5 Essential Email Marketing Tips

Email Marketing should be an essential part of your marketing toolkit because everyone uses and understands email. Email newsletters are easy and inexpensive to send out, they’re easy to track and measure (email newsletter software has analytics that reports on how people are engaging with your newsletter) and they’re an opt-in way to send information to people who’ve chosen to receive your content. If you’re unsure of the relevance of email, see this post and infographic on the value of email.

This isn’t to say that social media tools don’t have their place. Vertical Response reports open rates are 28% higher for brands who use email and social in tandem. As always, marketing tools shouldn’t be used in silos but, instead, integrated into holistic marketing campaigns. Watch this 1-minute marketing video for more information on using email newsletters together with your blog and social media networks.

5 Essential Email Marketing Tips

1. Use an Email Marketing Service Provider

Use a service dedicated to email newsletter distribution. These service providers have strict email rules that keep their servers white listed, which means that your newsletter is more likely to get through spam filters. They also give you the ability to measure your campaigns and manage your email list subscribes and unsubscribes.

Mail Chimp and Constant Contact are both popular email marketing service providers but we prefer to use Campaign Monitor to send out newsletters.

Although it requires a bit more technical know-how, we like Campaign Monitor because:

• The signup process can happen on your website’s URL. This allows you to track newsletter signups (and where they drop off in the signup process) in Google Analytics.
• You can give Client Access to an account so that clients can access to their own newsletter list and reports without having access to all of the accounts you manage.

2. Know When to Send Out Your Newsletter

In general, best practice for sending out email newsletters is midweek (Mondays are too busy, Fridays people are trying to finish things up for the weekend). You want to either send out your newsletter between 7-8am so that it’s in subscribers’ inboxes when they arrive at work and are sitting down to go through email, or send it out at lunch time so that people will read them when they look at their email after lunch.

Despite these general best practices, it is always better to tailor them specifically to your own audience. Find out what day and time your audience is online by going into your analytics and seeing what day and time of day gets the most traffic on your site.

In the new version of Google Analytics:

1. Log in to Google Analytics. Go to Overview
2. Here you can see visits by day and hour by clicking on the icons above the graph on the right hand side

In the old version of Google Analytics (this version gives you a report that’s easier to read):

1. Log in to Google Analytics. Scroll to the bottom and click Old version - Reporting (the new version of Google Analytics doesn’t have this report)
2. Go to Visitors > Visitor Trending > Visits
3. Here you can see visits by day and hour by clicking on the icons above the graph on the right hand side

3. Use Google’s URL Builder to Track Your Campaigns

If your email service provider doesn’t integrate with Google Analytics, use Google’s URL builder to create a custom URL for the links in your newsletter so that you can track them in analytics. For example, if you include http://www.yourwebsite.com/contact in your newsletter, while you can see in analytics how many visits there were to that URL,  you won’t know how many of those visits were directly from your newsletter.

Instead, use the URL builder to create a custom URL that identifies people coming from your newsletter. Note: the URL builder can be used to track any online campaign, including ad campaigns and blogger outreach campaigns.

Make sure to think through your parameters so that it will make sense in your analytics reports. Here’s an example of the parameters for a newsletter going out this month via Constant Contact:

• Campaign Source: ConstantContact
• Campaign Medium: Email
• Campaign Name: May 2012 Newsletter

To find this report in analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns.

4. Use Email Newsletters in Tandem with Other Marketing Tools

As mentioned above, email newsletters should be used in tandem with your blog and social media efforts.

For your blog, this means organizing your editorial calendar for the blog together with your email newsletter. If you have a quarterly newsletter, for example, publish blog posts throughout the quarter, and then send out your newsletter while slowing down activity on the blog.

Also think about reusing content from your blog in your newsletter. For example, send out a newsletter that is a roundup of the top 5 most popular blog posts on your site that quarter.

For tips on integrating your email newsletter with social media, read 9 ways to integrate email and social media marketing.

5. Measure and Report

Like any online marketing tactic, you should measure the success of your email marketing in relation to your overall business objectives. Possible metrics include:

Objective: Build Reputation

• Number of subscribes
• Number of unsubscribes

Objective: Increase Awareness

• Number of email opens (What’s a good email open rate?)
• Number of shares

Objective: Audience Engagement

• Number of click-thrus
• Comments/Feedback
• Time with content / Number of times opened

For more tips on tracking and measuring the success of your campaigns:

Using Custom Reports in Google Analytics to Inform Marketing Decisions
How to Use Google Analytics Advanced Segments

How to Integrate Google Analytics with Constant Contact

Integrating Google Analytics with your email newsletters is important so that you can track what visitors from the newsletters do on your site.

