OPTINDATALIST.COM EMAIL MARKETING – Looking Back Over the Past 15 Years

We ended 2012 with the best year we had in our history and 2013 started off barreling full steam ahead. We continued to have month over month growth and our Email List Cleaning and Validation Service was growing at a pace better than I could have ever imagined or expected. A large percentage of our business is from returning, existing customers and customer referrals. We are currently on track to add over 1000 new customers in 2013. Our new customer acquisition rate has exceeded all of our projections and goals. New customer orders have doubled in 2013, as compared to 2012 and our average order revenues have increased over 34% .Our email marketing services and Enterprise ESP Platform, eList Manager have surpassed our annual growth expectations as well, and it’s only September.  We haven’t even entered the holiday marketing season yet and were on track for another record year of growth.

Email Answers continues to be a privately held, debt free company. The foundation of Email Answers was built upon trust, honesty, integrity, transparency and putting our customers first. We strive to provide the best possible services, to all of our customers, at a reasonable and fair price.  I feel that this alone is what has led to our success and continued growth.

Planning for Growth

For the past 9 months we have been planning a massive consolidation, upgrades and additions to our servers, infrastructure and colocation facilities. Over the Labor Day Weekend, we transitioned into a new, state of the art data center. As part of our consolidation and move, we built out our own private cloud, enabling us to provide quicker turnaround times for customer orders and to virtually double our ability to process concurrent email list cleaning and validation orders. This upgrade and build-out has given us the infrastructure and ability to be able to clean and validate over 1 billion email addresses per year for our customers. Based on the fact that nearly 30% of all email addresses are abandoned, change or become undeliverable on an annual basis, we feel that email list validation will be an ongoing service that every business, that sends emails to its customers, will continue to need on an ongoing basis.

What will The Future Bring?

Planning for future growth and where we think Email Answers will be in 3 years is not an easy task. Although history does not ensure future performance, we have to be guided by these variables. Looking at all aspects of our business enables us to try and design a road map to where we want to be over the next 1-3 years. We see excellent revenue opportunities in all of the current services we offer and provide and are attempting to steer ourselves into the future as the market leader.

Most people assume a successful person or company just got lucky or worked hard and made it successful. I can assure you even unsuccessful, failed ventures had hard working people behind them. What most people don’t realize is that for every one success story you hear about, there are 100 failures that you’ll never hear about and success is not a bee line to the top. The road to Success is actually paved with failures and I can personally attest to this fact.

I think Albert Einstein said it best, when talking about success in one of his more poignant quotes that has stayed with me throughout my career, “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value”. No matter what you do, whether its providing a service or selling a product,  strive to make it your mission to deliver fanatical customer service, above and beyond any and all of your customers’ expectations. If you do, success will follow.

Check back in 3 years to see how we did and how accurate my crystal ball was. I bet we’ll all be surprised.

What Matters Most in Email Marketing: Five Questions for 5 Experts – www.optindatalist.com

Do we ever figure email marketing out?

After years of creating email campaigns for races, retailers, restaurants, hotels, and a even a daily email for my old newspaper, I must say no. I still find myself searching for answers.

What’s a good open rate? What’s should we measure? Images or no images?

The questions keep coming, the answers change by the day and the person.

This summer my colleague Kate Hamilton and I reached out to some of the marketers we respect most to get their thoughts on some common email marketing questions. Today we’re sharing their answers here, and the differences in their answers shows you that there are no hard and fast answers when it comes to email marketing (despite what so many experts will tell you).

Here’s a sampling of their thoughts on some common email marketing questions I hear from clients and friends.

1. If you only have time to dig into 1 metric for your email campaigns, what should it be and why?

The purpose of an email campaign (for me) is to get people to click on something, to take some action; because of this the click-thru rate is my #1 metric. Of course if an email doesn’t get opened then no one will click through — so open rate is a close second.

Open rate, because this is the best way to get your message across, and also best way to gauge engagement level of your audience

CTOR. This is my favorite email metric.

[Note:  For the unfamiliar, CTOR stands for Click to Open Rate, the number of unique clicks divided by the number of unique opens. This tells you how many of those who opened your email found your content good enough to read more or dig deeper.]

Who did not view. Why? You can try sending to them with a different title or as text-only.

