Google Buzz

Google has just launched it’s own social network platform called Google Buzz.

Google Buzz has been integrated with it’s highly popular Gmail platform, allowing users to connect with their contacts, it’s come under a certain amount of criticism due to some of it’s privacy settings, primarily that it integrated social media features into the users email account, causing Google to apologise for the error and moving quickly to repair the damage.

It appears that Google didn’t test outside of it’s own employees before they realised it on the millions of Gmail users. Buzz product manager told the BBC that they did not external testing before it’s launch saying that “We’ve been testing Google Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letter Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild”

It does appear the Google have jumped the gun slightly in Buzz and seemed to of rushed it out rather than test properly, it’s not the type of thing that we’ve come to expect from Google who on the whole do a pretty good job of rolling new and innovative products out, let’s hope they haven’t damaged their reputation with Buzz.

Whether Google Buzz can compete with the likes of Twitter and Facebook remains to be seen, it’s early days yet. Do we really need another social network? will Google Buzz be used in similar ways to Facebook and Twitter or will it find its only little niche in the social media world. One things for sure, Google Buzz is here to stay and I for one can only see it getting bigger and bigger.

HTML Email Images

Images in HTML emails can be really useful at helping to convey the message you are trying to put across, they turn an ordinary plain email into something that can stand out in an already crowded inbox, we all want our email subscribers to act on the message we are sending and images can help to do that, whether it be a ‘20% discount’ type of banner or an image of a location or attraction.

Images off in email clients

The only draw back with using lots of images in your emails is that many email clients are set to ‘images off’ as default, or if you are receiving an email from someone not in your contacts list images are blocked.

This normally would not be a problem, if for instance just your email header wasn’t shown, or perhaps a few small images throughout the copy did not appear. However it does become an issue if the bulk of your email message is made up of one or two big images and little or no text.

For example, below is an email I received to my Yahoo email account recently. By default my images are turned off, so this is how the email displayed when I opened it.

After getting me to open the email with an incentive driven subject line I’m left feeling slightly let down that the email does not contain what it promised.

Let’s see what it looks like with the images on

Quite a bit of a difference I think you’ll agree.

Now this might not seem like a big deal – there is after all a nice button at the top offering me the chance to view the images, but lots and lots of people are worried about their privacy (which is why email clients block images in the first place),  and do not fully understand that it’s probably ok to view the images. So at best your email gets deleted, at worst it gets classed as junk or spam as both Hotmail and Yahoo make that button nice and prominent in their interfaces.

Never send image only emails

So as a rule, never send your email entirely as one image, a good balance of text and images will mean that your message still gets through even if the images are blocked, like in the example below

Email with balance of copy and images

Although a big chunk of the images are blocked I can still understand what they want me to do, I am still able to see that website address and understand what the offer is.

Many ESP have services available that let you check how your email renders in a host of different clients. It’s worth running your campaigns through these every now and again (there is normally a cost involved) to check how your email looks. Of course you could always set up some test accounts and set them up with images off by default and see how your email renders

It’s also worth noting that emails with images off can screw with your open rates. HTML emails place an invisible tracking image (usually about 1 pixel by 1 pixel) that when called from the web server helps your ESP know that the email has been opened,  if images are blocked the image does not get called and an open not registered. (that’s why you can’t tell the open rates of plain text only emails)

Hosting Email Images

Make sure that you host the images on a web server. You can’t embed or attach the images as if you were sending the email to a friend. All image paths should be absolute e.g. http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/image/myimage.jpg and not image/myimage.jpg

So to recap:

• Never send an email entirely made up of images.
• Many email clients block images in email be default – especially from non contacts.
• A balance of text and images usually works best
• Test your email in different email clients with images on and images off
• If your ESP provides a service to test how your email renders in different email clients, use it regularly to test your creative
• Remember that blocked images can mess with your open rate metrics
• Always host the images on a web server, never embed or attach, use absolute paths

BT internet email addresses causing hard bounces

There’s been a global issue with  BT internet email addresses over the last few days. This means that email sent to those email addresses has been producing a ‘hard bounce’  The problem was first noticed late last week and at present it’s not clear if the problem has been resolved.

