really matter how you do it. Off the top of my head, topics such as event listings; lists; trivia, history and interesting facts; Q&A’s; trends and predictions; comparisons; polls and surveys; product reviews; guest contributions and links to interesting industry articles or other blogs are just the tip of the iceberg and they’re all ideas that are essentially ageless.

2. Are you offering them choices through a preference centre?

A preference centre is hugely beneficial and necessary if you offer more than one type of newsletter. It serves a dual purpose in that it lets your subscribers decide which newsletters they’d like to receive and how often, and it also gives them the opportunity to update their profile and add personal information (such as likes, dislikes, job sector etc.) when they’re ready to. This of course is all incredibly helpful data that you can then use to target them more effectively. Just make sure that you let your subscribers know their information is top secret and that you aren’t going to sell or rent it. One of the best ways that you can get people to your email preference centre is by telling them about it in your welcome email when they first sign up. Give them the direct link and let them know what it’s about and remind them they can access and edit it whenever they like.

3. Are you sticking to your word?

Saying one thing and then proceeding to do another is simply unacceptable. Harsh as it may seem, I doubt you’d find one reputable ESP who’d disregard this statement. Email marketing is developed around online relationships and as in real life, if someone doesn’t trust you you’re going to have a hard time convincing them to give you what you want. You need to ensure that if you promise your subscribers something, you’re able to deliver on it, and you need to establish this before you start advertising the fact. This goes for everything from the frequency of the emails you send, to special products/services you’re advertising for today only.

4. Are you interacting with them on their preferred social platforms?

A well set up email preference centre comes in handy here too, as you can also include a field that allows them to choose which social media networks they prefer and which one they’d prefer you to contact them on. They might have a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn account but would prefer you to connect with them only via Twitter for example. Having this type of information can also help you to further segment your audience and it really offers you the opportunity to connect with them on their level, so use it to your advantage. If you’re not yet confident enough to interact, then you can at least start by listening to what your subscribers are posting or tweeting on their profile. What are they waxing lyrical about, what are they dissing and dismissing, what’s trending amongst their peers? Because the topics are focused on what’s happening now and what they’re interested in, this information can be used to help you create and deliver more relevant content. Also make a point of following highly ranked forums and look out for questions that are being asked that you can answer or contribute to. It’s a good way to get yourself known online as an expert in your field and you’ll soon find that people start interacting with you and bringing you into the thick of things.

5. Are you asking them to share with you?

This can be done as a once off survey, or you could choose to include a link on each newsletter that takes them to an online comments field on your website. You can ask your subscribers to share photos, stories, ideas for newsletters, topics they’re interested in finding or reading more about, issues they’d like addressed, any questions they might have, and prizes they’d like to see up for grabs, all of which can be posted on your website. By giving them this platform to speak their minds as it were, they are also helping you with content ideas. You can also take their input one step further and include comments that people have made, or questions that are frequently asked (with your expert answers) in your newsletters. This way, everyone wins.

Finally, but perhaps most importantly, be real, you’re only human after all. There’ll be a time to be serious and a time to laugh and make light of situations. Engaging online, especially across social networks, isn’t about blatant self-promotion and sales pitches, it’s about finding out what your customers want and doing it in the least obtrusive way possible, and then actually doing something about it.

The idea behind dynamic content is that you can set up a single email (which can be repeated for future campaigns), but the content of each gets personalized for each recipient. Because the content is so highly relevant, open rates, click-through-rates and conversion rates are generally much higher. There are also other benefits to incorporating dynamic content, including: automatic updates of editorial content, optimal use of message templates, avoiding double the production work, personalizing external content boxes as well as tracking links inside the external content boxes.

It’s not just with email newsletters that dynamic content can be leveraged. Subscriber’s data including demographics, preferences and interests, purchase behaviour and history and analytical website data can also be applied to email alerts and updates, mobile SMS marketing and even across social media.