My two cents:  I love the COTR metric, but all metrics leave something to be desired. None tell you how many people saw the subject line in their email program but didn’t open the full email. That’s still an impression. Opens and click-throughs can drop dramatically if you’re sending several emails a week, and click-throughs can be much higher if you’re sending one email per month loaded with great content. The metric, and what defines success, depends on the overall strategy.

2. What’s your best time-saving advice for email marketers?

Curate! Great content gets read, but you don’t have to write it all! If you create a list of the most important articles, videos or podcasts from the last week (or month) about a topic your clients and prospects are interested in, it can make you look smarter and get more clicks than a well written article of your own.

Use a simple template. A weird, complicated template will cost you many many hours over the years.

My two cents:  After doing this for eight years, I’ve found one of the biggest time-savers is simply having a firm cut-off for including content. Don’t bend because a board member or staff member wants to squeeze something in late. It sets a precedent and will add many hours to the task over the course of the year.

3. What’s your best trick for increasing click-through rates?

Have lots of things to click on! If you have just one or two articles and those topics don’t interest the reader you’ve lost them. If you have a list of articles that you’ve curated from around the web on topics of interest to your audience you’ll see more clicks and fewer unsubscribes.

Leave a “curiosity gap.” The teaser text shouldn’t give too much away.

Make it easy to follow without a lot of text. Provide good, usable content.

4. Are there industries where email marketing isn’t worth the time or money?

I highly doubt it. I was going to say prostitution, but I bet that would be great actually.

Those with super expensive items for sale, such as manufacturing plant equipment. You simply do not have hundreds or thousands of customers to communicate with.

Businesses that sell impulse items such as candy under $1. People just won’t subscribe. Also, businesses that sell aircraft carriers/submarines that cost more than $100,000,000. These decisions aren’t affected by content marketing very much. It’s more about relationships, sales processes, multi-year RFP processes and bribes. …everyone else should do email marketing.

I can’t think of one. Every demographic has a growing mobile segment and uses email to some extent.

Thank you to these experts for sharing some wisdom with us!

With Gmail Overhaul, Not All Mail Is Equal – OptinDataList

For some retailers that rely on emailed promotions, Google Inc. is adding insult to injury.

When the search giant overhauled its free email service three months ago, it set up algorithms to automatically siphon the flow of airfare offers and spa deals away from users’ main inboxes and into an easily bypassed “Promotions” folder.

But there is another wrinkle: For Gmail users that do visit those Promotions folders, the first items they see will often be ads sold by Google.

The ads are different from those that already appear inside users’ opened messages. Instead, they look like emails sitting in an inbox but are shaded yellow and feature informational “i” icons explaining their purpose. Marketers still complain that the ads threaten to draw attention away from the coupons and pitch emails they want their targets to read first.

“People are not very amused by those,” said Tom Monaghan, product manager for the email service at marketing service HubSpot Inc.

Google shows no more than two inbox ads per user, spokeswoman Andrea Freund said. Some users’ inboxes showed no ads after Google tightened its “quality thresholds” for targeting the messages.

“Our goal was to put them someplace that was more relevant, and we thought that was the promotions tab,” she said. “When you’re looking at promotions, you’re looking for deals,” she added. “We do try to clearly label them as ads.”

If past software updates are any indication, Google will likely tread carefully as it introduces the new inbox ads, according to Ben Chestnut, chief executive of email marketing service MailChimp. Too many ads could alienate users, he said.

The ads are compounding the concern over the changes to Gmail, which has more than 425 million active users worldwide. Though Gmail users can’t see the changes when accessing their messages on iPhones, Google’s Web mail application is widely used on desktops. Ms. Freund said more than half of all users have the updated Gmail layout, which the company has been gradually rolling out since May.

Prolific emailers like Delta Air Lines Inc., Gap Inc., Gilt Groupe Inc. and Groupon Inc. have sent step-by-step instructions to their mailing lists on how to move messages out of the Promotions tab and back to Gmail’s “Primary” folder.

Marketers fear the new system could spread and put an unwanted kink in a tried-and-true method of driving sales, not to mention business models that rely on emailed coupons.

“We think other email providers will be adopting this as well,” LivingSocial Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge said of the new categorization system. “We don’t know when and we don’t know who, but we think they will.”

The reason for the instructions is simple, Mr. Judge said: “We clearly just want users to see our emails.”

“Let’s stay together,” apparel retailer Kate Spade Saturday pleaded in an email to its newsletter subscribers. Gmail’s “new inbox settings may have started filing away your Saturday.com emails into the depths of something called a ‘Promotions’ tab.”

