January 23, 2010 09:56 by Dawn Wallhausen
Creating and Using Surveys

1. INTRODUCTION

Online surveys, also known as webforms, can do more for your business than you might expect. You probably already know that surveys are a great way to get to know your customers, but you may not know that you can also use them to:

1. Encourage visitors to your online store to set up an account with you
2. Encourage customers to sign up for your mailing list
3. Collect demographic data about subscribers that you do not already have
4. Segment/target subscribers according to their stated interests
5. Perform sales diagnostics
6. Keep tabs on customer satisfaction

And more!

Ez.newsletter webforms allow you to create surveys within your account and use them on your own web space. The data from any survey made in your account will be collected and stored there. You can also have individual’s responses sent to you (and/or other members of your staff) in emails.

What’s more, you can use webform options to filter all respondents into a special email list just for them, or even file respondents into separate lists according to the questions they respond to, or the answers they choose. If, for instance, you asked respondents about their interests and wanted everyone who checked golf as an interest to be placed in a list called “GOLFERS” and everyone who checked rock/mountain climbing  into a list called “CLIMBERS,” you could do that. As you can imagine, this option can be usefor for targeted mailings.

How does all of this work? Section 2 gives you some general suggestions for survey design, and tells you exactly how to build yours. Then, section 3 discusses editing survey questions and answers in the system. Finally, section 4 touches on how to use webforms on your site.

2. DESIGNING AND CREATING SURVEYS IN EZ.NEWSLETTER

Before you begin making a webform, you must decide what purpose(s) you want your survey to fulfil. One survey can serve many functions, and you should plan each question and answer set carefully.

Most e-marketing experts recommend keeping your surveys fairly brief and uncomplicated. Otherwise, people will not want to complete them. Shoot for a webform that will take the average person no more than five minutes to complete, and test it out on people who were not involved in the design process, to make sure that it doesn’t take too long. Remember, if you can’t get all of the information you need from a short and simple survey, you can always use another to get the rest of the data at a later date.

To get started creating your survey:

1. Click webform.management
2. Then click webforms.manage
3. On the main part of the page, click the Create New Webform link
4. Enter basic information about your survey in the boxes provided:
   • Provide a name for the webform
   • Include a brief description
   • If you wish to have all respondents to the survey added to one of your mailing lists, select the list. If you do not wish to add them to a list, or you want to add respondents depending upon their survey answers, do not select a list at this stage.
   • If you would like to have all submissions sent to one or more email addresses at your organization, enter them.
5. If you wish to redirect respondents to a page on your website when they have completed the survey, enter the URL
6. Lock the webform if you do not wish to accept further submissions, or leave it unlocked while you are collecting data
7. Select whether to use antispam validation or not (it is highly recommended that you do)

Once you have saved this basic data, you can begin adding question and answer sets to the webform. Questions must be added one at a time, followed by the answer choices that correspond to them. To get started with a question:

1. Enter the text for your first question
2. Choose the format for the answer choices that makes the most sense:
   • Textfields work best for answers you wish to limit to just a few words or characters
   • Text areas can accommodate answers of several lines or paragraphs
   • Radio buttons should be used with questions where you want the user to select only one answer
   • Drop down boxes can be used similarly to radio buttons
   • Check boxes are useful with multiple choice questions where you want users to be able to select as many options as they wish
   • Multi-select allows the respondent to see all possible short answers and select one or more
   • The file upload format allows respondents to upload a file
3. If you wish to make the question you are currently creating a required question, choose a validation type. The type you choose will determine the message that is sent when someone attempts to fill in the answer in an unapproved format, or attempst to skip it.
   • Is Not Blank validation will ensure that respondents enter something in the answer space
   • Is A Number validation requires a numerical entry
   • Is A Date MM/DD/YYYY asks respondents to enter a date in the appropriate format
   • Is An Email Address requires respondents to answer the question with a full email address
4. If you selected a validation type in the previous step, enter a message to be displayed with the validation response. For example, if the validation type selected was Is A Number, you may want the message shown to survey participants to say “Please provide a numerical answer to the first question.”
5. If you would like everyone who answers this question to be added to the same list, select the list. If not, leave the field as is.

When you have completed these steps, click Add Question. Next, you will need to add the answer choices that go with the question you just added. The type of information you are asked to provide will vary somewhat depending on what kind of answer format you chose when adding the question.

If you selected radio buttons, check boxes, drop down boxes, or multi-select lists:

1. You must enter the text for those choices one at a time. Enter the text for your first option in the box provided.
2. Next, you must assign a value to the answer choices one at a time. Values can be a numerical code, or simply a reiteration of the wording of the answer choice it represents.
3. If you want respondents who select this answer to be sorted into the same list (for example, if the question is about whether the respondent likes golf or not and you want all of the people who reply YES to be sorted into a list for golfers), select that list. If not, leave the pulldown menu as is.
4. If you need to add more answer choices for the question at hand, click Add Answer and repeat these steps until all answer choices have been added.
5. When you have added all answer choices, click Add Question to start adding another question and answer set. Or, click Back to Webforms to save your work and return to the list of webforms.

If you chose a textfield or textbox format:

1. You will be asked to select a maximum number of characters that can fit in the field or box.
2. If you selected a text field, you will also be asked to specify how many rows of text the box will be able to accommodate.
3. If you want respondents who select this answer choice to be sorted into the same list (for example, if the question is about whether the respondent likes to paint or not and you want all of the people who reply YES to be sorted into a list for artists), select that list. If not, leave the pulldown box here in its default position.
4. When you have set your textfield or textbox preferences, click Add Question to add another question and answer set. Or, click Back to Webforms to save your work and return to the list of webforms.

If you chose the file upload format:

1. Specify the length of the file upload display.
2. If you want respondents who select this answer choice to be sorted into the same list (for example, if the question is about whether the respondent likes to read or not and you want all of the people who reply YES to be sorted into a list for readers), select that list. If not, leave the pulldown box here as is.
3. When you have set your file upload preferences, click Add Question to add another question and answer set. Or, click Back to Webforms to save your work and return to the list of webforms.

Continue adding questions and answers until you have completed your survey. Clicking Back to Webforms will save your work before taking you back to the webforms list, so don’t fear taking a break at any point. Finally, note that you can easily edit your webform at any stage in the process, so you don’t have to make everything perfect from the start. The next section discusses how to edit your survey.

3. EDITING SURVEYS

If you are already working on a webform and you decide that you want to make changes, you can easily do so.

• If you’re starting from the main webform page, locate the survey you want to work on and click the Edit link in the column to the far right of it, then scroll to the preview area at the bottom of the webform.

The lefthand side of the preview area gives you a general idea of what the completed form will look like. The right side allows you to make changes to the question or the answer choices, alter the order of the questions and/or answers, or delete items from the form.

If, for instance, you wanted to change the order in which a question appears, you would locate the question on the left side of the preview area and follow it to the column associated with it on the right side. Then, find the pulldown menu that has a number appearing in the top space: this number represents the current order in which the question appears. To change it, simply select the number that stands for the order in which you want the question to appear. So, for example, if you want the second question to be the tenth question, you would locate the pulldown menu to the right of question number 2 and change it to read 10.

