Opting out may seem like a small issue if the percentage of customers doing so appears to be trivial, but marketers must understand that the impact of opt-outs is cumulative. It’s not just a moment in time, it compounds with every campaign. When customers opt-out of email, you can no longer market to them; thus, impacting your company significantly in lost sales and profits. And these are the opt-outs you know about. There are also the “silent” opt-outs, those customers who are opting-out by filtering your emails to automatically go into their “junk” folder.
Tag: Campaign Tips
Winner of Best Email Design Contest 2012!
Your email template designs were judged by our panel of email experts and now it’s finally time to announce who this year’s contest winner is! However, before we announce the winner, let’s recap:
The Net Atlantic Best Email Design of 2012 Contest was open only to existing customers of Net Atlantic and Atlantic Web Host. Submissions were judged on criteria based on aesthetic appeal, content, as well as how well they follow industry standard best practices as set forth for email marketing. See full contest rules here.
Our winning template stood out and grabbed our judges’ attention because of its clean design and layout. This communication demonstrated a good balance of text and graphics as well as clear call-to-actions.
Now, without further delay, our chosen winning template design is…
Delivering Engagement: The Content-Value Exchange
Email campaign success depends upon subscriber engagement.
Marketers must understand that trust-building content (i.e., white papers, how-to-guides) and educational content (i.e., ebooks, newsletters) only become powerful if they facilitate a value exchange (both sides must benefit from engagement). Marketers looking to acquire customers and drive high engagement need to focus on consistent and engaging content that delivers value to the recipient in exchange for something (e.g., time, email address). The more valuable the content (built to serve your audience over time), the easier it will be for them to engage with your brand in a value exchange.
Here are a few thoughts on how to engage prospects more fully with your brand:
- Deliver engagement by offering recipients something valuable. Content only delivers engagement if it confers value. Your subscribers need to know they can trust you. When you build trust by offering valuable, relevant and timely content (informative content; not ad speak), you can turn your audience’s precious attention into long-term interest that drives repeat traffic and sales.
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Improve Data Quality by Verifying Email Addresses
Email remains a vital piece of contact information across all organizations and, in order to have a successful email campaign, deliverability is key. Ensuring email addresses are accurate allows you to get your message delivered to the intended recipients.
In my blog post titled, I’ve sent multiple emails and they’re not making it into my (or my recipients’) inbox!, I covered some of the most common reasons that emails may not be delivered to an inbox. In this post I discuss the benefits of real-time email verification, including:
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Behavioral Marketing: Subscribers Demand More Personalized Content
Targeting tactics should be a key component of your marketing strategy
Behavioral targeting starts with understanding who your target audience is, what they’re interested in and what their needs are. Crafting your email with their needs in mind will help keep them engaged.
Identifying a target market’s pain points and recognizing differences between groups of customers, is at the heart of marketing. What you think is relevant and what a prospect or customer finds relevant may be two different things.
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Harness customer data to improve relevancy
Moving into the New Year, marketers will need to make better use of customer data to engage and drive more relevant communications. By gathering insight about customers, marketers can begin to have more meaningful interactions through rich and deep customer intelligence.
Business intelligence data offers immense opportunity to better serve and engage customers. Expanding the customer profile with a combination of transactional and behavioral interaction data collected across multiple channels, empowers marketers to create highly targeted automated messaging. Start by tracking behavioral interactions, such as purchase history, clicks in your emails, and website activity. Use this data to segment your list and create actionable offers that are more integrated, personalized, and relevant across all your marketing activities.
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.
The Power of a Good Subject Line: Monitor Your Own Inbox for Inspiration
The goal of subject lines is to encourage readers to open your email and take action. For this reason the subject line is one of the most important components of successful promotional emails and newsletters.
Consistently coming up with subject lines that are engaging can be tough. But you don’t need a creative mind to build the perfect subject line. You can get inspiration by monitoring your own inbox and assessing newsletters and promotions that others send to you. More than likely you’re marketed to nearly every day. Take notice of the emails you’re personally opening and why. You can save a lot of time by learning from others. No need to reinvent the wheel! Many of the companies sending you marketing emails have already tested their own subject lines and you can learn from their research.
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Making it into the inbox isn’t guaranteed
As email deliverability has become heavily weighted on user engagement, it’s not enough to ‘spray and pray.’ The importance of creating highly relevant and valuable email content has become the key to keeping subscribers opening, reading and clicking through your emails.
Since engagement metrics have become the leading determinant of whether an email message reaches your target’s inbox or spam folder, consider the following 3 tips when putting together your email marketing plan for 2013:
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!
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