“Ack,” it added.

Google redesigned its service to help users manage email overload, Ms. Freund said. Users can reroute emails they want to land in their regular inbox with a simple drag-and-drop, or by going back to the old layout altogether.

The shift appears to have made a noticeable but small impact on the rate at which recipients open marketers’ pitches. MailChimp last month found the percentage of emails that were opened by its 3 million customers fell by about 1 percentage point for Gmail, to between 12% and 13%.

Analysis from HubSpot showed the percentage of Gmail users who opened clients’ emails slid slightly over the summer, though activity spiked during the weekends. Open rates have declined at the same slow rate since April, suggesting user engagement is suffering from too many emails rather than Gmail.

“There’s a little bit of Chicken Little happening right now over this,” Mr. Monaghan said.

Gilt, an online service that alerts members to deals on luxury goods, said it hasn’t had any problems with Gmail’s new layout. “Having said that, we think the best thing to do is to educate our members,” said Elizabeth Francis, the company’s chief marketing officer.

Groupon Chief Executive Eric Lefkofsky last week said the changes had no “material” impact on his business, because the daily-deals service has shifted away from emailed pitches to offering deals on its website. But just in case, the company sent a batch of emails to subscribers later that week explaining how to move its messages from “promotions” to “primary.”

Gap and Banana Republic sent emails about the new inbox because customers “value personalized and relevant emails,” spokeswoman Edie Kissko said.

OptinDataList.com – 22% of Opt-in Emails Not Reaching Inboxes

Nearly a quarter (22%) of opt-in marketing emails never made it to inboxes in  the first half of 2013, according to a recent study by Return Path.

Based on a sample of nearly 1 trillion messages sent worldwide, the report  found that 18% of all email messages sent with subscribers’  permission either were blocked or went missing, and another 4% were  delivered to spam or junk folders.

Below, additional key findings from the Email Intelligence Report: Placement Benchmarks 2013.

Global Trends

• Inbox Placement Rates (IPR)—the percentage of sent email delivered to  addressees’ inboxes—declined globally by 4% since 2012, according to the  report. 
• The Asia-Pacific region led the worldwide decline, slipping to an IPR of  64%. 
• On the other hand, American senders slightly improved their IPR to  86%. 
• European marketers had an IPR of 80%, lower than their North American  counterparts, despite improvements in Germany and France. 
• In South America, Brazilian marketers continued to struggle to reach  subscribers, losing more than 40% of their email to blocking or spam folder  delivery.

Rates by Industry

• Several large industries, including retail, posted meaningful IPR gains in  2013. 
• Social networks’ IPR declined to 75%. 
• Non-profit organizations improved their global IPR dramatically in 2013,  placing 90% of their messages in subscribers’ inboxes. 

Gmail

• 86% of American senders’ messages reached the Gmail inbox. 
• Reaching Gmail inboxes was far harder for senders from Brazil (53%  IPR). 
• Only 7% percent of all Gmail messages were routed to the Priority  Inbox. 
• Finance-related mail (17%) was more than twice as likely to reach Gmail’s  Priority Inbox, whereas social networks’ mail (5%) was the least likely among  major categories. 
• Messages that were part of an active conversation, either replies (24%) or  forwards (11%), also reached the Priority Inbox more often. 
• Any message categorized as a “statement” was far more likely to reach the  Priority Inbox (26%), but only 5% of those identified as “coupons” were found  there.

 

OptinDataList.com – Five Ways to Minimize Email List Unsubscribes

Over the course of time, a certain percentage of subscribers will choose to leave your email list despite your best attempts to keep them; and, believe it or not, that is a good thing. It’s the nature of any permission-marketing channel:  The ultimate choice and control over receiving messages rests in the hands of subscribers. Plus, we know from the channel’s nearly 15 years in existence that commercial email works best when it is deeply rooted in permission.

So, your first step is to accept unsubscribes as a fact of life and not take them personally.

That said, you can take some steps to mitigate unsubscribes by not only honoring the cornerstones of permission (choice and control) but also expanding the choice and control options you offer.

Here are five specific steps you can take both to deter email subscribers from leaving your list and to improve their experience of your email program.

1. Offer an ‘opt-down’ as an alternative to opt-out

Probably the best known and most effective deterrent to an email opt-out is a practice known as the “opt-down.” Specifically, to opt down means to reduce email frequency as an alternative to leaving the list altogether. For the subscribers of many retailers, publishers, and other high-volume senders of email, the opt-down provides the breathing room and relief that subscribers need to avoid feeling smothered by a brand in the inbox.