Don’t like the way a question is worded? Or maybe you want to place it in a different font? Click Edit Question in the column directly to the right (in the same row) of the question you want to change. Doing so will return you to a screen like the one in which you initially entered the question, so you can change any aspect of it. When you are finished making changes to the question, you can scroll back down to the preview area to make more adjustments, or click Back to Webforms to save and exit.

To delete an entire question, simply click the Delete Question link to the right of the question you want to remove.

To change what list respondents to a question filter into, simply select the one you want from the pulldown menu labeled List to the right of the question.

Changing answer selections follows the same process. Answers have their own numerical ordering pulldown menus, Edit Answer links, Delete Answer links, and List pulldown menus: as with changing the order of questions, you can change the order of answer choices using the numerical pulldown menu; like editing questions, the Edit Answer link returns you to a page like the one on which you entered the answer choice initially; just click Delete Answer to get rid of an answer choice completely; and use the List pulldown menu associated with an answer choice to change the list that respondents who select a given answer will filter into.

USING WEBFORMS

To use a webform created in ez.newsletter on your own Website, you (or your Webmaster, if you are not experienced with HTML) can create a Web page from a survey you have created and saved. To get the code for your survey, just

• Click Webform Mangement from the main page
• Then click Manage Webforms
• Locate the survey you wish to use and click the HTML button in the right-hand column next to that survey

The coding for the survey appears in four separate fields: one for header content (Header HTML); one for the main body of the survey (Webform HTML); one for the footer (Footer HTML); and one for the acknowledgement to survey-takers (Thank You HTML). You only need the code in the Webform HTML field, and you can copy it into a plain text program and include your company’s Web header and footer graphics and information to personalize the page. Then upload it to your website, adding any necessary links.

Once the survey has been added to your site, you can direct your subscribers to the page through a link in an email message or newsletter,use standard advertizing methods to attract new users to the page, highlight it on your main page and other pages on your Website… whatever makes the most sense for what you hope to accomplish.

As we mentioned earlier, survey answers will be collected, recorded, and tracked on your ez.newsletter account, and respondents will be sorted into lists according to how you set up the webform. If you have also chosen to have responses emailed to you, that will happen automatically, too.

Respondents will be thanked once they have completed the webform.

Webforms can do so much for your business, and they can be used on your site while collecting and sorting data on your account on ours. Consider using them to grow and segment your mailing lists, get to know your customers, deliver the best possible customer service, and more!

 

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December 12, 2009 09:20 by Dawn Wallhausen
Targeted Marketing

To gain subscriber trust and confidence, you need to make them feel that you are interested in what they want or need and then give it to them. It may seem doing so would require individual communications for each reader and a huge investment of time, but it doesn’t have to be that complicated. You can target marketing or fundraising communications to groups of people based on various traits that they have in common (and you can compliment these efforts with testing and user surveys). It will take some time and effort, sure, but so does anything that’s worthwhile. Your customers will repay your effort with loyalty and recommendations.

In this paper, we will first address targeting methods. Then, we will clarify some of the methods that cannot be explained in just a sentence or two. Finally, we’ll tell you how to sort and setup targeteted emailing lists, so that you can send different messages to each target group that you devise.

TARGETING METHODS

Before you get started with targeted emails, e-marketing expert Dave Chaffey recommends that you first think about your e-communication efforts as a whole and consider which aspects are most important for your organization for the current campaign:

• The creative elements—design and layout of the mail shot
• The offer—the proposition or benefits of responding
• The timing—season, month, day, time when the item is delivered
• The targeting—segment(s) targeted

You should decide on the relative importance of each for your purposes and number them accordingly. For example, the owner of an art gallery may regularly rank creative elements foremost in importance, whereas a retailer running a clearance sale on women’s briefcases may perceive of targeting as the most crucuial part of her message. Once you know this, you can divide the time you have for developing the campaign accordingly.

Next, determine how extensively to target your messages and by what method. Below, we list the most commonly-used targeting methods:

1. Demographic targeting—age, gender, geography. This can be important for business-to-customer (B2C) markets
2. Targeting by company type—used for business-to-business (B2B) campaigns
3. Targeting by product—categories of purchase. For instance, hardware versus software buyers. If you wanted to find out who brought product X and offer them on accompanying product Y, this would be a good way to target those who have one but not the other
4. RFM targeting (explained in more detail in the next section)—recency of purchase, frequency of purchase, monetary value of purchases
5. Customer value over a fixed period of time
6. Lifetime value of the customer (LTV)— this is the net value that a group of customers provide over their entire relationship with your company. It’s based on estimating company income and costs associated with customers over a set time period and calculating present value using a discount rate applied over the same time period.
7. Customer loyalty (explained in greater detail below)—length of time with the company and RFM.
8. Time on your subscriber list, in months
9. Responsiveness to email campaigns

These are not the only criteria you can use, and it may be that your organization’s best fit for targeting is specific to what you do. You don’t have to stick to just one type of targeting, either. You can test one type out for one campaign and try out a different set on another, depending on what makes the most sense at the time. For instance, you would certainly want to target men for a sale on men's shoes.

Many of the aforementioned targeting methods are fairly self-explanatory, but the next sections will address two that may require more clarification: RFM and customer loyalty targeting.

RFM TARGETING

Divide subscribers into RFM groups by sorting and scoring subscribers by:

RECENCY of purchases

0. Unknown

1. Within 12 months

2. Within 6 months

3. Within 3 months

4. Within 1 month

      
FREQUENCY of purchases
 

0. Unknown

1. Every 6 months

2. Every 3 months

3. Every 2 months

4. Monthly


MONETARY value of purchases¹ 

0. Less than $10

1. $10 to $50

2. $50 to $100

3. $100 t0 $200

4. Over $200

Assign customers the appropriate number for each category, then group them into lists according to their three scores. Every person with a 4, 1, 3 combination (in any order) goes into one list. Every customer with a 3, 2, 4 combination (again, in any order) goes into another list, etc. These lists are your segments.

CUSTOMER LOYALTY TARGETING

Customer loyalty happens in stages. You can develop your own terms and measures, if you like, but here is a basic set of loyalty measures:

1. New customers who have set up an online account with you
2. New customers who have shopped with you but have not set up an account
3. Developing customers—those who have set up accounts and who have been shopping on your site for at least six months
4. Established customers—those with accounts who have been shopping on your site regularly for at least one year
5. Dedicated customers—those who have been shopping on your site regularly for two years or more
6. Logged off—customers formerly from any of the levels above who have recently stopped shopping at your online store (the goal is to get these ones back)

Again, depending on how much importance you have placed on targeting, you may with to subdivide the groups for a deeper level of targeting. How? That will vary depending on whether you are primarily business-to-customer or business-to-business. Here are some examples of potential subdivisions by focus:

B2C                                                                        B2B

Age                                                      Size of company
Gender                                                  Industry sector
Geography                                             Title of contact

CREATING TARGET SEGMENTS IN EZ.NEWSLETTER

Once you have decided what kind of targeting you want to do, you have to create your target segments. To do so, start from the main page of your account, then:

1. Click on customer.management
2. Next select customers.manage 

In the left hand sidebar on this page, you can select customers by various criteria, and even use multiple levels of critera. The first set of selections include name, address, company, zip code, country, and email information, and you can filter for contacts that are like, not like, equal to, or  not equal to the search terms you supply, or filter for contacts that begin or end with your search terms. The second set of terms is for product name and SKU. The last set cover orders, products, product prices, shipping information, discounts applied, and taxes applied in quanitities greater than, less than, or equal the amount you supply. You can use these sets of search criteria individually or together in any combination. If you need additional search criteria, click More Options near the bottom of the sidebar.

