Open and Click Rate are a nice metric for us marketers to look at - but as we become more sophisticated in digital marketing and the technologies we use keep up with this thought process, open and click rate become not good enough in themselves.

You received a 38% open rate on Email A and a 32% open rate on email B sent to the same group of contacts - Great, you know which subject line and content matter resonates best with that group - but what’s the next action?

You received a 5% click rate on Email A and a 7% Click rate on email B sent to the same contacts - Awesome, you know what Call to Action and language resonates best with this group - but what’s the next action?

you, as a marketer, think like a marketer and think about how to squeeze better response out of the next blast or campaign.  You need to break out of your marketing only mode and think about what these results mean to the sales team?  What technologies or processes can you put in place that turns this 38% open rate and 5% click rate into 123 hot leads, 250 warm leads and 75 dead leads?

As a Swiftpage user, you have the technology and we’ve built tools to help you with the processes - When building your next campaign or email blast, think about how to boost lead qualification, not just open and click rate.

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.

You have 3 seconds for your Recipient to see who the email is from and if the subject line makes them want to open.

At first glance, you have 3 seconds for your recipient to decide if they want to read the message

You have 3 seconds for your recipient to find your call to action and know what to do with your email.

This means, you have less than a 10 second window (with distinct hurdles every few seconds) before your email becomes noise. Think hard about this before you send your next email - You’ve worked hard to make it to the inbox - Make less than ten seconds count.

You want to send multiple emails out to your permission based contacts. Seems simple enough, pick a list, ram the addresses into the “To:” field and hit send - piece of cake. Well yes, if you are willing to risk being put on a blacklist, have your emails not be delivered because there were too many names, you didn’t want to know who opened and what they clicked on and you didn’t want engaging rich media content - then sure, go ahead and send through your own system.

3 overlooked reasons why you use a third party email marketing service provider:

ISP Relations - 3rd party ESP’s like Swiftpage have full-time staff dedicated to making good with the ISP’s that control the email you are sending.  It is our job to make sure they know that sending through us is OK.  If you get blacklisted without using a 3rd party, it can take as much as a few days before your IP address will be allowed to deliver mail to that ISP.  Imagine if Deborah in Accounting can’t get out the accounts receivable emails…not good.  We make sure that doesn’t happen.

Send Limit Restrictions - If you want to send a message to more than 100 people at once, don’t think about using your email application.  Outlook pukes on sending around there as well as the most poplular generic email applications (hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc…).  3rd parties can send thousands of emails at once as we have high speed sending servers dedicated to getting your message to your recipients on time.

Tracking - Ever wished you knew when a recipient opened the email you just sent them or what link they clicked on?  Can;t do this on your own - 3rd parties provide robust analysis tools that tell you who opened, clicked, bounced, suppressed, opted out, forwarded and more.  If you want the data to make more informed business decisions, you need a 3rd party.

If you are already a Swiftpage user - congrats you’ve made the first step towards email marketing success.  New to Swiftpage?  Sign up for a Free trial of the number one integrated email marketing solution in the marketplace.

You’ve asked for it, we’ve built it.  Put your Marketing on Auto-pilot - Join our Drip Marketing Beta.

For those of who you don’t have Outlook, ACT!, or SalesLogix as your primary contact database and still want to use Swiftpage, there is hope. Very good hope, that a large number of our customers choose to use. We do offer an excellent  hosted solution, but the Swiftpage for Excel integration is our most versatile for any size list and any type of database.

The majority of CRM’s and contact solution software have an option for exporting information into an Excel format. For those not using our other integrations and you have 1,000 people you want to send an email to, just export a copy of their details to Excel and then send campaigns to an entire worksheet or only a selection of cells.  Sending directly from where your data resides will save you the time and stress of managing more lists than you need to.

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

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!

Which school of thought suits you best?:

The Mass- You have a healthy-sized database, you send large email blasts, do okay business as a result, but also tend to upset a steady percentage of your recipients.

The Tailor- You have a healthy-sized database, you send segmented email blasts, and you strategically squeeze unique results from each segment and in turn have a lower percentage of negative feedback.

Both scenarios show positive results from using email campaigns, but in terms of etiquette and the highest percentage of success, segmentation takes the cake every time.

The internet, email, blogging, etc. is going through an authenticity transformation and if you try to force feed your messages without thoughtful segmentation you will pay for it dearly. Your reputation will take a hit that will take more work in the whole scheme of things than the up front tailoring of list segmentation.

Do the work up front and save yourself a headache tomorrow. Your reputation and your business will thrive because of it.

Truth- Email marketing allows everyone to be an inventor, tester, lab rat, and learned expert through analyzing reports.

Challenge- Going against the grain. Not actually talking about it, but actually putting a toe in the water to feel things out. Email is the safest testing ground for exploring new ideas and concepts, so why not tinker and bring some exciting innovation to your industry?

This will obviously need to be done appropriately with opt-in contacts, etc., but why not do some exploring where you can track and see if your whiteboard concepts actually gain some ground with your clients?