Naturally, as consumers, we have shifting levels of affinity and periods of need for any brand, product, or service. Sometimes we’re in active purchase mode, other times we just want to “keep in touch” until the next time we’re ready to buy. Also, considering the different purchase cycles and frequencies of different products, such as computers vs. shoes, it can be months or even years between purchases.

Being given the option to adjust email frequency to suit our desired level of involvement with a marketer is critical to keeping a relationship with a brand not only alive but also healthy.

Either frequency is a significant reduction in volume from daily and provides enough relief to make subscribers on the fence about staying on the list much more comfortable with sticking around.

2. Provide email message type (category-specific) selections

Opting down in promotional email frequency is a logical choice, but it’s not the only way subscribers can stem the rising tide of email. For many marketers (business-to-business, travel, services), a high volume of email messages is the result not of constant promotional offers but the overall mix of many different message types.

When you combine newsletters, video/blog content, event-related messages, triggered email, and reminders/alerts with promotional offers, sometimes it makes more sense to offer category opt-downs vs. frequency opt-downs.

Because many subscribers will be content to maintain a minimum level of contact rather than unsubscribe completely, giving them an option to remain subscribed to your email newsletter is an excellent option.

3. Include an email change-of-address function

A third way to give subscribers the choice and control they need to avoid leaving your list is to allow them to change or update their email address.

People will need or want to update the email address they’ve given you for many reasons; among the most common:

They change email account providers due to a move or job change.
They revise their chosen subscribed address from a work to a personal email address (or vice versa).
They abandon a consumer email account that is receiving overwhelming, unstoppable amounts of spam for a clean new primary email address.

If your subscribers want to update their email address with you, by all means let them do so.

4. Consider message format choices

With now nearly 60% of all email now being opened on mobile devices, message format and rendering remain a concern. Often, to stay interested and engaged with your email messages, subscribers need to receive your emails in a more easy-to-read format. That means offering them the choice of plain text vs. HTML, or allowing them to indicate the device on which they normally interact with email.

Again, those options can be integrated into your unsubscribe pages to mitigate opt-outs, into an email (or overall account) preferences center, or both.

If you suspect message format and rendering issues might be causing people to leave your list, offering simplified format choices is a must.

5. Communicate beyond email

Finally, just because someone leaves your email list doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to hear from you at all anymore. If he or she has been a customer (transacted with you) prior to opting out of email, make sure to keep in touch through alternative channels, such as direct mail, catalog, and social media.

Track a list member’s buying behavior after the unsubscribe. Chances are, she may simply not be a fan of email as a marketing channel but she is still a fan of your brand.

You don’t want to make the mistake of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” by ceasing all communication to subscribers who opt out of email, but do be selective. Monitoring customer engagement and purchase history across all channels is essential to knowing where and through which it economically pays to continue customer communication, reduce it, or cease it altogether.

I’ll leave you with this to consider: When you treat the email list opt-out as a learning opportunity rather than a loss, you’ll see it in a more positive light and reap additional insight into your subscriber base.

Activating even a few of the ideas above will not only help you keep more email list members but also tell you a lot about where you can improve your programs to prevent opt-outs or complaints in the future.

Is Email Marketing Still Relevant to My Business? OptinDataList Weighs In.

Blogs and social media have led to many business owners wondering whether or not email marketing is still necessary. It’s likely that not all businesses still need to use email marketing.

However, before you decide if it’s right for your business, weigh the pros and cons:

Pro – Emails Don’t Require Customers to do the Work

One of the best things about email marketing is that it proactively reaches out to your audience.

Instead of having to wait for potential customers to read your blog or view your social media sites, you can send the information directly to their inbox.

Pro- Inexpensive

Even if you use an email marketing service, it will be far less expensive than other marketing efforts.

You can cut a lot of costs by transitioning from postal mail to email.

Pro- Can be Automated

Emails can be almost completely automated so there isn’t much work involved.

You can create email marketing messages ahead of time and schedule the days and times when you would like the messages sent.

With just a few clicks of the keyboard and you can reach your target audience instantly. You also don’t need to do much to keep track of the customers who have chosen to sign up for your newsletters. The computer will do it for you.

Pro- Analytics

Many traditional marketing efforts don’t really allow you to directly see how much activity and interest you’re creating.