So, how can you go about using dynamic content in your email marketing campaign? For starters, you could look at cross selling products. For example, if you know that your customer has recently bought a gas braai from you online, you could offer them accessories to go with it, such as cooking utensils, specialized cleaning products and recipes designed specifically for gas braai meals.

You could also offer vouchers, coupons, discounts or incentives based on the level of your customer’s loyalty. The more loyal they are (and this refers not only to direct sales, but also supporting your newsletter, spreading the good word of your company and so on), the better the deal they get. You can also let your newer customers know about escalating sales offers, which could help motivate them to become even more engaged with you.

Finally, one of the best actions you can take is to genuinely listen to what your customers want and put the information to good use. If they are only interested in holiday promotions to South America (and you know this because they have specifically requested this), then don’t bother ‘trying your luck’ and sending them the latest Asian holiday deal. Really, in the long term your customers will appreciate the fact that you aren’t sending them any and every special deal you have. Your customers want to feel unique and special, so nurture this, do your best to get them what they want and put any information they give you to good use.

1. Firstly, it’s important that you become a “known sender”, which means asking your subscriber to add your email address to their contacts. Not only will this help ensure that your email passes through any spam filters straight to their inbox, but it also means that images will automatically be displayed. Therefore, encourage them with a message along the lines of: “add this email address to your contacts so you always receive our emails” and explain the reasoning behind it.
2. Any images you include need to be relevant to the content and enhance the message, not distract from it. Stick to between one and three small, compressed images that add value to your email and are quick to download (test this before you hit send). The more images your email has the longer it takes to download and there’s always the chance that it won’t render correctly when it does open.
3. It might be stating the obvious, but be sure to include ALT text. This way if the image is blocked the user can still read a description of it and decided from there if they want/need to download it. Also remember to include captions, especially for images that are contextually important for your email message.
4. Try to avoid using images for important content such as headlines, links and calls to action. If the image doesn’t automatically download and if your subscriber doesn’t download it then you could lose an important conversion.
5. Finally, email newsletters and campaigns require constant testing and even more so if you have included images, therefore you need to cover all bases. How does it look in a preview pane, on a full screen and with images turned ON and OFF? Once you’re happy with this then you can start sending.

HTML and the use of images in emails has certainly come a long way in terms of setting standards and making it easier to produce content of this kind, but we aren’t out of the woods yet and we need to take every opportunity we can to follow ‘best practices’ and maximise the effectiveness of what we are currently able to achieve. Good luck!

Drip campaigns take their name from the agricultural term ‘drip irrigation’, whereby crops or plants are given small amounts of water consistently over a long period of time, thereby making it more resource efficient. This (and this is where the email marketing analogy comes in) is because with drip irrigation the ground is given consistent moisture as opposed to just being soaked and then left alone before it is drenched again (think email spray and pray tactics).

No doubt, drip campaigns need to be thought out carefully and planned strategically, so we’ve looked at four important questions you need to consider before you put yours into action.

1. What’s your aim?

What is your end goal and what exact action do you want/need your customers to take in order to reach it? You need to determine the key messages for each email and optimize them individually so that you can work towards reaching this goal.

2. Do you have your content lined up?

It’s been said a thousand times before, but it’s true. Content is king and well-written, informative content will keep your customers and leads interested. With drip campaigns, the content needs to be enticing, clever and even a bit teasing, especially if you are aiming to build up anticipation over the course of your campaign.

3. Are you able to segment your campaigns?

If you’ve only just started out, then you might not have much data with which to segment your campaigns, however even if you have basic information, such as whether they are male or female, it can be used to target your customers with more relevant content. Think about it, there is little worse than receiving an email that is promoting men’s underwear at half price, and you’re a woman. Customer engagement, I think not. As your campaigns and relationships develop, you’ll find out more about your subscribers, such as what their interests are, what they would like to see more or less off, their buying behaviour etc. all of which will help ensure you deliver interesting campaigns that hold value.

