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Email marketing campaigns have become synonymous with digital marketing success over the past 10 years. Though, recently it has been talked about less and less as the rise of social media marketing along with SEM has stolen the spotlight away from it. Is this justified? Well, the new kids on the block may be getting all of the attention, though it is email that is still the undisputed champion (statistically) of the digital marketing world!

Picture- ROI of marketing by channel per $1 spenthttp://blog.fusionfarm.com/blog/email-marketing-for-business-is-not-dead-find-out-why

As important as email marketing is for digital marketers, many simply miss the mark and never reach the full potential ROI of their marketing campaigns. Building an effective email campaign is an imperfect science. One will always need to take into account the subscriber’s receiving the mail, the ISP they are sending to and the message they are sending. With so many factors coming into play email marketing can get tricky.

Being able to step back and understand the message that you are delivering from the end users point of view is of the utmost importance. You will soon realize that blasting out self-promotional messages is going to do nothing but hurt your reputation over the long run. All of the short term profits from constant promotion will pale in comparison to the possible long term revenue you could bring in by providing useful information to the end user consistently. Providing useful, relevant and consistent messages to your subscriber’s is the key to the long term profits.

Here are 6 key areas that you need to focus on to increase the ROI of your email efforts-

1.The Message
Imagine if you were looking into buying a magazine, you would not choose the one that is all advertisements, would you? No, you wouldn’t. So why would you try to email out your messages with constant sales requests without providing them any value of being on your list. You need to make yourself the industry expert in your field and gain the trust of your subscribers; this is something that you cannot attain by blasting out’ buy now’ messages every day. Provide them value and they will become a valuable customer of yours.

2.The Call to action
The advice to “always ask them” has been turned into a heroic-sounding marketing term called the call to action as if trumpets were sounding and prospects were marching off to war just because you inserted a couple of words at the end of your copy.
The term might sound a little old fashioned. But the simple fact is, once you’ve gained your reader’s attention and presented all the benefits they will get by taking the action you want, you still have one more hoop to jump through.You need to tell your reader exactly what to do, how to do it, and that you want them to do it right now!

3.Staying Top of Mind
Engagement is your goal and top-of-mind awareness is your reward. It’s important to remember that engagement is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. The real value derived from engaging your subscriber base between transactions is maintaining top-of-mind awareness for your brand. This is a phrase often used to support ongoing advertising campaigns.

The marketer wants his brand of soup to be the first one that a shopper thinks of when browsing the soup aisle at the grocery store. While the Soup company won’t get many if any online conversions for their soup, next time the shopper goes down the aisle they’ll be more likely to pick a can up when they see it because they engaged with them recently.

Email marketing may not be the best converting ads for a soup marketer (techncally since there isn’t much of a direct return per se), but it has real value for something like a hotel chain. A subscriber might only travel for leisure a couple of times a year, but if she regularly engages with emails from Wyndham hotels — even if it’s no more than noticing an email in the inbox — she’s more likely to check Wyndham’s website for rooms and prices when it’s time to travel.

4.Force an answer, Present a Deadline
A deadline forces action. There are plenty of mental justifications you can give yourself for not doing something, especially if there is no compelling reason to decide right now. When you force a decision with a deadline, people have to do something; it’s either a yes or a no. It’s just like eating out at a restaurant when you can’t decide what to order and you need the pressure of a waitress standing over your shoulder waiting to take your order to force you into a decision.
A deadline is a form of scarcity, similar to producing a limited quantity of stock or taking a certain number of members into a membership site. This creates exclusivity, a perception that your customers are part of something unique that only a privileged few get access to (which is true). You have to act fast in order to ensure you are one of the “lucky ones.”

5.Test, test, test

Like most things in life, learning how to run effective email campaigns for your list takes time. You have to constantly be testing out different subject lines, post lengths, the time you send out the campaign, how you segment your list, etc… You will consistently need to test and assess what you are doing to maximize the ROI of your campaigns.

A good way to find out what works out best for your audience is to run an A/B test. An A/B test is a way to test out 2 different email messages to figure out what your list truly likes to engage with. Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when running an email A/B test:
• Always test simultaneously to reduce the chance your results will be skewed by time-based factors.
• Test as large a sample as you can for more accurate results.
• Listen the empirical data collected, not your gut instinct.
• Use the tools available to you for quicker and easier A/B testing.
• Test early and test often for the best results.
• Only test one variable at a time for best results. (If you want to test more than one, look into multivariate testing instead of A/B testing.)

6.Improving your Email Deliverability-

What good would the best email marketing campaigns be if no one received the message you so meticulously typed up? That is like having the best car in the world ready for race day and not having any fuel, you don’t stand a chance. This is why improving your deliverability is paramount to your campaigns success.

Here are 7 tips to increase the likelihood of your email reaching the inbox-

• Warm up your IP
Gone are the days where you can upload your list into an ESP right away and start blasting out emails. You are going to need to warm up your sending IP. What this means is that you slowly add in subscribers from your list, maybe only send to 20% of your subscribers on your first send then slowly add the rest to your mailing list.