When you have selected your search criteria and set the terms, click Filter near the bottom of the sidebar to run the filter. The contacts who fit your terms will appear on the screen and you can either filter them into an existing mailing list or save them as a filter using the appropriate link above the contacts. If you click Save This Filter, you will be asked to name the filter and provide a description of it. If you choose to Filter Into A List, you will need to select which list and decide whether or not to include unsubscribed contacts on the list and whether you want to save the filter or not. Please note that, if you want to start a new mailing list with filtered addresses, you will need to set up a blank list in list.management before filtering addresses.

If you want to add new customers who match your filter criteria to the same list, you will want to save the filter to have it run automatically. Automatically running filters run every minute.

When filters are used to move customers into lists in this manner, the lists react differently than they do when you upload contacts or add them one at a time by hand. Normally, a list will only contain an email contact once. However, when filters put customers into lists, emails can be in the list once for each order number. This does not translate to duplicate messages sent to the same contact, though. The ez.newsletter system automatically ignores duplicate addresses when sending an unscheduled message. But the multiple entries do serve an important purpose: they allow for any automated responses you set up to be associated with each individual order by a customer.

Schedules can then be used to set up autoresponder messages for these lists. If, for instance, you want to have an automated message including shipping information go to each customer every time they place an order, you could schedule that through schedule.manangement. The paper on autoresponders will provide more specific instructions about how this works, and how to customize these autoresponses.

Now that you know more about targeting options and how to make targeting work for you, put a little time into planning special messages and make your customers even more satisfied.

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December 12, 2009 08:31 by Dawn Wallhausen
Personalizing Messages for Your Readers

Making your subscribers feel that you are speaking directly to them—even if you design and send emails on a grand scale—is the best way to keep readers interested in your organization’s messages. This can be accomplished easily through the judicious use of personalization. There are many different ways to personalize, too. This paper will tell you all about the whys and hows.

It should be noted, however, that email marketing experts disagree about the value of personalization and how to best put it to use. For instance, Bruce C. Brown says that personalized subject lines used to lead to higher open rates, but this has changed. Why? Brown explains that spammers have become more likely to use this tactic. In one of his recent books, Brown notes that, for his part, he is now less likely to open a message with his own name in the subject line.¹ He suggests that personalization is best limited to the message greeting.

Dave Chaffey, on the other hand, is not nearly so opposed to any of a number of personalization options. He mentions the following as ways that messages can be tailored to individuals:²

1. You can set the salutation to include readers’ names, and/or use names within the message body
2. You can allow for users’ personal selections to tailor specific content
3. You can vary offers according to customers’ past behaviors and/or purchase history
4. Landing pages can be personalized if emails have been targeted for different segments
5. Personalize the subject line of a message with information of interest. As mentioned previously, spammers often use names in subject lines, which has diminished the effectiveness of this practice. HOWEVER, you could follow Amazon’s lead… they might announce a discount on historical novels as the subject—or in the header—of a message to someone who has shown a preference for this type of reading. 
6. Use demographics, like age, gender, and/or location. For example, send Caribbean cruise deals to someone living in a cold climate, send offers for lipstick samples to women, or send a coupon for Retirement Living magazine to people over the age of 55. 
7. Go by buying history. A good example is how iTunes recommends songs based on prior purchases.
8. Use names and a targeted message in your call to action. Instead of just saying “Forward to a Friend,” say something like “Susan, wouldn’t your best friend want to know about this book?”
9. Personalizing the overall content by offering customers content choices at signup.⁴ If you have already developed substantial mailing lists, you can still offer content choices to your current subscribers. Just develop your content options and invite existing subscribers to select them when you have set them up.

Points two, three, and four indicate that Chaffey considers user profile selections and segmentation to be methods of personalization. Indeed, they are: profile selections create a situation where subscribers self-select the types of information they get, and segmentation requires the use of individual subscribers’ personal data to tailor the content they receive. But other experts, like Brown, differentiate between segmentation, user content selection, and personalization more strictly, counting only the use of name data in addressing readers as personalization. We will treat personalization in broader terms for the purposes of this paper.

SOME OPTIONS AND EXAMPLES FOR PERSONALIZATION

Look at existing customer data (of which you will have at least email addresses, probably first and last names, and possibly more) and metrics (if any) and determine where personalizing may work best. 40% of marketers restrict personalization to the salutation. This is a good place to start, but make sure you also have a default greeting ready for readers whose names you may not have.

To revise or expand on Chaffey’s suggestions for personalization, consider also Simms Jenkins’s ideas:

INCLUDING PERSONAL USER DATA IN YOUR MESSAGE

Personalizing the header, salutation, and/or body of a message with individual users’ data is as easy as adding a simple token, or code, where you want the information to appear. Tokens can be added by hand before you upload your message to the system, but our newsletter editor provides a list of available tokens that you can click on to place them where you want them. To see token options, click on the ez.newsletter logo button at the top-right corner of the editor. The button looks like this:



The box that pops up contains tabs for three different kinds of tokens: personal, system, and order tokens. Here is the window as it appears, with personal tokens showing:



 

Simply place your cursor where you want a given type of information to appear and click on the corresponding token. Want the salutation to say “Dear Bob,”—or Barbara, or John? Place your cursor after the word “Dear” and click on the [--fname--] token. Want to include a statement of origin in your newsletter that reminds subscribers where and when they signed up for your mailing list? Write the statement and include referrer, referrer date, and/or referrer URL tokens in it.

System tokens, shown below, allow you to include information about the message subscription system. For instance, you may want to include a web address where readers can view your message, in case their email program will not display it properly. For that, you can add the [--problemsurl--] token. Tell-a-friend and unsubscribe tokens can also be found here. Legal compliance with the CAN-SPAM act requires that an unsubscribe option be included in all commercial messages. The token for it is [--optouturl--]. The [--optinurl--] token allows readers to forward the message to a friend in a way that will track the forward in the ez.newsletter system.





Order tokens allow you to automatically include information about individual customers’ online orders in the body of a message. These are extremely helpful when you are using automated messages to follow up with web sales. Here are some of the available order tokens:

 



These are fairly self-explanatory, and are based upon order records and item details as they are stored in your ez.newsletter account.

PERSONALIZATION THROUGH USER SELECTION

You can set up separate mailing lists for different kinds of mailings. Say, for instance, that your company sends out a monthly newsletter, coupons for online shopping, coupons for your bricks-and-mortar store, and highly-targeted announcements for customers with various specific interests. If the profiles option is enabled on your account, you can set list options to “external” and allow your subscribers to see and select what kinds of mailings they would like to receive.

If, for example, you run a sporting goods store, you might find that one customer may want online coupons and information about rock climbing equipment, while another wants to receive your newsletter and information about fishing and camping. When the readers select these options in their profiles, the will be added to those mailing lists and *only* those mailing lists. In this way, they self-select the information they get, effectively personalizing their own messages.