4. What’s your layout going to look like?

Think carefully about the layout and design. More than likely you’re going to keep the same template for the duration of the drip campaign, so while it might be nice to get a bright, funky, busy email once in a while, if you’re sending it once a day then the novelty will wear off quickly. Keep it simple, with short and concise copy, one or two relevant images and the necessary links. Remember, you want to keep the focus on getting your readers to perform a specific action with each email you send and you don’t want them to get distracted along the way.

While these steps are by no means the only questions that you need to consider, they are some of the most important ones. A drip email campaign can be one of the best decisions you make or a complete flop, so make sure you’ve planned and thought through each one meticulously before you hit the send button.

Tally up your hard bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints for the time period you’re interested in (usually a month or year) and divide this total number of ‘lost’ subscribers by your current list size and presto, you have your churn rate. A basic example looks like this:

• 3,000 (‘lost’ subscribers) / 10,000 (current list size) = 0.3 x 100 = 30% list churn rate.

While list churn is inevitable to a certain extent, there are steps you can take to reduce it and although they aren’t necessarily ‘quick fixes’ (if there is there such a thing in email marketing?!), if you make a concerted effort to employ these tactics you should start to see positive results.

1. Tell your subscribers everything they need to know

If you don’t have a preference centre where subscribers can decide which newsletters they receive and how often, then tell them what they can expect from you when they first sign up, and stick to this. Email marketing is all about developing a long term online relationship with your subscriber, and this is where it starts. This would also be a good time to lay out your privacy policy, in layman’s terms. No need to go into 5 pages of indecipherable text, just let your subscribers know that you aren’t going to sell, rent or disclose any of their details to anyone else. It’s really that simple.

2. Learn from your mistakes

If someone unsubscribes, politely ask for feedback or comments about why they’re opting out and what you could do better, and then do what you can to implement those suggestions into your campaign. It all helps with customer engagement and while you might have lost this particular subscriber, the constructive criticism can be used to adapt your strategy and help ensure you meet the expectations of the next customer who signs up.

3. Make things easy for your subscribers

Quick and simple opt-in and unsubscribe processes along with reliable contact details are what your subscribers are initially looking for, so get off to a good start and make sure these aspects of your campaign are optimized for ease of use. It’s also a good idea to offer a simple preference centre so your subscribers can easily update their profile or change their preferences in terms of what their interests are, which newsletters they’re interested in, how often they want to receive them etc. Not only is this a good way of engaging with them, but the data is hugely beneficial to you too, because you can use it to segment your audience and target them more effectively.

4. Re-engage inactive subscribers

The term ‘inactive’ is open to interpretation, but generally if a subscriber hasn’t clicked on any of your emails in the past 6 months (based on say 1-2 campaigns a month), then you could assume that they now fall into the ‘inactive’ category. It’s not a train smash, rather see it as an opportunity to re-engage with them and get them interested again in what you had to offer. They obviously liked something you did otherwise they wouldn’t have signed up in the first place, so work off of this. Assuming these subscribers are perhaps bored with your current email offerings, your reactivation campaign needs to jump out at them and offer something truly irresistible that’s going to guarantee a high open rate. This would also be a good time to find out if they are still interested in receiving your emails or if they’d prefer to reduce their subscription or unsubscribe completely.

• Greater control over formatting, layout, colour, fonts, graphics and branding – meaning you can unleash your inner designer and be as creative as you like.
• The result is a beautifully designed email that visually appealing (if you’ve done your testing)
• Interactive functionality
• You can include images that enhance your copy and corporate branding that helps establish brand awareness (make sure these are embedded properly and not just copy/pasted)
• You can include links to: websites, landing pages, videos, sign up forms, etc. (basically anywhere you want to)
• You can track the open rate and click through rate

Before we get carried away with this, it should be noted that although HTML emails are a hugely popular choice for email marketers, plain text emails are not without benefits and in fact many subscribers prefer to receive them over the HTML version. This is because they are:

• Straight forward and easy to read
• Don’t require images to be downloaded
• Always render correctly no matter the ESP or the type of mobile device it’s viewed on

Also, from an email marketer’s point of view they’re easy to produce and don’t require hours or days of testing. HTML versions on the other hand may very well have you pulling out your hair at 2am in the morning because for some reason it ‘looks a bit funny’ when you test it in such and such a browser or email client. Which is why marketers almost always include a plain text option alongside the HTML version, so that those who can’t or don’t like to open HTML emails don’t miss out.

