Email Marketing Blog

Email Marketing Best Practices and Advice for Marketers

Author: Net Atlantic Marketing

Ensure Your Email Effectiveness in Canada by Being CASL Compliant

Posted by on in Industry News

The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation, CASL for short, went into effect on July 1, 2014. For those who are thirsting for more of the legal framework to ensure your business is protected we recommend consulting an attorney.

This law applies to those sending CEM (commercial electronic messages) to anyone in Canada and/or anyone opening email in Canada, even if you are a U.S. based business or organization. Here are six major points that every sender needs to be mindful of when sending email to Canadian residents and businesses:

  1. Read More “Ensure Your Email Effectiveness in Canada by Being CASL Compliant”

Discover why email is at the core of a multi-channel marketing strategy.

Posted by on in Marketing Strategy

Forbes.com confirms what we at Net Atlantic already know, email is, was, and will continue to be the core driver of customer engagement. Simms Jenkins, CEO of BrightWave Marketing and author of The New Inbox: Why Email Marketing Is the Digital Marketing Hub in a Social and Mobile World acknowledges that social media is a valuable tool, but it’s not the most effective way to drive sales. “If you have just one bullet left in your gun to sell something, then email should always be that bullet.”

Today’s consumers, in both the B2B and B2C markets, are entrenched in a multifaceted online universe. Information is coming to them from many sources-websites, social, mobile, texts and tweets, press releases, blogs and online ads. The trick is to drive your customers to your content. The information is static until you give them a reason and a mechanism to explore your piece of the universe. What’s the trick? Why, it’s email, of course! Email plays a key role in driving traffic to all other channels.

Read More “Discover why email is at the core of a multi-channel marketing strategy.”

Top Takeaways from the Email Evolution Conference 2013

Posted by on in Industry News

Mobile Marketing was front and center at the DMA’s Email Evolution Conference.  Speakers and roundtable discussions were buzzing about what the increase in mobile usage means to email marketers. And it is easy to understand why:

  • 62% are using their smartphone every day and 80% don’t leave home without them.
  • Mobile email will account for 15 to 65% of email opens, depending on your target audience, product and email type.
  • Stats say 42% of email is now opened on a mobile device.
  • 43% of mobile email users check email four or more times per day.

Believe it or not, your customers are mobile!  Now is the time to think about a mobile strategy around your marketing efforts for social, Web and email in order to ensure success.

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Win $250 – Enter Your Best Email Design of 2012!

Posted by on in Email Marketing Best Practices, Email Templates, Design & Layout

You worked hard in 2012 designing email templates that produced high conversion rates, generated traffic to your site and maximized your email marketing ROI. If you think you have created an award winning email, enter to win a $250 American Express Gift Card.

The rules are pretty simple. Send us your design by February 1, 2013. A panel of email marketing experts will review and score the entries. In March, we’ll announce our winners! Read our official rules below and enter today.

Good luck!

Read More “Win $250 – Enter Your Best Email Design of 2012!”

Infographic: 4 Simple Rules for Email Marketing Segmentation

Posted by on in Infographic

Segmenting your email marketing campaigns doesn’t need to be a daunting task. We’ve simplified the process of dividing your email list into groups of likeminded individuals and sending personalized messaging into 4 simple rules. These rules will allow you to send targeted and personalized messages to groups of people who share similar characteristics. Although segmenting your list takes more time and effort, it gets your email to the people who want it the most, increasing the probability of recipients opening, reading and, ultimately, doing business with you. Segmenting at its most basic—using data you already have—will result in significantly higher conversion rates than one-off email blasts.

Follow the 4 Simple Rules for Email Marketing Segmentation illustrated in the infographic below to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns:

4 Simple Rules for Email Marketing Segmentation

Infographic: Email Testing In 4 Simple Steps

Posted by on in Infographic

Email marketing best practices dictate that testing be performed for each mailing you send out. And it makes sense! Why would you want to distribute what would otherwise be a broken email message to your carefully cultivated audience? So many things could go wrong (e.g., improperly formatted HTML, images not loading as planned, incorrectly entered merge tags, etc.) that it’s worth the extra few moments to ensure that your communications go out without a hitch. But that’s just testing for delivery. How about testing for effectiveness?

Testing your email content — and in a larger sense, your message — is an often overlooked step in the email marketing process despite it being a best practice. And it’s kind of silly that it’s so often forgotten about, really. Why wouldn’t you want what you send to be the most effective it could be? Much as you want to ensure the technology supporting the transmission of your communication is functioning as intended, you should also see to it that your message is producing the results you set out to achieve. But how do you do that? What do you change to make your campaign more effective? How do you measure this change?

Given its undeniable tie to the success of your campaigns, email testing is a pretty big deal. And unless you are 100% satisfied with your email marketing effort’s performance as is, it’s a big deal that you should probably address. But don’t fret; while it may seem somewhat complicated, fundamentally it’s a pretty simple process.

Our Email Testing In 4 Simple Steps infographic illustrates exactly how simple it is.

Email Testing in 4 Simple Steps

4 Critical Phases of Email Marketing Automation

Posted by on in Infographic

A properly implemented email marketing campaign works much like a well-oiled machine. It’s effective, only requires a moderate amount of maintenance and supervision and produces results with little actual effort from its operators beyond its initial setup. And what’s more, it’s not this long, drawn out, manual experience each and every time you want to send out an individual mailing. You just set things up and it just hits the ground running, pretty much on its own.

What? That’s not been your experience? You’re doing what? Oh! Perhaps you haven’t been getting the most out of your email marketing machine. Perhaps you haven’t been apprised of the benefits of automation.

With automated campaign management tools, you can improve the timeliness of your email communications with customers without a thought, coordinate multiple engagement efforts simultaneously and, coupled with personalization, segmentation and relevant content, reach out more effectively to your audience with ease as your platform simply does it for you. Rather than go through the tedious, time-consuming and mentally taxing tasks involved in doing every single step in the mailing process yourself, use the tools available to you as an email marketer. You can then concentrate on what’s most important to your communications instead: your message.

Check out our infographic on the 4 Critical Phases of Email Marketing Automation to learn more!

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Testing the Waters of Email Marketing

Posted by on in Email Marketing Best Practices, Marketing Strategy

With any advertising approach that involves a mailing strategy, campaign testing is a vital component in getting the best return results with the resources you have available. Direct mailing has been the foundation of companies’ marketing strategies for generations, and still remains a dependable and reliable source of getting your message sent straight to the mailboxes of your customers.  However with the expansion of the ever popular social media methods, DM is often the first thing to be eliminated.  Because of this, it is important to adapt and expand your methods and focus on email marketing and the right type of campaign testing to prove that the physical piece alongside online mailing is still bringing in returns.

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Test This, Not That: Email Campaign Testing Beyond the Subject Line

Posted by on in Email Marketing Best Practices

Test This, Not ThatI’m sure you’ve read it before: employing testing as an optimization tactic has been proven to be an extremely efficient means of increasing email marketing performance. What you may not have read is that the most widely used testing strategies are not always the most effective.

Read More “Test This, Not That: Email Campaign Testing Beyond the Subject Line”