If your account is not currently set up for this kind of profile management and you’d like to know more about it, talk to your ez.newsletter represenative about making your account accommodate profile setup.

PERSONALIZATION THROUGH SEGMENTATION

Segmentation, or dividing a mailing list into multiple smaller lists based on various sets of criteria, can aid in personalization if you segment based on demographics, order histories, or interests expressed in clickthroughs. Segmentation will be discussed in greater detail in another white paper. Suffice it to say that it is easy to sort and separate email addresses into different lists on whatever basis you choose. Those lists will allow you to target mailings.




---

 

1. The Complete Guide to Email Marketing by Bruce C. Brown.

2. Total Email Marketing by Dave Chaffey.

3. Salutations are often not used in newsletters, but Chaffey feels that they can and should be included in all customer communications. This could be effective. It's one of many aspects of email marketing that you can test with your readers.

4. The Truth About Email Marketing by Simms Jenkins

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December 12, 2009 08:17 by Dawn Wallhausen
Timing Your Mailings: When and How Often?

Frequency:

It has probably happened to you: you find a company whose products you like and you sign up for their mailing list only to get bombarded with more email from them than you can possibly handle. This scenario is all too common, and many consumers don’t just ignore and delete excess messages—some get frustrated and report them as spam.

According to Dave Chaffey, 42 percent of consumers in a recent survey said that reduced frequency would be the best way to improve permission-based commercial email.¹ But what is the right frequency? That will vary by customer. To get a really good feel for it, you’ll need to do some testing and develop separate mailing lists with different maximum and minimum frequency guidelines. But until you can get tests underway: 

1. Sending no more than once a week a good basic guideline for promotional mailings.
2. Definitely do not send more frequently than once in a 48-hour period.
3. For the sake of yourself and your staff as well as your readers, plan on sending newsletters no more than once a month, with the potential for periodic supplements as content allows.
4. Among the various types of list mailings you send out, aim for not less than once a month—you don’t want your readers to forget about you any more than you want to risk annoying them.

You can actually get started building separate frequency-based mailing lists before you test, though. How? Ask new subscribers how often they want to hear from you when they sign up. Give them a range of options to choose from and have the ez.newsletter system file them into separate mailing lists according to their answers.

Testing methods will be discussed in greater detail in other white papers. Suffice it to say that, when you are ready to test for optimal frequency, segmentation can help. One group of readers may respond best to monthly deliveries while another responds better to weekly mailings. Plan, test, adapt, analyze, and refine.

Timing:

Much like frequency, the best timing for email blasts will probably vary, and should be discovered through segmenting and testing. But until testing gets underway, keep these things in mind:

 

1. There is some evidence that first thing in the morning on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday is best for people who are likely to read the message at work, so this is good timing to start with if you do a great deal of B2B outreach.
2. Evidence shows that first thing in the evening on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday works best for people who are likely to read your message at home. Shoot for these days and times if your business is mostly B2C.
3. For the B2B set, reasearch shows that 7–10:30AM is a good time range to shoot for, but keep in mind that crossing time zones can throw your timing off. You may consider segmenting out readers from different coasts and/or countries and timing their mailings differently.
4. Remember before, during, and after testing that the best day and time for your customers or business segments may change over time.

Bottom line: start out on a Tuesday or Thursday and test from there.

One more thing…keep your lists fresh. If you send on a monthy basis, consider removing soft bounces after the second bounce. If your frequency is higher, remove soft bounces after four or five sends. Don’t send to hard bounces more than three times, regardless of your frequency. But don’t worry about unsubscibes—the system takes care of those for you.

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December 9, 2009 08:38 by Dawn Wallhausen
Optimizing Message Deliverability

Putting together an effective enewsletter or marketing message takes knowledge, skill, and time, so you want to be sure that the messages you and your team put together reach their intended destinations. But how do you maximize deliverability? The best steps you can take towards this end are to: 

1. Make sure that users and spam filters won’t peg your messages as unsolicited commercial emails (UCEs or spam)
2. Ask your subscribers, and in some cases, their ISPs, to “whitelist” you
3. Keep clean mailing lists: unsubscribe or remove addresses that turn up hard bounces after the third hard bounce

Aspects of spam filtering and mailing list maintenance have been addressed in other papers that we have put out, as noted below. Much of the information on whitelisting is brand new in this publication. In this paper, we have done what we can to gather all of the relevant information about deliverability into one place without repeating too much. If you find that you need more of a refresher on any of the prior topics, please refer to the other papers cited.

AVOIDING SPAM PITFALLS

One of the best ways to make sure that your messages get to your subscribers is to make sure that your subscribers don’t label them as spam. That’s accomplished through:

• Making sure that you have explicit permission to send to the people on your lists
• Increasing message relevance through customization and personalization
• Reminding users, at least in your preliminary messages to them, when and where they subscribed for your mailing list
• NOT sending so frequently that you annoy readers
• NOT sending so infrequently that readers forget having signed up for your mailings

These suggestions are addressed in greater detail in our various papers on spam filters, frequency, and  personalization.

Another way to avoid having your messages get junked before they are read involves avoiding spam filters, which match certain characteristics of your emails against known features of unsolicited commercial emails. Here’s how to keep the spam filters away:

• Keep filter-triggering words and phrases out of your messages and subject lines
• Include a working unsubscribe link in your messages
• Include your organization’s physical address, phone number, and other relevant contact information, too
• Comply with all anti-spam legislation
• Maintain strong HTML coding, and use ONLY HTML, no script languages
• Create a privacy policy that clearly and accurately reflects how your organization gathers and uses information, and link to it from your messages

The aforementioned tips also feature prominently in the paper on spam filtering. 

WHITELISTING

In some cases, getting whitelisted is fairly simple. Other email programs require that users take more steps. If you would like to instruct your readers as to how to whitelist you in some of the most common email applications, here’s what to tell them, by program or filtering type:

AOL Version 9.0 or Higher

• Click on Mail Center
• Under Mail Preferences click Customize your e-mail, then Next
• Under Essentials click on Spam Controls, then Next
• On the right panel, check Mail filtered by AOL's Advanced Spam Filter 
• Underneath, uncheck Mail with clickable Hyperlinks (URLS) and Mail containing words and phrases on my Custom Word List.
• On the left panel, make sure that Block mail containing pictures or files is not checked.
• On the left panel select either:
  1. Option 1: “Allow mail from all senders” (allows ALL email) or
  2. Option 2: “Use a Custom Sender list” (allows selective email)

(Note: other options are too selective to allow many of the messages your readers will want)

If readers select Option 1: “Allow mail from all senders,” whitelisting is complete.
If readers select Option 2: “Use a Custom Sender list,” ask them to follow these instructions to add email from you:

• Click on the blue link: Custom Sender List
• Select the second option Allow only the domains and senders listed below
  • In the space provided, enter [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com] and click Add
  • Click Save (on the Custom Sender List screen)
• Click Save to Apply these Mail Controls (on the Mail and Spam Controls screen)
• Close any remaining open windows

AOL version 7.0, or 8.0

• Click on the Mail Menu in the Menu Bar
• Click on Mail Controls
• Click on Next
• Select Customize Mail Controls for this Screen Name, and click Next
• Select Option 1 or 2 below:
  1. Option 1: Select “Allow e-mail from all AOL members, e-mail addresses, and domains.” (allows ALL email) or
  2. Option 2: Select “Allow e-mail from all AOL members, and from the listed domains and e-mail addresses. Block e-mail from all others.” (allows selective e-mail)

If readers select Option 1: “Allow mail from all senders,” whitelisting is complete.
If readers select Option 2: “Use a Custom Sender list,” ask them to follow these instructions to add email from you:

• In the space provided, enter [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com] and Click Add
• Click Next
• Select Allow this Screen Name to send and receive mail with pictures and files.
• Click Save to Apply these Mail Controls.