For example, a radio message, billboard or postal mailing may create some buzz but you’ll never really be able to know how much of your business came directly from each one of those sources.

However, email marketing messages can offer you very helpful feedback about your marketing efforts.

You can see how many customers clicked on your email links, visited your website and even purchased your products or services as a direct result of your email.

Email marketing has the potential to provide you with valuable data about your customers. For example, you may see that people in a certain geographic range tend to be responding better to your email marketing efforts.

These detailed analytics can help you improve your marketing efforts over time as you gain knowledge about which marketing efforts work best.

Pro- Personalized Messages

You don’t have to send out impersonal form letters to your entire audience. Instead, you can personalize your email messages.

For example, if you have a national following and you want to talk about seasonal changes, you can ensure your audience in Alaska receives a different email message from your Hawaiian customers.

You can even send different messages to customers based on their sales.

For example, if last November a customer purchased a new sweater from your website, you can send a message highlighting this fall’s sweater sales.

Con- Spam Filters

One main problem with email marketing is that spam filters may send your message straight to the trash can.

A customer’s spam filter isn’t going to know if the customer requested your email newsletters or not so it’s possible that a lot of your emails won’t be seen by the customer.

Con- Formatting Issues

Another potential problem with email marketing is that you never know what type of device your customer will be using to read the email.

What looks good on a large desktop screen might not translate well to a smartphone. It’s quite possible that you’ll have some formatting issues as a result.

Despite the potential downside to email marketing, there are plenty of positive aspects to it that make it a viable marketing tool for many businesses.

www.OptinDataList.com – Email Marketing Dos and Don’ts for Ecommerce Merchants

In “Email Still an Effective Marketing Tool?,” we addressed why email marketing is highly efficient, inexpensive, and easy to measure. This is unlike social media marketing, which for smaller merchants is often difficult to manage and track.

I used email marketing extensively in my previous online jewelry business. Here is a list of email dos and don’ts I learned along the way.

Email Marketing Dos

• Aggressively capture email subscribers. Capture email subscribers on your website, during checkout, in transactional emails, on your social media posts and pages, and any other place you can ask for an opt-in.
• Offer subscription options. Offer subscriptions options, such as frequency, subject matter, promotions, and past purchases.
• Offer at least one subject-oriented option. This means every email does not need to be a promotion. You can offer tips, customer profiles, and human-interest stories. Try to find some way to add some value to your brand beyond promotions.
• Personalize promotions. Mine your customer data and personalize promotions to the extent that your supporting platforms allow it. Past purchases, recent item views, and abandoned items can be used to personalize emails. Use what you have to increase your conversion rates and average order values.
• Give subscribers what they want. Respect subscriber choices and give them what they want and nothing more. If you create a new delivery option, provide a way for them to opt in rather than just assuming they will want it.
• Invest in a branded template. Don’t use the default templates included with your email marketing service. Create one that will help your brand stand out, support site links to relevant content, and support mobile devices. Create several for different types of promotions.
• Track email results. Use referral links that can be tracked as goals in your analytics. Track opens, clicks, add to carts, and conversions.
• Pay attention to results. If something is not working, try something else. If something is working well, make it better.
• Build promotional landing pages. If you are offering 40 percent off, create a 40 percent off landing page. You will see a higher conversion rate.
• Keep in contact. Sending more than one newsletter per week is difficult for some small merchants. But invest the time to make contact with your customers, for top-of-mind awareness.
• Offer an option to change preferences. When a subscriber opts out, offer alternative options to try and keep them on your list in a less intrusive delivery schedule.
• Ask why customers opted out. A simple question on the opt-out form, asking why they unsubscribed, can provide helpful insights.
• Send out mobile friendly emails. Soon the majority of emails will be read on mobile devices. Test your delivery on those devices. Test your landing pages on mobile devices. You will increase your conversions.
• Clean up your lists periodically. One of the best practices is to clean your lists periodically. At least once a year, send an email to all subscribers  who have not opened during that year. Ask them to confirm their subscription. This will weed out uninterested people and provide you with a better idea of your actual clicks and open rates.
• Compress your images. Keep images small so that performance is quick. No one wants to wait for a high-resolution image on a mobile phone.
• Send an instant newsletter to boost business. During slow weeks, when your sales are below your target, assemble a quick promotion to a list that you know will produce results.
• Post a copy of your email on your website. Post a copy of your email on your website, then promote it via your social media outlets. Create different links for tracking. Remove obsolete emails so people don’t find your old coupons in a Google search.
• Include an opt-in link. In addition to your opt-out links, be sure to offer an opt-in for those who may have found your email on your website or via a forward. Insert a forward-to-a-friend link, too.