• Check your sender reputation and score
Not knowing your sender score as an email marketer is a lot like not knowing your credit score when you are looking to buy a new car or a house. This important number can tell you what percentage your emails are making it to the inbox and what percentage is instantly going to the spam folder.

• Check and Monitor feedback loops
By monitoring your emails feedback loops you can understand which customers are marking your messages as spam and change your sending habits to these people as the more the mark you as spam the lower your sender score will be.

• Stick to a consistent send schedule
The ISP god’s frown upon those that send out 4 mass emails in a week then wait a month to send out another. In their eyes it makes you appear as a spammer so stick to email out your messages on a consistent basis.

• Engage your customers with relevant content
Engagement is king in terms of deliverability. The more you can get your subscribers to actively open, click and respond to your messages the better your email deliverability will be.

• Ask for permission
Email only to subscribers that have actively subscribed to your email list, they know you and why you are sending to them therefore are more than happy to engage with your messages while not seeing your mail as spam.

• Scrub your list
You should remove bounces from your list before you mail to them. The higher the percentage of bounces your list has the more you will tarnish your IP reputation, removing bounces before you send them is a must if you want to make it to your subscribers inbox.

There are very few companies out there that I look at what they’re doing and think “Wow, these guys are good at digital.” But MVMT watches is one of those few companies.

Why?

To start with their website is ultra clean and user friendly; the kind of site that is effortless to navigate on both Mobile and Desktop. They use the same minimalist design they use in their watches on their website. Since it’s the Holiday season they offered a Holiday Gift guide for those who were looking for a gift for a friend or loved one, good stuff.

They also have a really clean blog with unique content from various influencers of their brand that showcases their watches then at the end of the posts showcases the featured watches from that particular blog. They also do a nice job of getting a users trust by showing they’ve been highlighted in Business Insider, The Chive, Entrepreneur along with others. (My guess is paid promotion but either way this builds trust in the buyer)

The website is good, but that is truly the tip of the iceberg. They could have had the prettiest website with the worlds greatest user experience but who gives a shit if you can’t capitalize on that. That’s like being the worlds greatest Golfer when your out with your friends but come tournament time you play like hot garbage; who cares.

MVMT has built an effective funnel to retarget and capture previous website visitors. I went onto their website and left to Facebook, within 5 seconds of being on Facebook I was hit with this after I just looked at their ‘Holiday Gift Ideas’ page –

Then I went on my way to read a Recode article and they display retargeted me with this on the Recode site –

This was a watch I had previously looked at, literally a minute before I went to the Recode article.  They are going to continue to shove these ads down my throat until I convert. Then I jumped back into Facebook to ‘see what my friends were up to’ (this was all a test to see what MVMT would do), and this popped up –

Since I added that exact watch to my cart on their site they instantly targeted me with an automated ad with an offer of a ‘Limited Edition Gift box’ (Ooooo, lucky me!) to increase the odds of me buying the watch. This is what the lower end of the funnel looks like for MVMT, incentive based ads as they pushed site visitors from the Top of the funnel (Think of the people that come in via Entrepreneur, The Chive, Search, etc as the Top of the Funnel) all the way down to the bottom where they consistently bombard you with ads and incentives till you cave and buy a watch from them.

They have done a masterful job on their website and an even more masterful job on the bottom half of the iceberg creating a backend marketing engine that works and makes money. So many companies focus so heavily on the front end look of their website, but what matters and makes money is the engine that brings targeted customers back to the website to buy your products. Repeat visitors are more prone to buy; repeat visitors that have already shown interest, a la adding an item to the cart, are WAY more prone to buy and you should be targeting them with your ads accordingly. Give them that ‘Limited Edition Gift Box’ that only costs you an extra $1 or so to make, it’ll be worth it.

There are very few things MVMT could still do to make their site more effective – maybe having a better exit intent strategy, but overall they’re winning at digital.

Another useful post I made for an old company I worked for, enjoy.

The email landscape is always changing; from the new introduction of anti-spam laws, new email applications, and new mobile technology, email marketing has never presented more challenges. Being an email marketer, it is paramount that you stay on top of all of the new technology coming into your arena so you can master your craft and increase your ROI.

We all know one of the major players in this space is Gmail, if you are in the B2C marketing realm; you are going to need to get your sending IP to be best of buds with the Gmail servers, you are going to want to make yourself the ying to Google’s yang to ensure your emails are delivered properly.

To Start…

Let us look at how Google looks at incoming mail- it sees incoming messages in two ways: Spam and non-spam. A spam message is instantly placed in the spam folder, while nom-spam makes it to the promised land of the inbox.