Yahoo!

• Open your Yahoo mailbox
• Click Options
• Click Filters
• Click Add Filter
• In the filter name box, type [your company name]
• In the top row, labeled From header, make sure contains is selected in the pull-down menu.
• Click in the text box next to that pull-down menu and type [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com]
• At the bottom, where it says Move the message to: select Inbox from the pull-down menu
• Click the Add Filter button again.
  
  

Hotmail

• Click the Options link
• Click on the Mail link
• Click on Junk E-Mail Protection
• Click on Junk E-Mail Filter
• From the selection list, choose Enhanced, then click OK
• Click on Safe List
• In the space Type an address or domain:, enter ez-llc.com
• Click the Add button.
  
  

McAfee spamkiller for Outlook

• Click the Friends tab
• Click Email Address or Domains tabs as indicated below to add us to your list
• Click Email Address tab
• Click the Down Arrow to view your Personal Friends List
• Choose Add A Friend (right side)
• In the Address box, enter: [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com]. Your readers will need to name the link… they can refer to it by your company name. Then they will need to select Single e-mail address as the type and click Add.
• Click on the Domains tab.
• In the Address box, enter ez-llc.com, and name it [your company name]. Choose all users at domain as the type, and Click Add
• Click Save
  
  

EarthLink

Using TotalAccess Mailbox (Windows):

•  
  • Open TotalAccess and choose the Mailbox
  • Click on the Address Button.
  • From the File Menu, choose New Company (Domain)
  • In the space provided, enter  [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com] and Click Add
  • Click OK
  • From the File Menu choose New Contact
  • In the space provided, enter [your company name] as the name and [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com] as the email address:  then click Add
  • Click OK to add our contact name information

Ask your readers to also make sure that you are not in their Blocked Sender List!

•  
  • Click the Protection button in the TotalAccess Task Panel, select spamBlocker, and choose Settings
  • Click the Edit Blocked Sender List button
  • Look through the list and click on [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com] if it appears there
  • Click the Unblock Sender button to unblock this address
  • Click the Apply Changes button.

Using Web Mail (Macintosh or Windows Online):

• • Sign in to Web Mail
  • Click Address Book
  • Click the All Categories pull-down menu and choose Companies (Domains)
  • Click the Add button
  • In the space provided, enter [your company name]
  • Click Allow This Company (Domain) button
  • Click the All Categories pull-down menu and choose Contact.
  • Click the Add button.
  • In the space provided, enter [your company name] as the name and [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com] as the email address:  then click Add
  • Click Save Button

Ask your readers to also make sure that you are not in their Blocked Sender List

• • Click the spamBlocker in the left menu pane, below your Inbox and other mail folders.
  • In the list of tabs along the top part of the screen,click on Settings
  • Click on Blocked Sender List (in the lower right part of the screen)
  • Look through the list and click on [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com] if it appears there
  • Click the Unblock Sender button to unblock this address
  • Click Save Button (lower right part of screen)

MSN

• Click Help & Settings
• Click Email Settings
• Click on Safe List
• In the space provided Add an item to this list, enter ez-llc.com
• Click  the Add button
• In the space Type a single e-mail address (or domain):, enter  [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com]
• Click Add

NetZero

• Log in to your NetZero Web Mail account.
• Click on Options (along the second row down, next to Address Book).
• Click on Safe List (in far right column, the third option down under Filtering).
• In the space provided, Add Address to Safe List, enter  [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com], then click Add
• Click the Save button (bottom right of screen) to Apply these Mail Options.

Norton AntiSpam with Outlook and Others

• Start up Norton AntiSpam, Click the Status & Settings tab
• Click AntiSpam (middle of the screen).
• Click Yellow Configure Button (bottom right of screen).
• Click Allowed List tab (the 2nd Tab on the list of tabs).
• Click  the Add button (lower left).
• In the Email Address box, enter  [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com]  (Use [your company name] in the Name field)
• Click OK (bottom of screen).
  

We don’t advise that you send all of these whitelisting instructions to your subscribers in an email, but you may want to construct a web page that includes tagged links to each set of instructions, and make it available from your signup page. Don’t forget to swap your ez-newsletter From address wherever it says [yourFromaddress@ez-llc.com] in the instructions, and place your company or organization’s name wherever the instructions say [your company name].

Note, too, that some internet service providers (ISPs) maintain whitelists. Many respond to requests from legitimate companies to be added to their whitelists, but be aware that they may charge you if they receive a spam complaint against you, and too many complaints will result in blacklisting. Refer back to the section on spam pitfalls and to the section below for more about how to stay on an ISP’s good side.

MAINTAINING CLEAN LISTS

Repeatedly sending to addresses that reject your messages, or sending to addresses that have unsubscribed from your list, could give your company a bad reputation with the Internet Service Provider that hosts those addresses. Since ez.newsletter automatically unsubscribes anyone who uses the unsubscribe link you place in your outgoing marketing messages, you need not worry about those. But you do need to pay attention to hard bounces, and remove them from your list after three bounced attempts in a row.

Bounces can be monitored from your newsletter report pages. To see a report on any newsletter, just click report management on the main page of your account, then report.newsletters, then click on the mailing you wish to see a report on. You can click on the View Details links below any spam or hard failures to see who isn’t receiving your communications. Compare these to reports from prior messages and unsubscribe any addresses that have three failures in a row.

If you notice that the bulk of your bounced messages are coming from one Web domain (i.e. bobsuniversity.edu or sillymonkey.com), or if it seems that no one at a given domain is getting your messages, that probably means that the internet service provider for that domain is blocking you. You may want to try to contact the email administrators at that domain and request that they whitelist you. But be diplomatic: it’s an email administrator’s job to make sure that your company is legitimate before whitelisting you, so it’s also that person’s job to ask questions. Be prepared to discuss how you gather addresses for your mailing list, maybe even have specifics on how and when some of their users signed up. And of course, be ready to tell them about the kinds of goods and services your company provides, and anything else that may support your case, such as membership in the Better Business Bureau.

Follow these guidelines, respect subscribers’ wishes, and respect ISPs, and you will maximize deliverability of the email messages that you and your team work so hard to create.

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December 9, 2009 08:26 by Dawn Wallhausen
Starting and Growing Your Mailing List

The more people you have on your emailing lists, the more opportunities you have to build relationships and turn them into loyal, long-term clients or customers. But where to start? And how best to grow your list once you’ve built it? What pitfalls should you avoid in this process? Here’s some advice from the experts about how to get, and keep, new contacts.
 

