Email Marketing

Use your first contact to engage with your customers

admin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:52:47 +0000

We start this tip with an essential statement in email marketing: your first email will affect how they think about you and your brand or company. It can even determine whether they’ll continue to do business with you.

The email relationship can start when someone signs up to receive promotional email or newsletters. But be aware that it could also be something as generic as an order confirmation or account registration.

All those messages offer a perfect opportunity to engage with your customers. They allow you to open or extend the email relationship with your customers or subscribers. And what about the chance to answer ‘hot’ questions or to cross-sell or up-sell your products or services… You wouldn’t want to waste that, would you?

Maximize customer satisfaction through email

admin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:52:11 +0000

You may provide the greatest product in the world with the best service in the industry, but if it doesn’t work for the customer, they are not going to be happy. After all, customer success is what customer satisfaction is built upon.

There is a relatively easy way to boost customer satisfaction. Consider starting an email newsletter that provides your customers with best practice advice and case studies. It’s an ideal medium to share product knowledge that will help customers get the most out of your product or service. In addition to that, email also makes it easy for recipients to forward your message to a friend. And rest assured: satisfied customers will forward your message, expanding your brand reach considerably.

What links can do in your email

admin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:51:36 +0000

Lots of emails are sent to generate traffic to websites. Promotional emails link to product pages, newsletters link to extensive articles, etc. This makes links in emails extremely valuable.

But how can you increase the chance email receivers will actually click and engage with your message?

The key is relevant content of course, but next to that we can offer you some specific tips:

Repeat links in different formats (URL’s, text links, image links)
Highlight important sections and links
Link to high valued sections on your website (e.g. via a navigation bar)

Conclusion: Use your links strategically and always focus on key propositions to ensure site traffic and conversion.

Endless e-mails are not the way to go

admin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:44:15 +0000

About a week and a half ago I ordered a pair of sandals from Endless.com and since then, the e-mails have seemed endless.

While I have been an Amazon customer for years, this was my first time ordering from their independently run e-commerce shoe store. So like any good e-commerce store, it sent me a confirmation e-mail to let me know that my purchase had gone through, as well as a follow up e-mail the next day to let me know that my product had shipped. These two e-mails are a great use of e-mail so far.

But then the blasts began. It seemed like every day for a week, I got an offer for free shipping on some other kind of shoe. It felt overwhelming that I had ordered a product from this new company and instead of sending me an introduction e-mail detailing the offers that it would send, or even an option to opt in to receive savings, I was automatically being bombarded with marketing messages. It was also surprising because I had unchecked the box to sign up for the e-mail program. While I know, my purchase alone was a non-direct opt-in to subsequent messages, most best practices would not have persisted with marketing messages to a customer who had not directly signed up for offers.

Good Tool – Bad Idea

admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:01:17 +0000

This seems like s spammers best bet. OR could there be a way to use it in order to validate email addresses in your database? I was trying to see this from a useful view instead of the immediate one I found for it.

The elevator pitch on this tool:

One of the obstacles in sending an EECB (Executive Email Carpet Bomb) is that if you’re guessing a whole bunch of executive emails based on a standardized email format, some are bound to bounce. Verify-email.org lets you quickly figure out if if an email address is valid or not. Useful if you want to go through several email permutations fast, without waiting for a bounceback to finetune your results.

I think that many ESP tools have domain validation in them, but would it be useful to add a feature that IF KNOWN would automatically fix the structure of your email database? Could it fix typos or structure typos? I would think that would be handy. I know that it is quite easy to guess anyone’s email address, but if they did not enter it into your opt in form should you be taking the initiative to fix it? I think you let it die. Human error is going to always be a factor that we have to deal with.

Here is that link for you that think otherwise:

http://Verify-email.org/