While most email marketing services track the clicks on links in newsletters, they don’t track important metrics about what visitors do after they click. When running an email newsletter campaign, you can track this data by integrating Google Analytics with your email tool in order to answer questions like, how long do visitors from the email spend on the site? How many pages do they visit? Do they convert, or how many goal completions do they make such as downloading a whitepaper, purchasing a product or requesting a quote? What’s the conversion rate for newsletter visitors vs. non-newsletter visitors?

Knowing this information allows you to measure the success of your email newsletter efforts.

To further understand what newsletter traffic does on your site, once Google Analytics integration is set up, you should also create an advanced segment in Google Analytics to isolate your email traffic so you can look at visitors from your email campaigns in relation to other audience segments.

How to Add Google Analytics Tracking Code to Constant Contact Emails

1. Log in to Constant Contact.
2. In the Emails tab click on the email you want to schedule.
3. In Email Settings, once all of the fields are correctly filled out and you have a Send To List selected, click Schedule in the top right corner.

4. In the Schedule pop-up window select Include Google Analytics and enter in a Google Analytics Campaign Title. This is what you’ll see in Analytics to identify your email so choose a naming convention that will make sense when you’re looking at your Analytics reports. If you send out a monthly newsletter, use the name of the month/year as your campaign title. If your newsletter is topic-based, then perhaps include the subject keyword. i.e., Apr-12 News: Facebook Tips
5. Click OK.

View Your Campaign Reports in Google Analytics

1. Log into Google Analytics and in the sidebar select Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns

2. Here you’ll see your Campaigns listed by Campaign Title. By default, the Campaign Source is the same as your Campaign Title and the Medium is auto completed as email.

Email Marketing Still Matters: Gmail Priority Inbox and Permission Marketing

Despite the growth of social networks, email is popular as ever. A recent survey found that 72% of respondents check email during their time off,19% check email in bed and 50% check email while they’re on vacation or during days off.

Last week Gmail released it’s Priority InBox, which has some marketers declaring the death of email marketing and others trying to figure out ways to get past the Priority Inbox filter - like adding “Important” to their email subject lines.

But these marketers are missing the point. Gmail’s Priority Inbox gets us back to the basics of email marketing. Email marketing is effective because it’s based on permission and, as Seth Godin states,

the future of marketing is based on permission. It’s based on sending messages to people who want to get them, who choose to get them, who would miss you if you didn’t send them. It’s not easy and it’s not cheap to earn permission, but so what? This is my attention, not yours, and if you want to use it for a while, please earn the privilege.

If you’re sending your newsletter to people who want it then you shouldn’t be worried about it getting lost in their inbox - people will look for it if they don’t receive it.

We like email newsletters because they’re:

• A proven way to communicate with your audience.
• Easy and inexpensive.
• An opt-in way to send information to those who are most receptive to your message.
• Effective. Everyone has email and is comfortable with email. People understand how to subscribe and unsubscribe.
• Measurable. A newsletter subscribe button on your website is a measurable call to action. In addition, email newsletter software has analytics that measures how many people are reading and clicking through links within your newsletter.

So if you have a newsletter, keep sending it out and if you don’t, we recommend starting one. Make sure your newsletters include a clear call to action, an unsubscribe link, and effective copy - strong email subject lines, headings and opening paragraphs. Also make sure to use a service dedicated to email newsletter distribution, like Campaign Monitor or MailChimp to manage your list and get metrics on your readers’ behaviours.

More email resources:

• Stop Yourself From Making Egregious E-mail Errors
• The Three Key Elements of Irresistible Email Subject Lines
• Gmail Priority Inbox: 5 Tips for Better Productivity 

Email Newsletters: 6 Mistakes to Avoid

In April 2008 I gave a presentation to the Vancouver League of Drupalers (the Vancouver Drupal users group). My presentation, Email Newsletters: WTF?, is a general overview of the issues involved with managing an email newsletter and 6 mistakes to avoid.

These Show Notes were kindly pulled together by Dale McGladdery.

Introduction
00:00 Email Newsletters: WTF? Opening Credits
00:05 Monique Trottier introduces her talk

Monique’s List of Mistakes to avoid
01:50 Mistake 1: Don’t treat Email HTML like Web HTML, they’re different
04:50 Mistake 2: Forgetting to design for Preview Panes
09:53 Mistake 3: Assuming your images are going to work
13:10 Mistake 4: Too many images, not enough text
16:12 Mistake 5: Not testing in different email programs
19:45 Mistake 6: Do not neglect your footer

Questions
23:35 Campaign Monitor
25:36 Email vs RSS
28:00 Newsletter Focus
30:30 Email Delivery Systems
33:50 What kinds of stats do you want to see from a delivery system