Many ESP’s have a threshold on the number of times that an email address can hard bounce before it is put into quarantine.  This is to stop problems with you becoming ‘blacklisted’ and therefore not being able to send emails to a specific domain or domains.

Check your email reports for high hard bounce rates and if you can,  find out what email addresses are affected. Work with your ESP on the best course of action.

Email Marketing Lists

If you want to send emails to people you need their permission it’s a simple as that. We’re not talking about emails you may send to a friend or colleague, we’re talking about regular emails you may want to send to your customers or people who visit your website and want to know more about your products or services, so if you want to use email marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy make sure you have peoples permission to do so.

There are a number of ways you can do this. You could build your own opted in list via your website or you could buy an email list from a reputable data supplier to promote your list.

You can email those who people who have supplied an email address as part of a sale or if you are emailing them about a similar product they have purchased from you as long as you give those means to unsubscribe at any time.

Build your email list

Take every opportunity to grow your email list. Make your sign up box prominent on every page of your website. So many companies fail in this. Keep it simple, first name and email address are all you really need, you can collect other data later.

Make sure you advertise your newsletter on all of your off line media, in brochures, flyers, posters and event or exhibition material.

Getting people to part with their email address can be tough, so when they do, treat it with respect. You need to convince people that they should give you their details – what’s in it for them? You can try incentivising your sign up – a subscriber only discount or offer, entry into a competition or prize draw, a useful guide or download that the subscriber would find useful. These types of incentives also have the added benefit of making your subscriber want to open your emails when they arrive.

Once someone has subscribed to your list follow it up immediately with a ‘welcome’ email. Use this to reinforce why they signed up to your newsletter. This is always a good point to remind them of the free download or offer that prompted then to sign up in the first place.

Keep it simple

Keep the information you ask brief, first name and email address are essential, you may also want to collect, last name and title too.

Lots of tick boxes and other fields will put people off, especially if that information is for things like income (if you don’t need to know something, why ask for it?)
You need that person to sign up to your email newsletter, you can go back later to collect further information if you need to, or get certain information when they buy your product.

Make your privacy policy visible

Don’t hide what you intend to do with someone’s data, be as transparent as possible. Tell them who you are and how often you will be emailing them. Email marketing has come under a lot of scrutiny recently, especially as a large proportion of the email that is sent every day is spam (we are talking billions of emails) so be upfront about who you are. Make your unsubscribe procedure clear too.

Your opt in page

Keep your page simple, tell potential subscribers what it is you are offering if they part with their email address. If you are offering a download or freebie/discount make it clear when they can get or claim this e.g. after you hit the subscribe button you will be taken to a page to claim your discount etc…

Customer testimonials are a great way to convince people in the value of subscribing to your newsletter.

Tell them what you are going to send and when you are going to send it. Don’t promise a weekly newsletter and then email once a month.

Promote your privacy policy and unsubscribe mechanism.

Leave any tick boxes empty, never pre tick them.

Keeping your email list clean

It’s imperative that you keep your email marketing list as clean as possible. They should be kept free of email addresses that hard bounce and those subscribers who ask to be unsubscribed.

Managing your email list

• Remove incorrectly formatted email addresses
• Invalid domains and typo’s (e.g. alo.com)
• Hard bounces
• Confirm email addresses
• Customer update link – Change of email or other details
• Monitor delivery rates by domain
• Test emails

Soft Bounce

An email that gets as far as the recipients email server but is ‘bounced back’ undelivered before it gets to the recipient.

A soft bounce can occur for a number of different reasons – recipient’s mailbox is full, server is down or swamped with messages, message too large or user has abandoned the mailbox.

Hard Bounce

Email is returned to the sender and is permanently undeliverable.

Causes of hard bounces can be – domains that don’t exist, typo’s changed addresses or recipient’s mail server has blocker your server.

Keeping your email lists is critical to your reputation, which together with a number of other factors determines whether your email gets delivered.

What is email marketing?

