Posts Tagged ‘subscribers’

Based on our experience we conclude that an email list may contain 20-30% of inactive subscribers. In the context of email marketing we call inactive those subscribers who have not opened any email during a given period of time. In this chapter we’ll tell about possible reasons of the subscribers’ inactivity, examine the methods how to determine who is inactive on the list and give several tips for re-engaging them.

• Why Subscribers Become Inactive   
• How to Identify Who is Inactive   
• How to Re-engage Inactive Recipients

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The recipients will be viewing your email newsletter in different email applications which render HTML email differently. For this reason, you need to test your email first and make sure it works in as many different email applications as possible. There are many email applications out there and they all render HTML email in different sometimes unpredictable ways. Do you need to test every single newsletter across every single application, every single time you send? No. Just setup a good, simple, foolproof template and test it as much as possible. In the future all you’ll need to do is to vary the content. It really helps to setup a test computer (or two) in your office. If it’s not possible, send the email to a few friends or office-mates. Just ask them to let you know if anything looks "off" or broken to them.

In the table below we summarize the particularities of most popular email clients. Knowing common issues of various email applications will help you find the optimal HTML design so that you email newsletter is displayed in the suitable way for all the subscribers.

• AOL 9. The "preview pane" is extremely tiny. Make sure to design your emails to peek out enough from the preview pane. Your HTML code needs an extra line break or two after the final </HTML> tag, or you’ll see weird "equals signs" in your email.
• Outlook 2000. Default installations of Outlook 2000 will display almost anything you throw at it, including embedded movies. Displays HTML email just fine but like in AOL, if you don’t have an extra line break under the closing </HTML> tag, you may see mysterious equals signs appearing in your email.
• Outlook 2003. Blocks images by default to protect your privacy. Displays HTML email fine, but default installations of Outlook 2003 open up in 3 vertical panes, leaving little room for your preview pane.
• Mozilla Thunderbird. Mozilla Thunderbird blocks images like other apps, but doesn’t use big, obvious placeholders. If you use "alt text" for a logo graphic for instance, the Alt test will display, instead of a big "broken/blocked image" graphic. The downside of this is that, depending on what alt text you use, people may never know there’s an image to display, and won’t click the "show images" button. If you don’t use alt text for your images, a placeholder seems to appear like other apps.
• Thunderbird 1.5 has a new "This looks like a Phishing scam" feature, where you get a big warning icon at the top of the email if it detects a link that appears to be deceptive. For instance, if it finds a link described as, "Paypal home page" but the URL actually points to some suspicious URL.
• Lotus Notes. You’ll almost always get a random border box around something. A graphic, a table cell – whatever. Lotus Notes 6.5.3 handles center alignment ok, but 6.5.4 doesn’t. And neither seems to handle animated GIFs with transparency. COLSPANs can also be touchy here. Keep the table structures very simple.
• Comcast, Bellsouth, and other "at-home" ISPs. We’ve noticed some "at-home" ISPs use email servers that interpret lines beginning with "periods" to mean "end of email." So be careful not to start any lines with a period. Sounds weird to do such a thing anyway, but places where it often occurs include: plain-text emails, where someone uses periods as visual markers and divider lines, embedded CSS code (header, footer, etc). Indent your CSS, or add a space in front of each line to get around this.

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Sometimes a correction email may come to your help if you made a serious mistake in the original message, but at the same time it may play a nasty trick on you. Yes, sending a correction email may have a few downsides.

• Firstly, some recipients will simply not like to receive another email from you in a short amount of time. That’s why try to determine what recipients were affected by the error and send the correction email to those people only.
   
• Secondly, people used to scan the email and they may not notice the mistake. The correction email brings the mistake to their attention and can affect your company reputation.
   
• And finally, a correction email can cause a few additional unsubscribe requests. For this reason, send a correction email only if you made a big goof in the original letter that can seriously mislead your subscribers and/or ruin your company brand.

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We know how hard and time-consuming the work with bouncebacks and "unsubscribe" messages can be. That’s why we’ve incorporated the Bounced Manager module into G-Lock EasyMail.  Here is a quick overview how it works.

With G-Lock EasyMail you can direct all bounced emails to a separate email account so you can easily manage them at a later time. You simply enter an email address destined to collect bouncebacks, for instance bounced@yourdomain.com, into "Return E-mail Address" field when you fill the account in, and you will receive the bouncebacks to that address.

Some time later after your email newsletter is sent out to your subscribers, you start the Bounced Manager module from G-Lock EasyMail. The Bounced Manager provides you with the most accurate bounce detection solution. It downloads your bounces, classifies them, and helps you remove bad email addresses from your email lists.