How and Where To Collect Email Addresses¹

• On your website. Simms Jenkins recommends making signup accessible from every page, not just a landing page.
• Customer orders. Be sure to ask customers’ permission to be added to your mailing list before doing so, though. More on permissions below.
• Offline. Use direct mail, print ads, billboards, and other offline venues to send people to your signup page.
• The "fishbowl". If you’ve got a bricks-and-mortar store, collect addresses at the point of sale. Also, provide a spot for signups at conferences and trade shows.
• Surveys. Again, ask survey takers for permission before placing them on the mailing list.
• E-newsletters. Place forward-to-a-friend links in every newsletter, so readers can recommend you.
• Promotions, discounts, and giveaways
• Viral campaigns
• List exchange/rental. This technique can be tricky, though. We don't recomment it. Find out more about it below.
• Banner ads
• Affiliate and associate programs. Have a solid anti-spam policy in place before you do this.

Permission Types

If you wish to maintain your company’s good reputation in the marketplace, you cannot allow your email marketing approach to look like spam. As such, you should follow CAN-SPAM Act guidelines and never assume that you have permission to add someone to your mailing list. A customer who makes an online purchase, or one who responds to your e-survey, must still opt to receive your marketing messages for permission to be valid. There are two main ways people can opt in, and which form you choose is up to you:

• Single Opt-Ins

Here, a user must check (or uncheck) a “sign me up for the mailing list” box on a confirmation page, or enter their email address and click submit on a signup page. Single opt-in is a simple approach, but it does have some potential drawbacks:

Subscription errors
These occur when a user mistypes his or her email address. The ez.newsletter software automatically corrects many common subscription errors.

Invalid submissions
These happen when users enter an email address that does not exist.

False submissions
These occur when a user submits a fake email address or an address that does not belong to them.

List poisoning
Spammers may purposely poison your list.

• Double Opt-Ins

When someone signs up for your list, a confirmation message immediately goes to the new address. The user must then click a link in the confirmation message in order for the signup process to be completed.

This method is more complex, and you may lose up to 50% of new users with double opt-ins, but the trade-off is a much better quality list.

List Exchange/Rental

Rented and exchanged lists are dangerous; they could get you labeled as a spammer if you aren’t careful, and they may be of poor quality. But if you’re going to go this route, make sure that you:

1. Ask the list owner what form of opt-in was used and request proof of double opt-in. Don’t use a rented or exchanged list if the owner cannot prove that that people on the list chose to receive messages from other sources, and did so through double opt-in.
2. Ensure that the list owner has a good reputation.
3. Give preference to list owners affiliated with list quality control groups.
4. Make sure the list is not too old… if the list has not been used recently, many addresses may have fallen out of use, and active members may not remember agreeing to receive additional communications.
5. Use a statement of origin in messages going to the rented list.
6. Have traceability of contact, such as the date and location of opt-in and when the user’s profile was updated.
7. Make sure that the opt-out mechanism in your message is inserted and works properly, and honor unsubscribe requests right away.² Of course, the unsubscribe mechanism in ez-newsletter takes care of that last part for you.

These steps will reduce the chance that a rented or exchanged list will cause you trouble, and make it easier for you to prove that you aren’t a spammer if trouble does arise. Still, it’s safer and better to rely on building your own house list.

The best and safest way to make and grow your list is always to start from scratch. Collect addresses of interested parties where you can, make all of your other marketing efforts work with your mailing list, and never underestimate the power of good old fashioned word-of-mouth.

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December 9, 2009 08:13 by Dawn Wallhausen
How Spam Filters Work and How to Keep Your Messages from Going to Junkmail

One thing every e-marketer should know is that unsolicited commercial emails (UCEs or spam) are, well, unsolicited, and generally unwelcome in readers’ inboxes. You don’t want your messages to annoy your readers by seeming like spam—many will hit “delete” without even seeing what you have to offer, and some may report you. And getting a reputation as spammer could get you blacklisted for future correspondence, leaving you unable to get messages through at all.

But how do you do avoid such problems? First, you must know:

1. How UCEs are identified
2. Why messages get blocked
3. What best practices are

Then, of course, you have to follow the best practices and avoid spam tactics.

Here’s how messages get identified as spam:

• By the recipient—the reader clicks the “junk” button
• Software filtering—anti-spam software weighs characteristics of an incoming message against known spam characteristics and filters the message when it has too much in common with UCEs
• Domain blocking—an email service provider such as Hotmail, AOL, or gmail, or the email administrator at a company’s Web domain blacklists messages from a particular sender because the sender is known (or perceived to be) a spammer
• Sender authentication systems—these systems prevent spam by requesting that unknown senders click a link in an automated authentication message before future messages can be received from that sender’s address

What specifically causes a message to be filtered out depends upon the type of filtering that’s happening.  

If recipients are junking your messages, it may be that they don’t remember signing up for your mailing list (or only did so to get a promotional goody). Or, they may feel that the messages arrive too frequently, or are not really relevant to them. Or, perhaps you assumed permission to send email to them based on a prior customer/client/contributor relationship, but did not actually get consent to add them to your mailing list. Frequency, relevance, and permissions are addressed more thoroughly in other white papers.

Getting too many spam complaints could get your company a bad reputation (1 complaint per 1000 messages is considered an acceptable level).That’s where domain blocking comes in to play. Say ten users out of 150 subscribed from the domain bobsuniversity.edu peg your messages as spam within a few months. The university may then decide to block every message that comes from your address.

We already mentioned that spam-like content can lead to software filtering, but what constitutes spam-like content? Here are are some of the things filters look for:

• Subject lines in ALL CAPS and/or containing word “free,” the names of certain pharmaceuticals, the dollar sign ($), and/or the words quote, samples,  mortgage, membership, or access
• Messages containing some or all of the above in the body
• Messages comprised of one large image or several smaller ones, and little or no text
• Messages that do NOT contain a physical address and phone number for the sender
• Messages that do NOT contain an unsubscribe option, or with nonfunctional unsubscribe links
• Misleading subject lines, headers, or content
• Messages that are commercial in nature, but not identified as such

Legally, commercial emails must make it clear that they are commercial, must contain the sender’s physical address and phone number, must contain a working unsubscribe feature, and must NOT mislead the reader. 

Clearly, all practices that can lead to spam filtering are best avoided.

But how can you tell if filtering is happening to you, and what can you do to stop it? To know what’s going on with your messages, the best thing you can do is pay close attention to the reports generated after you send a message using ez.newsletter. Then, if you detect any of the following potential problems, follow the corresponding advice below: 

1. If a set of subscribers routinely ignore your messages, ask those readers ONCE to confirm their subscriptions. Unsubscribe the ones who don’t respond, or who reply asking to be removed. Any users who opt out using an unsubscribe link created in the program will automatically be unsubscribed.
2. If you get three hard bounces from a given user, remove that user from your list.
3. If you notice that you have no opens from the subscribers at a specific domain (as in, none of the 50 subscribers at pinkpoodles.com opens your messages) or worse, you have nothing but hard bounces from the domain, the domain may be blocking you. Here, you can contact the administrator of the domain and ask—diplomatically—why your messages aren’t getting through. If you can prove to the administrator that people at their domain requested your messages, your address may get removed from the blacklist, so know when those users subscribed and be ready to discuss the signup process you use.
4. You don’t have to worry about sender authentication systems at all. Why? Because the ez.newsletter team receives and automatically responds to them on your behalf.