Put really simply it’s the use of electronic mail for marketing purposes. Of course it’s a little bit more complex than that. Email marketing is a form of direct marketing, it allows companies too easily and cost effectively communicate with their customer base and target and acquire new customers.

Email marketing is often used in conjunction with other forms of traditional marketing such as direct mail and newspaper and magazine ads.

The advantage of using email is that it’s a lot quicker to get your message to a large number of people, it’s certainly cheaper and more often than not you see the results of email campaigns a lot earlier than other forms of traditional marketing.

Now that sounds wonderful but it’s not without its disadvantages. Practically anyone with an email account will have been plagued by ‘spam’ or ‘junk’ email at some point; email marketing messages can often be seen as such. It can sometimes be difficult for the recipient to determine what a legitimate email is and what ‘spam’ is

Because of this it’s imperative that you have someone’s permission to email them (it’s actually a legal requirement) without it you cannot email them, it’s really that simple.

I will be adding separate posts on each of the main components of an email marketing, from list growth to sending campaigns and measuring results, I’ll also make it available to download later.

Search Engine Optimisation – Basics

For those of you who aren’t sure what Search Engine Optimisation is, put simply it’s the process of getting highly targeted traffic to your website via the search engines. Search Engine Optimisation is often known as SEO or SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

It’s no good having a nicely designed website if no one visits it. You can direct people to it via business cards, company literature but that really is a drop in the ocean.

The trick of SEO is to drive the people who are searching for what your website offers to your website. Depending on what market you are in, there are potentially hundreds of thousands of searches every day, the trick is getting those people to your site, to do that you need to have good search engine rankings, that is to appear highly in the search engine results for your chosen keywords.

SEO takes time and it needs to be done properly and constantly so that your site continually gets the best targeted traffic possible.

There are a number of things you need to do to ensure you rank well for your chosen search terms. I will cover each of these in a separate post but some of the main areas are

Keywords and keyword research
Meta Data
Title Tag
Content
Headings
URL’s
Links and Link building
Off page optimisation

I will cover what I consider to be the cornerstone of good SEO – keyword research in the next post.

Email Testing – why you should test every email campaign.

One of the great things about email marketing is that you can test and measure results quickly. Sometimes within minutes of sending an email campaign you can tell whether it’s working or not.

A recent study of 623 email marketers found that 37% did not test any part of their email campaigns.

Email testing – It doesn’t need to be complex

Testing does not need to be a difficult process involving complex algorithms it can be as simple as testing one subject line against another. A simple A/B split test can provide useful information that can then be used in the next campaign.

By just testing something as simple as a subject line you could notice a difference in open rates, what potentially positive impact could that have on your campaign?

What should I be testing?

Subject lines

An important part of your email campaign, it has a big sway in your email actually getting opened. If you can segment your list then you can send specific lines to certain segments.

Offers

Price testing, discount codes, free downloads. Price testing is a great way to quickly and easily test pricing for new products or changing the pricing of existing ones.

Calls to action

Really important this one, it can make the difference between someone clicking through from your email and them not. You can test text Vs image call to actions – text links as opposed to a banner. Where in the email do you place the links? (I would always recommend adding one high up in the email, above the ‘fold’ of the preview pane) and what do the call to actions say.

Length of email

Short copy Vs long copy. It would be easy to assume that in today’s fast paced life we all seem to lead that keeping copy short would be logical, we’re told people scan there inboxes and emails. However depending on the type of email you send, long copy may well suit your audience. If you have very long emails you could try breaking it down into ‘snippets’ and adding links to the full article hosted on your website.

Layout

Fonts, images, position of copy or ads, style can all be tested. Does your email reflect your brand? Is the design of your email consistent with that of your other marketing? Does it need to be?

Time, day, how often – If you go by common industry thought, B2B send early in the week (Mon/Tues) and B2C later in the week (Thurs/Fri) however this may not be true at all, you might find this completely turned on its head.

What time of day do you send, first thing in the morning so it’s in the inbox for 8.30 or later in the evening when people are perhaps catching up on email after the kids have gone to bed and the washing up has been done?

How often depends on what type of email you send. You need to tell subscribers when they are going to receive you email, e.g. while you are testing to say ‘weekly’ would be fine, once you know what day gets the best response then you can tell them when to expect your email.