Discussion of handling bounces/unsubscribes
37:10 ISP Blacklisting
37:35 More points on newsletter forwarding
38:47 Getting content into Campaign Monitor
41:00 Outlook 2007 especially problematic
41:40 Recommendations of time/frequency/length
44:54 Jacob Neilson eye tracking study
46:48 What kind of stuff gets forwarded?
47:18 Embedding images, objects, and landing pages

You may also find this blog post interesting (Monique on Lab with Leo talking about Email Marketing): More Email Marketing Tips

References
Boxcar Marketing Website: http://www.boxcarmarketing.com
Constant Contact: http://www.constantcontact.com
Campaign Monitor: http://www.campaignmonitor.com
MailChimp: http://www.mailchimp.com

Campaign Monitor Is My Purple Cow

How I Got Wine from Campaign Monitor

First let me tell you a story. It’s actually Seth Godin’s story from The Purple Cow, a book about what it takes to create and sell something remarkable.

Seth and family driving in France, enchanted by picturesque cows grazing in lovely pastures. Kilometres and kilometres of cows. New cows suddenly are just like old cow, now cows are common. Now cows are boring.

“Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be well-bred cows, Six Sigma cows, cows lit by a beautiful light, but they are still boring. A Purple Cow, though: Now, that would really stand out. The essence of the Purple Cow—the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows—is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to. Boring stuff quickly becomes invisible.”

Campaign Monitor is my purple cow.

In the land of email distribution services there are some big players and companies with lots of features. How do you choose who to spend money with?

I looked at everyone’s websites. I tested the tools.

I like that CampaignMonitor.com has a self-explanatory website. The home page tells me about the immediate benefits I will see using the service: control, design testing, reporting, and the blowing-away of clients. Wow, they know what I need.

• Free sign-up. Yay!
• Easy set-up. Double yay! (Although it did take me a bit to realize all the moving parts for creating the on-site subscriber links and thank you pages. As a methodical beginner this was all fine, and now that I’ve done it once, I’m like a rocket ship.)
• Simple reporting of complex info. Love the opens, activity reports, subscriber reports—fantastic!

Plus, they have a rockin’ newsletter with lots of tips. It’s important that the company selling me email distribution actually understands how this works and writes a good newsletter.

And, they continue to provide value to the community by creating tools for designers, like this CSS Support Chart that details what CSS elements are supported in various email clients. Hello Superstar!

Campaign Monitor is my Purple Cow. They make email marketing “refreshingly simple”, which is also part of the tagline for Freshview, the company responsible for Campaign Monitor.

And “refreshingly simple” makes them my favourite. It makes them remarkable. So remarkable that I’m willing to recommend them to friends and colleagues, which is what I did recently on Lab with Leo.

Now how did I get that wine?

In June, Mathew from Campaign Monitor spotted me on Lab with Leo and sent me an email thanking me for mentioning Campaign Monitor. He also said, “We’d love to send you a Campaign Monitor shirt to say thanks.” Sweet!

Since James is the t-shirt wearer in our family, I picked a size for him. On a related note, James gets a lot of t-shirts from Threadless, who also use Campaign Monitor.

Somewhere along the line, I also ended up with 2 bottles of fantastic Australian wine from my Sydney-based friends at Freshview.

Remarkable service means I remark on the service.

Thank You for the Thank You.

Email marketing tips on the Lab with Leo

Work Industries’ second appearance on Lab with Leo showed up online and we’re glad to share it now.

In the 9-minute segment Monique shares with Leo her top tips for creating an effective email newsletter. And she knows what she’s talking about because she’s the force behind the Underwire newsletter: full support for non-techies.

Lab with Leo episode 132 — Monique Trottier explains her top 5 email marketing tips.

And if you liked that, you might also like Monique’s post on 10 email marketing tips.

10 Email Marketing Tips

Did you see me on Lab with Leo on Tech TV?

I was on Episode 132 talking about email marketing.

The segment will be live online eventually and I’ll update this post.

In the meantime, do you want 10 tips for improving your email marketing this year?

Constant Contact, which is one of the email delivery services I mention in the Lab with Leo segment, produces a great email newsletter.

Last week Amy Black, Constant Contact Editor, Hints & Tips e-Newsletters, offered up these 10 great tips:

1. Develop a communications calendar - This year, plan ahead. Sit down with a calendar each quarter and look at everything you have coming up. Think through what your goals are and how you want to market your products, events, or organization with email and the other communication tools available to you.

2. Create your emails early - Are certain times of the year busier for you than others? When you have so much going on, it’s hard to give the time and brain power needed for creating excellent marketing emails. A solution is to create some of these emails during a slower time in your year. If you have your plan in place, you know what you have coming up. You can even set the day and time your emails will go out, so you don’t have to give them a second thought.

Get 8 more ideas for your email marketing from Amy.