Email Marketing Don’ts

• Don’t spam your lists. If you have an old list you want to import or use, send a one-time email requesting an opt-in to your new service. If subscribers ask to opt-out, whether they do it on the phone, via email, or from your automated links, remove them immediately.
• Don’t send out emails with poor content. Emphasize content development. Use quality images, proper grammar, and links that work.
• Don’t assume your list is good forever. Eventually, your list will go stale. Clean up your lists as suggested in the dos, above.
• Don’t send out bad coupons. If you have promotional coupons, make sure they actually work. Bad coupons anger consumers.
• Don’t put too much on the email page. Keep text to a minimum on promotions, have a primary offer and secondary links.
• Don’t make too many offers. Too many offers clutter the message and reduces its effectiveness.

OptinDataList: How can I optimize my website to increase email marketing performance?

As an email marketer you pay close attention to how effective your content is. You want to have the most relevant information being sent to the most relevant audience to ensure your emails are being opened and read. But email marketers must also take into consideration design, shareability and user experience when developing their campaigns. Although your emails and newsletters may have great content addressed to the right audience, if these emails don’t lead to a call to action or a destination optimized for mobile and social sharing, you will miss out on the opportunity to maximize the potential of your campaigns. The following are tips that can enhance your direct marketing efforts via your Web properties:

Email marketing must compensate for the abundance of different device types used to check email and visit websites. If an e-newsletter fails to maintain its consistency on a mobile device, you’re missing out on a chance for leads.

Strategic incorporation of social media sharing buttons within the website and newsletter itself is crucial. Social sharing will increase the exposure of your newsletter content.

Your website should be designed in a way that stresses user experience and digital design; this design should also be emulated in the email newsletter. Consistent design and aesthetics serve to establish your brand’s unique identity and garner trust from customers and potential leads.

When users reach a specific page by clicking on a link in the newsletter, make sure the page is optimized with a call to action. Whether answering a survey, responding to a poll or downloading a white paper, calls to action are critical when a potential prospect reaches your main site.

Segmentation is vital for optimizing newsletter content for specific demographics. Use Web analytics to assess visitor data to understand exactly who is viewing your site. This information can then be used to optimize the effectiveness of segmentation for your newsletter.

Archiving past newsletters on your website is a great way to optimize the impact the site has on the newsletters. This also provides valuable content for site visitors who have not received a newsletter.

If a user does click through a newsletter to reach your website, be sure to optimize landing pages in addition to assuring strategic information hierarchy for your website. Contact information, details of services, client pages and “about” pages should be accessible in one click or fewer. The worst result is having people click through the newsletter, visit your site and subsequently leave due to poor site design.

Signing up for the newsletter should be a seamless process. Use social media and create landing pages for signups. Place opt-in sections in strategic places on the website. Require as few steps as possible for opt-in subscriptions.