You can also register your commercial address with abuse.net’s feedback loop. It will also help you to identify potential problems before they become real problems.

Put more simply, best practices for commercial email messages and company newsletters are as follows:

1. Keep a clean list.
2. Only send to those who have specifically stated that it is OK for you to do so.
3. Have a working unsubscribe link in your messages.
4. Comply with all spam legislation.
5. Send at a responsible frequency.
6. Maintain strong HTML coding, and use ONLY HTML, no script languages.

Go to http://www.ftc.gov/spam for updates to the laws regarding UCEs. In The Complete Guide to Email Marketing, Bruce C. Brown recommends these additional spam resources:

www.spamlaws.com
www.cauce.org
www.spamcop.net

Finally, there are a couple more things you can consider to reduce the risk of spam complaints while increasing customer satisfaction:

1. Provide instructions for registering complaints as part of a complete anti-spam policy and link to a page containing those policies in each message.
2. Offer customized frequency and/or content options to your users so that they can choose how often to receive email from you and what they would like to read about.

These final suggestions are not quick fixes: they will require some additional thought and time to put into place. But doing so could be well worthwhile for the increased relevance and understanding they will bring.

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December 8, 2009 09:36 by Dawn Wallhausen
Eight Tips for Getting Your E-Newsletter Read

If you’re going to take the time to design and create an online newsletter, you want to be sure that recipients will read and appreciate it, and look forward to receiving more of them in the future. Here, we discuss some basic ways to make to make that happen. Other articles will discuss some of these ideas in greater detail, but these eight tips will get you well on your way to producing an e-newsletter that gets attention.

1. Set goals in advance.

Before creating an e-newsletter, consider what you hope to achieve with it. Is your primary objective relationship building? Is it keeping customers informed about developments in your business or upcoming events? Do you want to build your mailing list through forward-to-a-friend links? Can you set specific targets for your goals for the next six months or a year?

2. Pay special attention to subject lines.

Many people use subject lines to determine whether a message is unsolicited commercial email (spam) or not, so don’t take your subject lines lightly. Keep these things in mind:

• Feel free to be a little creative with a subject line
• HOWEVER, make sure that it still tells your readers something about the message contents
• Make sure the subject line isn’t misleading
• Try to keep it under 30 characters long—additional characters may get deleted
•  DON’T SHOUT!!!! The use of all caps and multiple exclamation points comes across as yelling, and it makes your message look like spam
• Avoid use of the word “free” or the dollar sign ($) in your subject line: those are also spam triggers

3. Avoid spam-like tactics in the body of your message and for message sending in general.

Here, as in your subject line, avoid all caps, too much punctuation, and overuse of the word “free.” But keep in mind what users consider spam, too. Your readers will appreciate it if you:

• Get specific permission to send them emails
• Don’t send messages too frequently

Permissions and frequency and timing are addressed in greater detail in other posts.

4. Make your content scannable.

Dave Chaffey notes that 75% of email readers scan messages rather than reading them word-for-word, so take steps to make scanning easier for your readers.* How?

•  Halve your word count as compared to traditional writing 
•  Write in inverted pyramid style, stating the main point first in every paragraph, then adding details
• Use bulleted and/or numbered lists
• Highlight keywords
• Use meaningful headings and subheadings
• Limit paragraphs to one concept each
• Keep instructions succinct and to a minimum
  

5. Stay away from the hard sell.

Consider your e-newsletter a way to build trust within your customer base. Think about your readers’ needs and write for them. Deliver value and relevance, and the rest will follow.

6.  Give readers what they want.

E-newsletters should offer information value to readers. If your audience is likely to want different types of information or advice from you, consider offering choices for content types that can be updated through their personal profiles.

7. Make it easy to navigate.
 

• Provide a table of contents with links to specific content. 
• Use a similar layout for each newsletter.

8. Follow the rules.

Many countries, including the United States, have established laws designed to identify unsolicited commercial email and punish its purveyors. In his book, Bruce C. Brown summarizes the main points of the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act, which legislates spam, as follows:**

• Commercial messages must NOT contain false or misleading information
• Commercial messages must not contain false or misleading headers
• Deceptive subject lines are not permitted
• Commercial emails must contain a functional opt-out link
• Ads must be identified as such
• All commercial messages must include the sender’s physical address and contact information
  
  

  ---

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December 8, 2009 09:29 by Dawn Wallhausen
Setting Goals, Measuring Success, and Troubleshooting with Metrics

Perhaps your organization wants to start an e-newsletter and e-marketing campaign, but you don’t know where to set the bar for your response rate goals. Or maybe you and your team have already started an e-newsletter and it seems like you are getting a good response from your mailing list, but you don’t know how can you be sure. Basing your goals on industry standards is a good place to start, and if you miss the mark, these metrics can give you a good idea what to improve upon.

In his book Total Email Marketing, Dave Chaffey estimates industry average values for various metrics as follows:

• Hard bounces should not exceed 5% for a good-quality list
• Open rates should not fall below 10%
• Clickthroughs should not fall below 5-10%
• Landing page form completion should reach at least 40%

Hard bounces represent e-newsletters that never reach their intended recipients. This may occur if the address is bad or no longer in use, or if the recipient’s mail server actively blocks your message. It is to be expected that you will receive some hard bounces from time to time, but if you are getting too many, consider:

• Cleaning up your list, if you have been using it for some time
• Increasing quality control, if manual data entry could be part of the problem
• Asking new subscribers to add you to their address books or whitelists

More information on whitelisting is available from another paper posted on this blog.

Open rates give you a general idea of how many people are looking at your e-newsletter. However, do not put too much stock in this number alone: open rates can be thrown off by readers using preview panes (which register opens that may not have happened) or email programs that automatically turn off images (messages opened in these systems may not appear as opens). Still, keep in mind that:

• Lower open rates suggest a problem with the subject line.

Think up new ways to use subject lines to entice readers to open your e-newsletter, but make sure it remains accurate!

Clickthrough rates show how many readers have clicked at least one link contained in your e-newsletter. Low clickthrough rates suggest:

• Relevance may be a problem.
•  Creative elements may need work.

To increase relevance, consider offering your readers a choice for types of content they’d like to see. Alternately, you could sort your audience members by demographics, purchasing patterns, or other behaviors and tailor content accordingly. We will offer more advice on this in a future article.

In addition, review the following creative elements:

• The length and size of the message—keep it brief and don’t bog it down with huge images that take a long time to load
• The position of call to action link(s)—one should appear “above fold”, or within the range displayed by a typical email reader's preview pane, and may be duplicated elsewhere
• The prominence of links
• The structure of links—do they follow a logical sequence? 

Landing page form completion rate refers to the percentage of visitors to your signup page who complete the process and join your mailing list. Although the landing page may not necessarily be a part of your e-newsletter, it may benefit you to add a link to it for people who receive your newsletter through a forward, so we will include it in this discussion. Low form completion means that you should review:

• The number of questions asked
• Privacy—is your policy clear? Reassuring? Reasonable?
• Tone and design of landing page—is it consistent with your website and other communications?
•  The appeal of the message

Mailing list signup questions should be kept to a minimum, at least initially—first and last name, email address, and zip code may be all you need. You can always collect more profile information at a later date, but asking for too much at once could turn people off.

