Email Marketing Checklist

Here is a checklist you should run through before you send your next email marketing blast:

From Address -
Will your recipients recognize who the email is coming from?  Make it personal - send from your personal email address or from a sales team members address - general addresses garner lower results than a personal address.

Subject lines -
Less than 45 Characters including spaces
No special characters, numbers or all caps (#!?, 1234, HELLO)
Recognizable content - include corporate branding or product name
Consitent content - Does your subject line reflect what the main email represents?

Main Email -
Short outbound links
In 3 seconds of viewing your recipient should know the subject of the email
In 3 seconds of viewing your recipient should know what to do with the email - call to action!
Simple concise messaging - email should be short; pushing recipients to landing pages.

Spam Check -
Before you send to all recipients, send through a spam check to see if there are any quick fixes you can make that will improve deliverability.

Test Email -
Send a test to ensure all of the images render properly, text is properly aligned and your message comes in portrayed how you had planned.  Create dummy accounts with hotmail, gmail, yahoo, AOL and more and recruit some colleagues with corporate email addresses to be on your test list.  See how each message looks in each different email application.

You’ve taken the time to craft a beautiful message, make sure it gets to the right contacts and is received with an impact.

Time Saving Tools- Heat Seeking Call Lists

Part II of III

The following series on time saving tools with your email and contact databases will help you explore the most efficient and productive systems that essentially cut mindless work at the knees.

Cold calls hurt the soul and take several layers of tough skin to power through, without seriously snapping at someone over the phone and jeopardizing the reputation of your company.

We have combined the click-through feedback of your email campaigns, with a call list generating tool, that allows you to create call lists of only those who have shown true interest in what you had to say via email. So, odds are if they took the time to read and click about on your email, they have a pulse that is worth looking into.

These call lists can be manipulated however you like. You can create a call list with data from every one of your campaigns, or single campaigns, and then from there choose a combination of Hot, Warm, or Mild leads to contact. During the call list generation process you can also choose to delegate portions of the work to any one of the Swiftpage users under your account.

If you follow up your email marketing campaigns with a call back or have a sales floor of talent, why not only spend your valued time going after the tried and true of the email curious.

Click Here for more info on Call Lists

Time Saving Tools- Google’ing

Part I of III

The following series on time saving tools with your email and contact databases will help you explore the most efficient and productive systems that essentially cut mindless work at the knees.

Not a day goes by where you aren’t “Google’ing” your favorite restaurant, clothes, cars, and most importantly business necessities.

For example, I know that if I am going to spend a valuable chunk of my time on the phone with someone trying to strategize, reason, and persuade, then I need to do my homework. It is in my best interest to get the latest and most pertinent background info on this contact to show a genuine effort and curiosity of how a mutually benefiting relationship can come to be.

The funny thing is that most people go to something like Google, and then to Google Maps for example, and then type in what they are looking for. Very few people actual streamline this process and get exactly what they want with just one click in their database.

The solution that we have developed is an automatic one-click search that queries your contact database or whatever it is that you are looking into and not only in Google, but all over the web with any search that really matters in a business setting.

You can click one button in the Who Is window of Snapshot for ACT! and immediately get a whole caveat of end-result browser windows. With this one click you can find such things as Google map directions to an office, images of a contact, blogs of a contact, podcasts of a contact, YouTube videos of a contact, and a laundry list of other resourceful online tools. The search settings can also be combined to do a search of a contact and their company or just the company alone.

What would take you far too much time during the course of a day has been streamlined by Who Is, so give a contact one click directly from the ACT! database and save yourself some time.

Click Here for a view of what the Who Is menu looks like in ACT!

 

Email and Survey Uses

What types of things are you using email for?  Likely you are sending promotion information and newsletters if you are reading this blog, but how many of you are using email to drive webinar registrations, conference call invitations, distributing whitepapers or sending out event invitations?

Email paired with a survey tool  can provide an extra depth of knowledge for you and your team.  Host a webinar or conference call on industry best practices and let your contacts know via email.  If the call to action in the email is a sign up form, you have the ability to gather extra pieces of data that you may not have know about your customer.

If you are able to offer a whitepaper, give it away for free in exchange for information.  Ask the right questions, like “Of our newest product, what feature has the largest impact on your business?” and you’ll learn how to better segment your contacts for more relevant future communications and ultimately drive more revenue as you offer more relevant solutions to your contacts.

Middle of the Road

The middle of the year is an excellent time to take a step back and look at your email marketing efforts for the first half.  What are some of the things you learned?

