5 Real Steps to Easier Email

Have you ever thought about your subscribers? Who are they? What are their occupations? If they subscribe to your newsletters, buy your products, and respond to your offers, it doesn’t always mean they devote all their time to online marketing. Your subscribers or customers are quite different people with totally different jobs and mindsets. If they have a full-time work, they may access their computers for a short time on the evening or at night only.

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Subject Line Personalization: Does It Make Sense?

As the Subject line is one of the factors that make the reader either open or delete the message, we’re always wondering about the best way to write the Subject line. In one of my latest articles I shared several tips on how to write the Subject line to increase the email open rate.

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6 Tips for Writing Better “Subject” Lines

Like the From field the Subject line is one of the most important components of a successful newsletter sending campaign. Together with the From line, the Subject line determines whether the recipient will open an email, delete it immediately, save file it for future reading, or report and/or filter it as spam. Plus, many anti-spam filters use the Subject lines to separate good emails from spam. So, because of a poorly written Subject the email may not even reach the recipient’s inbox in the first place.

Below are the tips to write Subject lines that produce higher open and click-through rates:

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Tailoring “From” and “Subject” Lines for Email Clients

So you got a great email message design, wrote a perfect Subject line, added your company name to the From field and you think you’re ready to send the email out. Wait a minute. You work may not be over yet. You probably will need to spend some time for optimizing your From and Subject lines. What does it mean and why is optimizing the From and Subject lines so important?

You know different email clients render the From and Subject lines in different ways. This is one of the challenges of distributing email newsletters.

Some email clients limit the quantity of characters if the From and/or Subject lines. So, if your Subject is too long, it will be cut off and may be unreadable for the recipient. In some email programs the From and Subject lines are interrelated – the longer the From field, the shorter the Subject line is allowed. The From field can be displayed either as Name + Email Address, or Name, or Email Address in different email programs.

It’s good if you know what email clients your recipients use to view your emails. You can then tailor your "From" and especially "Subject" lines to display properly for all the recipients. If you don’t have the information about your recipients’ email programs, try to optimize your message at least for the most common email clients listed in the table below.

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Bigger List, Better Results

Since email marketing is the cheapest form of marketing, many email marketers focus on building as big mailing list as possible believing that the bigger list they have the better results they get. Of course, obtaining new subscribers or customers is a good thing. But a smaller list of active, interested and motivated subscribers or customers is really what you should aim at. At least, take time to clear your list from invalid emails and reduce the energy you spend on your inactive members.

Here are a few tips how you can get the most out of your active members:

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8 Tips to Minimize Spam Complaints

Minimizing spam complaints is closely related to best email marketing practices and starts with the method of collecting email addresses. You should remember that nowadays sending unsolicited emails will only hurt you. To get the lowest complaint rates, you need to either use a confirmed opt-in method, or properly manage your single opt-in list. If you send to a solid permission-based list but still find that your spam complaints rate is higher than the optimal rate and/or is rising, consider the following:

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Click-through Rate

How many people clicked the links in your email? Which links did they click the most? Did you see a rise in purchases? How long after you sent the campaign do links keep getting clicked?

Try experimenting with:

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Email with Higher Open and Click-through Rates Wins

Email marketers often use a technique that implies segmenting the email list and sending different versions of the same email to each segment. Such split tests help compare the effectiveness of different subject lines, creative approaches, offers, etc. During the next campaign marketers often send the version that had either the highest open or click-through rate (or both) believing that this version is more effective. However, the true is that the email that resulted in a higher open or click-through rate may not be the version that produces the best results. In some cases the email with a lower click-through rate can lead to a higher number of transactions because it was of greater interest but to fewer people.

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Why Subscribers Become Inactive

Some time later after the launch of your email marketing program you may discover (based on your campaign statistics) that some of your subscribers didn’t open any of your emails within a certain period of time. You would most likely wonder why. We believe that the causes of such inactivity may be the following (we don’t include bounced emails in this case):

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Segmenting List Using G-Lock EasyMail Capabilities

With G-Lock EasyMail you can send a regular (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) newsletter to your subscribers. It works great for that kind of stuff. You can use your current customer database to manage your recipients and segment them any way you want. Then you can link to your database directly from G-Lock EasyMail. The “external list” option is very powerful in G-Lock EasyMail. You can create a link to any ODBC compliant database and take the email addresses directly from the database without import-export. Or, you can export your list to a file and import it into G-Lock EasyMail. There is even a simpler way – if you export your recipients’ email addresses to a text file, you can load it into G-Lock EasyMail in seconds. Yes, so easy.

Plus, you can store any additional recipient’s information like the first name, last name, company name, job title, gender, age, etc, etc. You can filter the recipients in any way you want to easy management of your list. We’ve made G-Lock EasyMail so that is supports an unlimited number of email lists. That is you don’t need to clear the previous list of recipients before importing a new one. You can simply create a new list and import your new recipients in it. This also makes easy to segment your subscribers as you want: by buying habits, purchase history, location, account type, ISP (at-home vs. at-work), Gender, Age, etc. So, you can create and send focused, relevant email newsletters to each recipients list. Take your customer list, and send half in the morning, and the other half in the afternoon. Or split them into different days. Or try different subject lines, etc., etc. everything you can imagine.

Linking to externally managed lists from G-Lock EasyMail

The feature of G-Lock EasyMail to integrate with external ODBC compatible databases is an extremely powerful tool for experimenting with your email marketing. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or mathematician, and you don’t have to program anything. You can simply use your own customer database to create multiple lists, and then link to those lists from G-Lock EasyMail and send separate campaigns to them.

From our experience we came to the conclusion that MS Access is one of the most popular databases for storing and managing email lists. So, we will demonstrate how to create a link to a database from G-Lock EasyMail address book at the example of a MS Access database.

To connect to a MS Access database from G-Lock EasyMail, follow these steps:

1. Open G-Lock EasyMail

2. Click on Address Book icon

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How to Get Better Email Open Rate

As an e-mail marketer you’re surely wondering what happens with your email after it is sent. Did your subscribers open it? How many people opened your message and clicked on your links? Not only do such metrics help us identify active and inactive subscribers on our lists, they also help us understand whether our email is relevant to the expectations and interests of our recipients. That’s why we collect email tracking metrics – to analyze them and search for ways to improve them.

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