You’ll see bounced messages in the middle pane as far as the Bounced Manager will be retrieving them. The Bounced Manager recognizes the following types of bounced messages:

• Hard. The mail server could not send the message. The most common example of a hard bounce is if the user doesn’t exist on that domain, or the mailbox is unavailable, or the email address is invalid.
• Soft. The recipient’s mail server is temporarily unable to accept the message. This usually happens when the user’s mailbox is full, or the user is over quota, or the mail domain is unrouteable.
• Blocked. Indicates that the recipient’s mail server blocked the message sent from your IP address or from your mail server’s IP address.
• Temporary. The mail server is temporarily unable to send your message. This usually happens if the mailbox is temporarily disabled or not found.
• Spam. Indicates that the message was blocked by anti-spam filters on the recipient’s mail server or email client.
• MDN. Indicates that the message is a Message Disposition Notification, commonly known as a "read receipt".
• Warning. Indicates that the mail server will try to deliver the message again.
• Unknown. Indicates that the program was not able to detect the type of the bounce message.

The Bounced Email Manager extracts the email addresses from bounced messages and saves them to a file.

The program creates a unique file name for every session and inserts the date and time into the file name, for example Bounced_2006-Dec-20 [13.27.19].txt.

By default the files with bounced email addresses are saved to this folder on the disk: …My Documents\G-Lock Software\EasyMail\Bounced

If you want to save the files with bounced email addresses to another place, you can select a different location in the Bounced Manager settings.

After all bounced emails are retrieved, you can quickly add them to the exclusion list in G-Lock EasyMail Address Book.

To add bounced emails to the Exclusion List:

• Click on "Add to Exclusion List" icon in G-Lock EasyMail Bounced manager
• Select a group or database name

Bounced emails will be added to the Exclusion List of the selected group or database.

To delete bounced messages from the server, click "Delete email(s) from server".

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It’s believed that emails sent on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday get better open rates. There is some truth in it. The work is in full swing and people are more likely to act on the messages. So, if you are sending breaking news, announcements, daily newsletters and the like, consider distributing them in the middle of the week.

However, for non-business related emails weekends as well as Monday and Friday can be the best time to motivate readers or customers to take a specific action upon your message. Think about sports or music fans, cine amateurs, weekend sport warriors and others, who may be more likely to take an action on the weekend. Also, some people used to plan their purchases for the weekend when they are in a “purchasing mood”.

In addition, the consistency you are distributing your newsletter is important too. Sending it consistently on a Monday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday will generally lead to better results and your open rates are likely to be higher than if you send inconsistently on Tuesday through Thursday.

The bottom line: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are optimal days to send email newsletters. But if your company offers goods or products relevant to your customers’ leisure-time, consider sending the emails on different days – Saturday or Sunday. And try to establish the consistency so that your subscribers can expect the arrival of your email at the specified day.

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After you created a list of subscribers who confirmed their wish to receive emails from you and segmented your list depending on the recipients’ preferences, you can start creating your email message.

The “Multipart-Alternative MIME format” is what you need. The MIME format means that your email program ties your HTML code and a plain-text version of the message together into one email. In this case if a recipient’s email program doesn’t display a HTML email, the recipient will see a usual plain-text version of your message. You either need to program a script to send email in multipart/alternative MIME format, or just use an outside program (like G-Lock EasyMail) to deliver the emails for you. 

G-Lock EasyMail automatically prepares a text version of your message while you’re creating a HTML part. You can also edit the plain text part separately so it can differ from the HTML part.

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Open rates are tracked with the use of a transparent one pixel gif image hosted on a server and inserted into a HTML message just like usual images. Any action on the recipients’ part that leads to the image load is counted as an open. But this metric may not be accurate if:

• the recipient prefers receiving plain text messages;
• the recipient open a HTML email in a non-HTML compatible email client;
• the recipient’s email client doesn’t load the images by default;
• the recipient opens the email offline after download.

As a result all the above "email opens" will not be counted in the stats.

The open rate is generally defined as "percentage of unique email opens from the total of emails delivered". People can open the same email several times, and some companies measure open rates based on total opens rather than unique opens that results in overstated open rates. Some marketers equate the "email opens" to the "email reads" that may not be true at all. 

It is important that you clearly define how you will measure the email open rate for your company, and then consistently work at improving it (from 40% to 50%, for example) without paying attention to someone else’s 80%.
 

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Your sender reputation with ISPs is the key factor which determines what will happen to your email after you click “Send”. Your reputation is built on your email sending activity, and it’s much easier to spoil it rather than restore your good name.

Although many email marketers underestimate it, sender reputation is a big concern. A bad reputation is often the reason for the emails being filtered and not reaching the recipients.