Things to consider

Rise or fall in open rate
Rise or fall in response rate
Repeat customer’s attracted through email efforts
New customer’s gained through email efforts
Growth in your database that you can send email to
Referrals by forwarded emails

The main question you should be asking yourself when looking at all metrics is “why?”.  Why did open rate and response rate increase, why isn’t our database growing at the rate we would like, etc.  What external factors could have an impact on these numbers.

And going forward, what can you take from the first half of the year and apply that to the second half?  What changes are you going to make and what pieces are you going to leave the same.

You should be asking yourself this for all of your marketing channels in addition to email.

Sage Software - Insights 2007 - Orlando

What a great show for us at Sage Insights this year! Thanks to everyone for stopping by our booth!

It was a great week for us. Swiftpage took home 3 awards. The “2007 Preferred Vendor 4-Star Club Member”, “2007 Preferred Vendor Top Rookie” (both from Sage), and the “2007 Killer App Award” (from the CRM alliance).

We the debuted our new product; Snapshot; our sales force automation tool integrated directly into ACT!.

We received tremendous feedback about the NEW Snapshot sales tool and the incorporation of the Swiftpage Call List into ACT!. Thank you to all of the Sage Partners and Resellers who have made Swiftpage what it is today.

And Congratulations to Janice Holt from Covenant Information Services for winning the Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) we gave away!

The new ACT! plug-in with Snapshot will be available soon!

Design for the Disabled

In a previous post we mentioned that a “good chunk” of Email applications turn “images off” by default. Essentially this means that your recipient will see your email with blank areas where your images reside. Even though your recipient may not see your images, you need to make sure that your text content still flows and that your layout is maintained. For example, if your text wraps around your images you need the “blank areas” where the image would normally appear, to be the same size as the image itself.

To ensure that these “blank areas” are the same size as your picture, you need to specify the size in your HTML code.

(Note: If you create email in the Swiftpage editor, this is done for you)

When you create your HTML specify the height and width of your image. This will keep the layout of your email intact.

Below is a test email viewed 3 different ways.

The first is a view of the email with images enabled. The second and third are both viewed with images disabled (default). The difference here is that the second was designed with the image height and width specified, and the third was not.

For your next email campaign, keep in mind that some of your recipients may not see the images in your email, so make sure your point still gets across with the text content you have written in your email.

Send on a Regular Basis

Think of how many emails you receive everyday.  There is likely a handful of promotional ones, a large number of corporate ones, some friends and family ones and so on.  What makes you open one email now, flag another for later reading or just delete before even opening it?  Ever thought about what your contacts might be doing?

Not only do you need to be sending relevant email messages to the correct people, but you have to hit them at the right moment so you are not automatically deleted.  Have you considered what it might do to your open and response rates by sending at a specific time and day each time you send?  If your contacts know they’ll be receiving email from you every Tuesday morning at 11:00 AM, and you are sending them content that is valuable, chances are, over time, your open rates will start to increase and response will increase as  a result of more eyeballs on your message.

It’s practically impossible for me to be this structured, but a consistent email campaign like this is an excellent tactic to get your customers excited to receive your message as they know it will be appearing in an hour or so…

Email Marketing Metrics

As the month of April winds down, many of you will be looking back over the past month’s performance of your marketing channels.  When looking at email metrics, what are the things you focus on?  Rather, what metrics matter to you?

Deliverability - Have you seen a boost in your emails hitting inboxes?
Open Rate - What does your open rate look like this month compared to last?  Are you testing subject lines with different language?  Have you been sending from a personal email address when you were sending from a general address in the past?
Click/response rate - Are your contacts taking action?  Do they know what they’re supposed to do once they open your email?  How has placement of offers within the message changed your response rate?  Played with copy shortening and more graphics?  Is your contact info easier to see - getting more phone calls?

And further, what are you going to test in May to gain better results?

Purchased Lists and Email

Companies like Salesgenie and Jigsaw have become more popular to media channels recently and their 100 free leads campaigns may seem compelling.  So, if you happened to give them a shot and purchase a list, does that give you the right to send them email now that you own the list?

The answer is no - Because permission actually stands for something in permission based email -

If you are having a hard time generating leads, then purchasing a list through a channel like this may be a good way to spark interest in a few contacts.  Before you can email these people you need to start a conversation with them - By telling them about your services through direct mail or telemarketing efforts and encouraging them to go online where you can then ask them permission for their email address.  Once permission is gained, the barriers are lifted and you have earned the right to start a conversation in a different medium.