Thanks to the folks at FreshView who brought us Campaign Monitor and MailBuild, you can now download ready to use email newsletter templates which have been tested on all major email clients, including Outlook 2007. These are a great starting point for your next newsletter.
Here is where you can find out more about the Campaign Monitor templates and the MailBuild templates.
It might be tempting to hire an amazing graphic design company to create your next news announcement or invitation. Fonts and colours would be just right, you could source out some nice stock photos or do a photo shoot. The end result would surely guarantee that your marketing department be tickled pink. But, before you send out this fancy newsletter you may want to consider the fact that the risks of sending a single-image email extend well beyond visual design:
Jeanniey Mullen over at ClickZ Experts wrote an excellent article about email marketing. Before you embark on your next email campaign you may want to go through the following checklist:
One of the best features of any email marketing service is tracking and reporting. When people are first introduced to email marketing, they are thrilled to find that they can see who is (or isn’t) opening their emails and what they’re clicking on.
After experiencing the initial delight that comes with discovering this helpful tool, the next reaction can be one of disappointment. I’ve heard questions like, “Why is it that only 40% of my list opens my emails?” or “When I first started sending, I had a 60% open rate and now it’s dropped to 37%. What happened?”
Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact explores the topic of open rates in this interesting article. By the end of it, you will have a better idea of what they are, how they are determined, how to feel about yours, and what you can do to improve them.
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Writing a newsletter, regardless of how many times you do it, takes time and energy. Isn’t it disappointing when you finally get to mail it out and see from your statistics that half of your recipients don’t even open it? If only 40% of the recipients open it, should you resend it to the other 60% who didn’t? This is a very dangerous test to carry out. On the one hand, your list contains names and emails of people who specifically asked for your newsletter, on the other, if you resend them the email they may get annoyed and there goes your reputation.
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If you use an email newsletter and list management tool such as Campaign Monitor or Constant Contact you’ve probably enjoyed looking at the stats of your various newsletter campaigns. Understanding these stats is crucial in order to improve your newsletter content and increase your ROI. The following is a quick explanation about what the stats figures actually mean.
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One of the biggest email marketing questions has always been “What’s the best day to send email marketing campaigns?” The only valid answer remains, “It depends.”
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Managing the way you handle bounces for your Subscriber Lists has never been more important. Keeping a close eye on your bounces can reduce your email delivery costs, therefore having a direct impact on the ROI of your campaigns.
Before looking at how to reduce bounces let’s look at the difference between soft and hard bounces.
A soft bounce is an email message that gets as far as the recipient’s mail server (it recognizes the address) but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the intended recipient. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient’s mailbox is full, the server is down or swamped with messages, the message is too large or the user has abandoned the mailbox. Most email service providers will attempt to deliver the email regularly for a few days. If it is still undelivered, it becomes a hard bounce.
A hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender and is permanently undeliverable. Causes include invalid addresses (domain name doesn’t exist, typos, changed address, etc.) or the email recipient’s mail server has blocked your server. Servers will also interpret bounces differently, meaning a soft bounce on one server may be classified as a hard bounce on another.
At Bluelime Media we use Campaign Monitor which automatically moves subscribers that hard bounce into a “Bounced Subscribers” category, so they don’t receive future campaigns. This maintains your list clean and reduces your cost.
To many people the subject line of a newsletter is an afterthought and is only considered when preparing the email prior to being sent. With the amount of email in our inbox, how can you guarantee that your newsletter will be read? The only way to do it is to “Write a great subject line”.
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Email marketing is one of the most cost effective medium of promotion. Sending out a newsletter builds client rapport, creates credibility and allows you to sell additional products and services to your existing client base.
The growing concern for spam has resulted in stringent anti-spam filters and strict rules and regulations by email service providers for delivering emails to their users. Thus with these new measures how can you be sure that your newsletter doesn’t end up in the junk filter?
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