At the beginning you need to decide how you want to segment your list. Segmentation depends on the type of your online business, the volume of information you gathered about your subscribers during the sign-up process as well as on the resources you have to deliver relevant emails to each of your segments.

If you sell any products online, you may want to segment your list based on the types of products customers buy or are interested in; if you run a travel site, you may think about splitting your list based on the vacation destination interests; if you offer apparel and/or cosmetics, it may be reasonable to segment based on sex and purchase habits.

You’ll need to create separate versions of your emails or variable elements of the email. Remember that the success of an email marketing campaign is in delivering information that is as personally relevant as possible for each recipient.

Here are several criteria you can use to segment your list:

• Product-based: if you allow the subscribers choose their areas of product interest, take care to prepare separate versions of your email newsletter targeted to each product area. The emails don’t need to be quite different. You can simply insert the relevant product name into each copy or tailor the intro note for the relevant product with the rest of the email being the same.
• Gender-based: if you sell the products for men and women, for example, clothing, shoes, cosmetics, consider creating separate copies of your email for each gender or personalizing each email by including only relevant product items.
• Purchase-based: if a recipient purchases a product or service, you may want to send a trigger-based email a few weeks later that promotes other similar products or services.
• RFM-based: RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value) is a way of segmenting the customers based on their value and likeliness to purchase. The simplest way of using RFM analysis would be to send an email offering % discount for the products or services to those customers who have not purchased from you in more than six months. For your active purchasers, you can send emails more frequently than the rest of your list.
• Domain-based: this segmentation criteria mainly applies to your AOL subscribers. Because of their unique online preferences and AOL email software client issues, we recommend sending messages optimized specifically for AOL recipients. The optimization can include:

• special HTML emails with no graphics, but with bold text, hyperlinks, and color;
• your company name in the Subject line (the AOL email client shows your email address in the From field, but not your name);
• shorter Subject line to ensure that it shows completely (AOL leaves less space for the Subject line than other email clients);
• be careful with using the 1 pixel image to track open rates. This clear .gif image will set off the image warning in AOL causing some recipients to delete the email. Why will the recipient download any pictures if the email doesn’t contain them?

Tip: If your email doesn’t contain any images (for example, pictures of the products, goods you’re selling or the like) except the 1 pixel tracking image, consider inserting your photo near your signature at the end of the message. As the alternative text for the photo you can write something like "My Photo". It won’t arouse any suspicion with the recipient and there is a chance the recipient will download the photo to see you. The tracking image will be loaded together with your photo and the open will be counted by your email tracking system.

When doing customer segmentation some large companies should take into account from dozens to hundreds of demographic and behavioral variables and use sophisticated tools and techniques. But for most small companies, getting started with list segmentation can be simple using just a few variables and still produce significant results.

The thing to keep in mind when segmenting your customers is to assess how responsible the segmented categories are. It’s important to just get started with your segmentation and then continually refine and perfect your program as you go.

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Your opt-in page has the only purpose – to convert as many visitors as possible to subscribers. Therefore, the design, layout and copy of the opt-in page are of a great importance. Consider the following rules when creating your opt-in page:

• Make it clean and simple. Your opt-in page design should be similar to that of the landing page. Create the opt-in page in the manner that it instills confidence, trust and value.
• Show newsletter samples. If you have samples of your email newsletter, provide a link to the page where the subscriber can view the newsletter samples.
• Use testimonials. If you have some testimonials from your readers, it’s wise to use them on your opt-in page. Use testimonials in pull-quote format, either text or as an image.
• Offer incentives. This is a great way to increase conversion. Nowadays people are getting tons of marketing promotions, advertisements, sales letters, etc. and they are too cautious to give their permission for receiving messages from a new sender. And you should take this into account when creating your opt-in page and promise something of value to your future subscribers.  Your promise may include:

• special reports;
• software trial;
• tips & news;
• discounts;
• email mini-course;
• e-zine subscription.

Every form is very effective in obtaining opt-ins. You are simply promising them an instant access to some free content in return for their name and email address. So, after the prospect opts-in, you give him a download link on your “Thank You” page or in the confirmation email he receives.

• State your privacy policy. It’s important that you include 1 or 2 sentences about your privacy policy near the “Subscribe” button below the form. People must be sure that if they opt-in to your list, they will not start receiving all kinds of spam from other companies. You can place the statements like “we hate spam as much as you do”, “we will not share your email address with anyone”, “the information you provide will not be shared with a third party”, etc. to reassure your prospects and increase your opt-in rate.
• Set the expectations. The opt-in page should set expectations for the recipient: frequency of the emails, possible other communications from your company. If you are using a double opt-in method, clearly explain your confirmation process.

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