Once the message makes it to the inbox Gmail indexes it into the different tabs that the user has set up- these are Primary, Social and Promotion, by default, but the user can also add in an Updates tab and a Forums tab. The categories allow users to better organize and control their inboxes by helping them classify the mail as it comes in… but this can get complicated. If you are constantly sending out promotional information from your sending IP, Google will have a higher chance of marking your future messages as promotional, even if you are just sending out your most recent informational newsletter or transactional email. So it would be good for you to send your messages from different IP’s; have one for your promotional mailings and another for your quality content newsletters. (Hint- Use separate IP’s or Domains for your promotional/non-promotional emails)

How to make it to the Inbox

Gmail works hard to deliver all legitimate mail to the user’s inboxes, but it is highly possible that they will mark your message as spam even if you are not a ‘spammer.’ There are 2 important factors that will without doubt get most of your messages to the user’s inbox-

• Having a user click ‘Not Spam’ to alert Gmail that your message is of legitimate value
• Having your ‘From:’ Address listed in the user’s contact list

It will also help you to send fewer bounced emails to invalid Gmail accounts, the less emails that you send that bounce the higher your IP reputation will be and the stronger your relationship with the Gmail servers will be. This is why it is always recommended to scrub your lists quarterly so your email sender score can stay intact. For more tips on how to increase your overall email deliverability refer to step 6 on this post.

Get your subscribers to interact

I know what you are thinking… “This is obvious…” This is what every email marketer wants. We all want our subscribers to open our mails and click our links while never marking our messages as spam. Obviously it is important to us, but to Google this is a must for our campaigns to have continual success and make it to their user’s inboxes.

Be Consistent

It is important to consistently send from the same domain and IP address so you can build up a rapport with the Google servers. It is ok to have a different ‘From:’ addresses for your promotional emails and newsletters, but stay consistent with what you are sending with them.

It is also important to send out your email campaigns on a consistent basis. If you are sending out random newsletters and promotional emails, here and there, Google’s algorithm will likely view your message as spam as that is something that is inconsistent with reputable mailers.

Assure that you are not on any Black Lists

While Gmail doesn’t publicly note it uses blacklists, there is a high correlation of spam folder delivery when the sender is on a Real-Time Blacklist, or a DNS-based Blackhole List, which is based on domain names.

Spamhaus is one of the most widely used Blacklists and getting listed on it and other sites like it indicates problems with complaints and spam traps, which is likely caused from lack of permission, or lack of list hygiene over the years on your behalf. This is something that you will want to constantly be monitoring because being listed can absolutely ruin your campaigns. Here is a free black list monitoring tool that you can use to see if you are currently listed anywhere.

Ask your Subscribers to mark your message as ‘Not Spam’

This will alert Gmail that your recipients want to receive your messages, it is as simple as asking your subscribers to click a button.

Make sure Your Links Work-

Broken, incomplete or links that connect to websites overseas will all decrease the likelihood of your email making it to the inbox, double check all of your links to make sure they are working.

Other Things to know about Gmail

How Google Caches Images-

Not too long ago, Gmail began caching images for users that were checking their mail in a browser and in their Gmail mobile app. This allows the images to automatically populates instead of prompting the use to download the image. While, this is great for their users protecting them from harm, it makes it hard for all of us email marketer as it skews our data, in particularly what device is opening our mailings.

So let’s say a user is using their web browser or the Gmail app, the report will come back as the reading environment of ‘Webmail via Gmail’s image Cache.’ They all have the same response code! So whether someone is reading our email on their computer on their phone with the Gmail app, it will say the same thing. Only if the user is using one of the default email apps on their phone that they connected their Gmail account to it will it show that the email was opened via a mobile account and what type of device that opened it. (Android, Apple…)

Also with them caching images, many Gmail subscribers have noticed that the quality of their images quality has become degraded, some images are failing to load or even loading in the completely wrong spot.

So what do you need to do about Gmail’s Image Caching?

Though the device detection is less detailed, you should continue to optimize your emails across all Gmail inboxes types. (Gmail Apps, Browsers, Mobile Email Apps, Etc…)

You should also anticipate that not all users will see your images due to loading problems and work on having your emails make sense if the image is not there. Use different background colors and live text to help improve subscriber interaction with your emails just in case the image does not show up properly.

Automatic Image Downloading-

So shortly after the Gmail team started to introduce image caching, the team over at Google began to automatically download images. This has helped to skew the results of open rates for all email marketers over the past year and a half.

The tracking of email opens relies on an image, which is also known as a pixel, in your campaign to load when the user opened up the email. Every time the image got downloaded from the server, the ESP or tracking software that was being used would mark the email as opened. Gmail, much like what Outlook still does now, use to ask all of its users to download all images to view them; now all of the images are automatically being downloaded and displayed for Gmail users. What is the result of this? A net increase in the open rates of all Gmail users. (A skew in the data)

Statistics show Gmail open rates are up 70% in 2014, which is largely a result of image caching and automatic image downloads.

What do you need to do about this?

You should continue to optimize for the ISP’s that need users to click the download images button to see your emails as you want them to look. Gmail doing automatic image downloading is a good thing for you in terms of the design of your email since your subscribers will be able to see the email as you intended it to look, unless of course it gets cached incorrectly.

Conclusion

Emailing to Gmail is something that can easily get over complicated, but it truly does not have to be. Like most ISP’s, Gmail wants to make sure its users are only receiving emails that they want to receive and are subscribed for and not be them at risk of spam/phishing emails. By following best email practices the majority of your messages will make it to the inbox, but with these tips you can optimize your email campaigns with Google in mind and increase the overall ROI of your efforts.