Does sending at a weekend work? Or is everyone too busy having fun to be sat checking their emails?

Who is your email from – This has an effect on your reputation too so be sure to get this one right. Do your emails come from your company name or brand or from an individual person within the company.

How to test your email marketing

Random test – You may have a large data base, so you could test just a small random segment of your list and roll out the winning test to the rest of your list.

A/B split test – or A/B/C testing, depending on the variable. For example you could test 3 subject lines to see which one gets the better open rate, useful if you are doing email campaigns to third party lists. A/B price test, £5.99 Vs £7.99

Have a control and test against it, when the control is beaten by the test this then becomes your new control and you test against that.

Signup.to have produced a really useful email benchmarking report for UK email marketers on email marketing performance. The report is based on emails sent from their own clients across a number of different industries. It’s useful to see how your email marketing stacks up against others in your given industry.

To see how your email bench marks against others in your industry, pick up a copu of the report

Get the full email marketing report here

In these times of recession, email marketers are under more pressure than ever to get the best return from their email marketing campaigns. So it’s tempting to crank up the frequency in which you hit your list or lists.

As email marketers we’re under increasing pressure to maximise the ROI from email marketing campaigns and in the short term there may well be a lift in sales or website visits but how much long term damage could this do to your overall reputation? You risk potentially doing more harm than good if you increase the frequency in the number of emails you send, you could end up bombarding your subscribers with more emails than they are happy to receive from you – don’t forget you’re not the only one sending them emails!!

So what can email marketers do?

Well sometimes less is more! A well targeted and timely email campaign will yield far better results than an untargeted blast to your entire file.

Segment your list

I’ve known companies (and I’ve done it myself) segment to the most very basic level, for example, if your database contains people who have bought different products from you, then email people who have bought product A promoting product B. (not forgetting to make sure you exclude anyone who already owns both products!)

You could send a targeted offer to the male and female readers of your list; it could even promote the same product but with a different message that appeal to that demographic.

Depending on how much you know about your subscribers there is so much you can do. If you don’t know much about your subscribers (perhaps you have only collected the most basic information) then you can ask them, run a questionnaire or poll on your website and find out more about them, these can be targeted to your business needs, then make segments based on the feedback and email accordingly.

Timing your email campaigns

Timing your email campaign is critical to its success; I have learnt this from bitter experience. I’d recommend thoroughly testing the day and time that you send your email campaigns to see when you get the best response. From experience it tends to be Tuesday to Thursday, between 5 & 9 in the evening. Of course this may be different for your industry and also for your market, for instance those in a B2B environment may notice that’s it better to send early in the week opposed to sending on a Friday afternoon when people are winding down for the weekend.

Of course a timely offer is a great way to increase the response of your campaign. Email campaigns around a specific event work well. If you know the date of your subscriber’s birthday you could do a special offer available on that day. Or its known event coming up (mothers day, Valentines Day or the kids going back to school)

As with all marketing test, test and test again.

Run split campaigns against creative to see which works best and if your as not testing subject lines on EVERY send you should be!

You may have heard the term multipart message, but do you know what it is?

When sending an email to your subscribers you don’t know whether they can actually receive HTML or just plain text emails. Many email clients are set up just to read plain text, if you only send in html your message is lost.

Sending in multipart format basically means your email server bundles your html and a plain text version of your message and sends them at the same time, if your subscriber can read html they get that version, if not the plain text version is delivered.

Top Tip: Send welcome emails in plain text only, that way your first contact with a new subscriber is not lost.

If you’ve never sent HTML emails there are a couple of things to remember.

1. You can’t just attach an html version as you would if you were sending your email to single person. Email clients will break paths to things like images and your email won’t render.
2. Use tables for layout – most email clients really don’t support much CSS; you certainly can’t use an external style sheet. Keep CSS light and make sure it’s inline.
3. Images – many email clients now default to images off so be careful when planning your message. Is your important sales message in a nifty image or banner? Chances are your subscriber won’t see it.

I’ll be covering the basics of HTML email design in another post.