www.optindatalist.com – Email Marketing isn’t Just About Sending Email

OptinDataList.com – When Salesforce.com bought Exact Target for $2.5 billion in May you might have assumed that the world finally valued the art of email marketing. Did everyone miss the real story? Email marketing isn’t about sending email. Email marketing is about the email address – the customer relationship management (CRM) targeting power of this unique identifier. That’s what Salesforce.com bought. Email marketing companies aren’t hot because they send email. They’re hot because of the most unique and persistent piece of CRM targeting data in the universe: the email address and its hexadecimal derivative: the MD5 hash of the email address. Send-based email marketing is almost an unnatural act: brands become publishers of a single-topic magazine (the first-party branded newsletter). Now Walmart.com might be the largest publisher in the United States. Brands send these newsletters hundreds of times a year. Most brands run this effective play with some small variations. Repetition is the formula. Because email hasn’t supported iFrames and JavaScript, making it difficult to buy and sell advertising in other email newsletters, retailers and brands have had to create and manage their own single topic newsletters. But thanks to Facebook – and now Twitter – brands discovered that email marketing is not just about sending emails to your own first-party newsletter (opened only by 10 to 15 percent of its recipients). What’s the solution? Use the MD5 hashes of your customers’ email addresses to reach them outside of your own newsletters. How does hashing an email address work? Hashing takes an email address like dave@liveintent.com and turns it into a 32-character string like “43307bb5a669b247270a4d81cce6f3ff.” This algorithm is a one-way cryptographic function that produces a unique and repeatable 32-character hexadecimal string. No algorithm translates a hash back into its original email address, hence its popularity for securely exchanging data. For CRM purposes, the email hash string is an improvement on the cookie. Unlike cookies, email-based hashes are very effective on mobile because we use our email addresses on all our devices. You check your email on all your devices, but cookies don’t follow you around, they live where they are dropped. So unlike email, cookies are not great for cross-channel campaigning. This realization has led Facebook, and recently Twitter, to create what are known as “Custom Audiences” advertising exchanges designed to use the hash. Custom Audiences allows retailers to safely “hash” their subscriber lists into targeting segments, pair them with display creatives/URLs, load them into Facebook, and bid for their customers. MD5 hashing has enabled customer targeting on third-party sites and newsletters without exchanging explicit email addresses. So rather than wasting valuable dollars advertising to existing customers via cookie pools, brands can show one kind of ad to their customers and another one to prospects by using MD5 hash segments. Ad exchanges are now being built (full disclosure: my company runs an email hash-based ad exchange with more than 300 publishers as members) to take advantage of this incredible capability. Brands using these exchanges can leverage the power of the email address without sending any email campaigns of their own. Email marketing, long forgotten by agencies because it couldn’t be bought like traditional web display, has now leapfrogged its competition – the cookie. When you combine the CRM powers of the email address with real-time bidding, you have something that promises to be both effective and consumer friendly. Brands – start your hashing!

www.OptinDataList.com | Tips For Effective Email Marketing.

Once you’ve selected an email marketing service provider you are ready to start sending out impressive email marketing campaigns. But, there is more to email marketing than just pressing ‘send’. The goal is to create effective email marketing messages that help achieve your goals. In this article our email marketing experts share a few key tips to help improve your email marketing results.

Tip # 1. Effective Subject Lines

Choosing a good subject line is important. When your email lands in someone’s inbox, they will most often only be able to see the sender name and the subject. That is why your subject must pique their interest so that they want to read more. It is also important that you avoid overly cheesy or gimmicky subject lines as those simply do not work on today’s consumer. The subject “This email will make all your dreams come true” will almost always be dismissed as spam. Whereas a legitimate subject line such as “Fall Sale Starts This Week” will get your reader interested.

One key strategy for subject lines is to keep it simple. Try to explain to the reader in as few words as possible what they can expect to find inside your email.

Also, make sure that the length of the subject line is no more than 55 characters long (the shorter the better). This will ensure that the viewer sees the entire line and none of it is cut off by the default settings of the email program they are using (ie. Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.).

Tip # 2. Don’t overload the reader with content

Make sure you are not bombarding your readers with too much information. The more topics that you bring up within the body of your email, the higher the likelihood the readers will forget most of what you’ve mentioned. If you focus your email to one topic, the reader will retain more on the topic given, and are more likely to respond to your email marketing campaign.

Tip # 3. Directing the Reader’s Eye

Help direct your customer’s eye to the most pertinent points by providing bullet points or by numbering items. This makes your content easier to read and makes it look economically structured. The more organized and concise the look of your content, the more the reader will feel they have the time to read it, and therefore are more likely to spend that time reading it. Using visual aids is also a great way to clearly illustrate your main points.

Believe it or not, your reader will be scared away from reading too much. It is important to give your reader the impression that your email is a quick read, and spacing can help you do this. Similar to the visual aids concept, spacing your email can have a profound effect on your potential reader. If your paragraphs are too tightly packed together, the visual effect is that your content looks too dense. In the same vein, if your spacing is too great you can lose your viewer because your email will give the impression that it drags on.

You will need to find a happy medium so that the email looks, and IS easier to read.

Tip # 4. Font Style/Format

Because of the vast number of email platforms available on the internet, choosing your font style/format is critically important. The last thing you want is for a subscriber to be unable to read your email because their email platform doesn’t recognize the font you’ve chosen for your email. Make sure that you select a common option like Arial, Times, or Verdana.

While the above tips will get you well on your way towards email marketing success, it is also very important that you do a bit of brainstorming and ask yourself what type of content your readers are interested in. After all, people are only going to read your email when they think it is worth their time, so make sure you give them something of value to keep them opening your email every time.