Fears about having contact information shared without permission may also reduce signups. A privacy policy should be accessible from your landing page, and it should accurately reflect what you intend to do with the person’s data, include as much detail as necessary, and be as clear and concise as possible.

A landing page that has design and stylistic differences from those of the rest of your website or other communications may cause people to suspect that the page does not actually belong to your company. For this reason, make sure that your style and tone are consistent. Think, too, about adding your company contact information to the landing page (and every web page and outgoing email message, for that matter) for an extra measure of reassurance.

Last but not least, check that your message is appealing. Does the signup page clearly explain the benefits of receiving your newsletter and/or marketing messages? Maybe link to some of your best newsletter content, to give a taste of what is to come.

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December 8, 2009 09:06 by Dawn Wallhausen
Ten Common Email Design Errors and How to Avoid Them

Email marketing is cost-effective, efficient, easy, and flexible in comparison to more traditional advertising and fundraising methods, and it allows you to build and grow relationships with your customer or client base. However, the ease factor of email campaigns may lead you to forget how important planning and testing is, and the flexability factor may cause you to go a little heavy on the cutting-edge media. It’s only natural to get exuberant when you discover the freedoms that email marketing brings to your organization’s advertizing, but make sure that energy doesn’t lead to mistakes that could render your email campaign ineffective or worse, get you labeled a spammer. Below are ten common mistakes email marketers make and the best ways to avoid them.

1. Dashing off a subject line without putting much thought into it

For many readers, the subject line of a message is the deciding factor in whether they open it or not, so it is important to craft a subject line with care. At the same time, you should try to keep it below 20 characters—after that point, some of the characters may get cut off. Here are some other things to keep in mind:

• Make sure that your subject line reflects the contents of your messages accurately and succinctly
• Avoid using ALL CAPS—this is tantamount to yelling
• Avoid overuse of exclamation points
• Don’t use the word “FREE” or the dollar sign ($) in your subject lines… these may trigger spam filters

            2. Forgetting about the preview pane

Many email programs offer users a preview pane, and many people use the preview pane to read messages, rarely opening them to full size. Sizes and orientations (horizontal or vertical) for preview panes vary, so you can’t make your message look perfect in every single one, but follow these guideline to optimize your message for previewing:

• Keep the width to 600 pixels or less
• Aim for your most important content to show “above the fold”—where it can be seen without scrolling (this holds for vertical and horizontal scrolling)
• Get your call to action above the fold
• Left align your header image or logo so that it doesn’t go missing from the preview altogether
• Avoid using fixed-width table cells—flexible widths will allow content more room to adjust to different preview pane sizes

            3. Leaving out the forward-to-a-friend link

The forward-to-a-friend link isn’t necessary for every email communication you have with customers or clients, of course, but e-newsletters, nonexclusive promotions, and of course e-membership drives can benefit from allowing for this kind of word-of-mouth. Some people will just use their email program’s forward button to recommend your messages, but placing a link in the message header will remind even the forward-button forwarders to spread the word. And people who do use the forward-to-a-friend  link will reward you with recommendations that will be stored in your ez.newsletter database, so that you can follow up with them later.

            4. Using one large graphic (or many small graphics) and little or no text

HTML-based emails allow you to do great things for the look of your outgoing email messages, but you can go overboard with the graphics. Some email clients automatically turn images off, and some filters strip pictures from incoming mail, so making your message from one big graphic or several smaller ones may leave readers with no idea what your email is about. 

By all means, include your handsome header, company logo, and relevant accent pictures in your e-newsletter and messages, but make your most important points and your call to action text-based, and include your company name in text, along with your full contact information, in the footer.

            5. Neglecting alt tags

When you use images in your messages, provide a brief description for each one in “alt” tags. This way, those who can do so may be inspired to turn images back on, and those who can’t will have a good idea what they aren’t seeing.

In ez.newsletter’s message editor, the insert image feature provides a field for image alt tags. Just enter the text you want to appear when the corresponding image is not available.

6. Forgetting the footer (and things that often go in one)

A footer not only helps tie your message together with the header and body, but it should also contain standard email marketing elements that are necessary for anti-spam law compliance (unless you have incorporated these elements into a different part of the message). These include:

• The physical address, phone number, fax number, and any other necessary or useful contact information
• An unsubscribe link
• A link to your privacy policy

And, while it isn’t necessary for anti-spam law compliance, you may also want to include a statement of origination in the footer… one of those notes that says how your company got the reader’s address and when you received permission to add that person to your email list. It helps prevent false spam claims.

            7. Forgetting to test the unsubscribe link

You can put an unsubscribe link in your email marketing messages, but you aren’t following through on legal compliance until you check the link and make sure that it works. Malfunctions such as this are uncommon with ez.newsletter, but if you are testing your messages in different email programs, anyway (as described below), this is easy enough to do. Try out the unsubscribe link in one of your test accounts with each email marketing campaign. Remember to reverse the unsubscribe after testing, so that you can test on the account again the next time you send messages.

            8. Forgetting to test the message in multiple email programs

Again, your messages can’t look the same in every single format, but it’s a good idea to try them out in as many email clients as you can and ensure that the most important parts of your design and message are coming across. Get free email accounts at Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL and send test messages to them. If your company uses Outlook or Eudora, test in the program you already use, and see if you have a friend who uses the other program and can offer you feedback.

            9. Getting too fancy with the coding and extras

Javascript and dynamic HTML often don’t work in email, and even CSS isn’t supported across the board. It’s safest to stick with old-school HTML, and you can create some interesting layouts using tables, colors, and/or text formatting.

You may also want to avoid including video clips in your messages. Why?

• If your readers don’t have the latest version of Flash, or whatever player your video requires, they may end up frustrated with the idea of having to download something to see your clip, no matter how cool the clip is.
• Readers with slower internet connections are likely to have a long wait to see video and may experience interruptions in the video feed, which can also be frustrating.

You can get around this by providing a link to special content housed on your website. However, make sure that you note which player is required and be certain that your readers control the start/stop/pause and volume. Video and audio that start automatically could be embarrassing to someone who unknowingly clicks the link in a work setting.

10. Sending too frequently

Contacting your readers too frequently could get you accused of spamming, even if you are doing everything else right. But more than likely, it will just mean that many of your messages will go unopened. What’s too frequent? Well, that may vary from one reader to the next, and may require testing for you to determine accurately (that is a subject for another white paper).

However, it’s pretty safe to say that you shouldn’t send email on a daily basis, even to your most loyal customers, unless you are responding to a message thread started and continued by the other party. You can also bet that regularly sending more messages than you say you will is a bad idea. However, it’s a good idea to give new subscribers some idea of how often to expect messages from you. Better yet, let them choose the level of correspondence they want. Then stick to that schedule.

The mistakes listed here are quite common, really. But ensuring that your business doesn’t make similar gaffes in the future will set your marketing campaigns above the rest, making them uncommonly user-friendly.

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