Of course each version also has its share of downsides. With HTML:

• Emails invariably take much longer to open and download, especially if they’re image heavy.
• If you’ve downloaded the email to view it later offline the images won’t display and links will appear to be broken
• Someone, somewhere will undoubtedly have a problem with it rendering incorrectly when they open it
• A busy design and too many images and/or links can be very distracting, which ultimately affects your click through and conversion rates
• If you’re an email marketing newbie, creating an HTML email might be a bit mind boggling, although most good ESPs (such as Mail Blaze) have pre-build templates which do all the hard work for you.

And with plain text:

• Text can’t be hyperlinked
• Any link that is included has to be typed out completely (e.g. http://www.mailblaze.com)
• You can’t include any images or graphics
• You can’t format the font at all

At the end of the day, when it comes down to it both formats have proven to work very well in terms of open rates and conversion rates, so the best thing that you can do is to create both an HTML and a plain text version of your campaign and give your subscribers the option to open either. That way you cater effectively to all your subscribers and it helps ensure your message gets across to as many of them as possible. In short, cover all your bases.

For the past year they have been a seriously hot trend largely due to the fact that they can literally be applied to almost everything. Although they have been used for years in Japan, the technology to utilize them to similar levels elsewhere was simply not available. Thanks to the world wide explosion of the smart phone however, that’s changing. Most smart phone users download an app that allows them to easily scan QR codes, but some new smart phones come with a QR scanner pre-installed, which just goes to show how popular they’re becoming.

Once a code has been scanned, it causes the phone to load data. Often this data is a URL, which then opens the embedded website on the mobile device thereby delivering instant information to the reader.

Although QR codes are undeniably novel and successful in print form, many marketers are still sitting on the fence regarding its practicality in email marketing. In an email message they would be used in the same place as an ordinary link, but where a QR code would still require scanning, a link can simply be clicked. This makes it a tricky and less effective option if your subscribers are already viewing the email on their mobile device. If that’s the case, they would need to be able to first save the image on their phone to scan later, or they would have to have a second mobile device handy in order to scan the code (somewhat unlikely). Either way, it takes away some of the ‘immediacy’ that a QR code brings with it.

If however you are integrating email marketing with traditional marketing solutions such as direct print mail, then QR codes could be put to good use here. Unique codes on advertising could instantly take readers to:

• The home page of your website
• The sign-up page for your email newsletter
• A landing page for special offers
• A ‘contact us for more information’ page
• Automatically register them for a competition or freebie
• Send a text on your behalf
• Display text, contact or additional product information
• Provide directions to your stores (via Google Maps)
• Connect to a wireless network
• Display your social network profiles

There’s no doubt that we’ll be seeing much more creative use of QR codes this year, even though we’re already finding them in magazine advertising and editorials, name tags, for sale signs (directs you to a virtual tour of the property) coupons, billboards, busses and bus stops, posters, cards, clothes, business cards, invoices, print distributions and street signs, making them hugely versatile. If you can find a way to incorporate them into your overall marketing strategy, you’ll be engaging with your customers on an entirely new level and you’ll be staying ahead of the latest marketing trend.

If you’re interested in taking the next step, then there are a number of free or inexpensive QR code generators online such as Kaywa, ZXing Project and QR Stuff. For inspiration, you can also check out some innovative examples of QR codes here and here.