Best Practices in Action: A Look at Our Contest Entries

Our Best Email Design of 2012 contest saw so many more entries than we had anticipated. Our panel of email expert judges had to square away some serious time and focused attention to properly evaluate them and give them all a fair shake. By February 1st, some really impressive submissions made it to our contest inbox and, in looking things over, it has become apparent that the entire pool of submissions we received provided a very insightful look into how you all out there were doing in regard to email marketing best practices. Because, let’s face it—it’s one thing to be aware of what constitutes recommended and proven methods with regard to email. It’s another thing entirely to see them in action.

Here are a couple great things we saw you email-sending folks out there do:

Data Collection Tips to Improve Deliverability

The key to an overall data collection strategy is to ensure your data collection methods are sound. The quality of the prospect and
customer data being used to target and personalize your email messaging efforts are only as good as the data used to power them.

There are several actions that your organization should take at the point of data collection to ensure that best practice is achieved in the collection and use of data, including:

  • Gaining positive consent by using an “Opt-in” checkbox (where the box is unchecked) is preferable to a passive opt-in practice (where the box is pre-checked).
  • While single opt-in (no confirmation email) remains the most commonly used permission-based mechanism, double opt-in (where a confirmation email is sent to the new subscriber with a link to activate the registration) provides 100% assurance in terms of the validity of the email address and reaffirms that a recipient does want to receive your messaging.

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

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!

Testing the Waters of Email Marketing

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.

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

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.

Top 10 Things to Test to Boost Email Marketing Results

Email marketers often see their results slipping–fewer opens, a lower click-through rate and a dropping conversion rate–and panic. That’s understandable when the bottom line is at stake, but panicking won’t help you figure out what’s wrong with your email marketing strategy or how you can fix it. The only thing that can help is to test, test, test … and then test some more!

Remember that all 10 things to test below are meant to be tested over time. Don’t try to test too many things at once or too quickly, as you’re results likely won’t be accurate. Here are the main parts of your email marketing to focus on when you decide something needs to change:

Increase Retention, Engagement and Sales with a Special Edition

In my former role as an email marketing manager, I was in charge of publishing a daily email newsletter to more than 200,000 readers. When I started in the job, we were publishing about three times per week, but over the years increased that to mailing nearly every day. Most of our readers were happy to have more content from us, but some felt overwhelmed by the amount of and frequency of the information coming in our email newsletter.

After noticing a drop in retention rates, we decided to create a special weekend edition of the newsletter with a special format and its own opt-in. I authored the issue, writing a topical, timely column each week In addition to the section that I wrote, the newsletter included several special features that only occurred in that issue on the weekend. Over time, readers realized the value of the weekend edition and it eventually became the issue with the highest number of subscribers, highest open rate and highest conversion rate of any that we sent all week.

5 Ways to Keep Your Email Newsletter Content Fresh and Engaging

I recently wrote in this space about five simple steps to improve the look of your email newsletter and today, I want to follow up on that with a post about how to improve the content of your email newsletter in five more simple steps. Implementing these suggestions will keep your email newsletter content fresh and get readers’ attention so they’re more engaged for longer.

1)  Inject personality.
No matter how serious your business is, there’s always room to make things personal. People respond to people (which is why photos are so effective, as I discussed in my last post). So don’t be afraid to let people get to know you. Provide real-world  anecdotes that relate to your larger point, discuss a problem you had and the solution you came up with, even talk about your family if it’s relevant. You’ll be far more memorable and better able to connect with readers if they think there’s a real person on the other end of your email.

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