In this article we will give you several tips that can help you in improving your open and click-thru rates.

1) Open rate

In order to your email campaign be successful the first necessary thing is that people open and read your email newsletter. Online publishing is very similar to traditional publishing. When you buy a daily newspaper, you probably don’t read everything. You don’t have that much of free time and not every subject is equally interesting for you. If you are a sports fan you will read the sport section but you might skip an article about latest movies . In most cases you will decide what you are going to read upon subject titles.

Same thing with email newsletters. One of the two most important factors that influence whether or not your subscriber will open your email newsletter will be your subject line. In order to have good open rates and click-thru rates you have to know your audience. Your message has to be well targeted.

There are several rules you have to follow in order to make effective subject lines.

Subject lines

Your subject lines should be short and snappy to get attention of your subscribers. Many people receive dozens of emails every day and some other people that have web sites and often make posts on different places like web forums, discussion lists, publish articles, can get more than 100 emails per day. So your message will have a very big competition in your subscriber’s inbox. That’s why your subject line has to grab attention of your subscriber. This doesn’t mean that you have to use usual spam techniques. On the contrary. Avoid using words FREE, GUARANTEED, Make Money Fast, Limited Offer and other get-rich-quick schemes words. Not just because of your subscribers. If you use these words it is most likely that your emails will never even reach them. Their ISP will take care of that with their spam filters. Also don’t capitalize every letter and don’t put several times exclamation. You don’t need to shout, people will “hear” you if you know how to “tell” them your message.

So your subject line has to be short and snappy, best thing is that you include one title from your articles in your subject line. It can be some breaking news or exlusive interview. People like to read breaking news or exclusive interviews that can’t be found anywhere else. Also, people often read how-to articles (for example - How To Choose The Right Email Marketing Software) or so called “number” articles (for example – 7 Tips For E-publishers On A Shoestring Budget).

Good thing is that you put your newsletter name in brackets, at the beginning of your subject line in order to be easily recognized from other emails in inbox.

Please bear in mind, that your subject line has to be consistent. What do I mean by that? Of course that you will change the title in your subject line but you have to find the best subject form and stick to it. For example:

[NewslettterName] Your Subject Title, Issue #x, Date

Don’t forget, in order to make effective ads and this apply to subject lines, as well you have to remember 3 words – test, test, test! You have to experiment with different models and find out which work best for you.

From field

Beside Subject line, From field is another info that your recipients will see in their inbox. People have to trust you in order to decide to read your emails. You don’t open your doors to every person who knocks, don’t you?

If you are well-known person, trusted expert in your industry, for example some reputable Internet consultant and you are the only person that is involved in creation and publishing of the newsletter put your name in From field. If several people are involved in that process and if it is a corporate newsletter, use your company name.

Most important thing with From fields is that you don’t experiment with it. Choose one From field and stick to that. It is very un-professional that you often change your From field and beside that, in that case, your open rate will decline.

Useful tip is that you ask your subscribers to make a filter rule for your email newsletter, based on your email address, From field or some part of your Subject line. For example, they can put [YourNewsletterName] in a filter rule for your newsletter or your From field name so every time they get the email newsletter that matches that rule it will be moved to a specially designed folder, for example YourNewsletterName. So this way your newsletter won’t end in their Bulk folder. That is also one of the reasons why you should be consistent with your From field and subject line.

2) Click-Thru Rates

Clicks come once your email newsletter is opened. With good open rate you have finished only one part of the job. Now, your newsletter has to be well designed with appropriate content and concept, and most important, well targeted in order to have a decent click-thru ratio (CTR). You have to know your audience. You can increase your CTR if you put your most important articles and ads at the top of your email newsletters. Don’t write too long articles. It is better to write articles where you will list several tips. Also, don’t overload your newsletter with ads. People want to read useful things and not lots of ads.

Also, you know that a picture is worth more than 1000 words, so it is good that if you publish a HTML newsletter that you include photos that will be relevant to your articles and that are clickable. Click-Thru rates get higher if you give some value-added services to your subscribers. You have to make a good relationship with them. Treat them well, write useful articles, give exclusive discounts to your subscribers and they will show their appreciation.

Different types of email newsletters have different click-thru ratio. Click-Thru ratio is important, but it is not the most important. Just because many people click on your follow-up article or offer doesn’t mean that they will actually buy your software or service. In some cases, lower CTR can get you more sales than some good CTR. Think about that next time you start your email campaign.

Let’s face it. Email marketing is here to stay. Many people use email in their daily communications, many use it even more than a phone. Many companies use email to build and strengthen connection between them and their customers, to have good customer relationship. How effective is direct email marketing compared to traditional marketing? You will find out in this article.

Advertising and marketing online and offline have at least one thing in common - you have to know your target audience. Market segmentation is very important because you don’t want to loose your money sending your ads to someone who has no interest in it.

Cost/benefit

With direct email marketing, you can have 1-1 communication with your customers and prospects. With Group Mail product, award-winning email marketing, you can start creating your email marketing campaigns inexpensively. You will have ability to send HTML email newsletters in order to get better conversion rates and to include your graphics. Also, if you prefer hosted ASP services you can use services like Constant Contact, Vertical Response or some other quality service.

Using Opt-In Manager from Group Metrics package you will be able to get the necessary info from your subscribers and store it in your database. Importing data from existing applications or databases couldn’t be easier. Group Mail can import practically any file type, text, CSV, binary, databases, and email address books. At present any database that supports ODBC or OLEDB (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Access, FoxPro, Excel, etc.) can be imported directly into Group Mail using the free Database Importer plug-in. This is very important in order to create highly-personalized campaigns, and with the advanced IF THEN ELSE personalization you will have real 1-1 communication.

Using Group Mail for your direct email marketing campaign you will be able to create unlimited lists with unlimited recipients in each and to make list segmentation. So this way you can send different emails to your prospects, clients, business partners, press or any other group about your company.

Traditional marketing is much more expensive than direct email marketing. If you want to start a direct mail campaign you will have costs for creating and printing your brochures and delivery expenses. Not to mention TV or print advertising. Beside that it is much more expensive, it takes much more time to create and implement any of the traditional marketing campaigns or offline advertising and response ratio is usually much lower than with using email marketing. If you use double opt-in practice for getting subscribers (we always recommend that practice), so that you require that people confirm their request to be on your list, it means that they are interested in what you have to say so they will be interested in your products, too.

Imagine that you want to announce your new software product, update, conference or webinar. You want to inform your business partners and clients because it is most likely that they will be interested in it. You have two choices: to use email to notify them or to use traditional techniques like sending letters or using a phone? What is better for you? You already know what is cheaper.

Tracking

The second advantage using direct email marketing compared to traditional marketing is tracking. Practically, you can find anything about your email marketing campaign with Group Metrics product. You will get detailed statistics about how many people have opened your emails, what is your click-thru rate, which articles or ads were the most popular in your email newsletter. You can get some of that data without services like Group Metrics but there is more hassle. For example, you can embed a 1×1 pixel in your email newsletter and you will count the open ratio. Also, you can use PhpAdsNew for tracking clicks on your links.

There are no such precise techniques for tracking in traditional marketing. Can you know precisely how many people have seen your last TV commercial? No! Can you know precisely how many people have seen your last radio commercial? No! It is the same like with advertising in print magazines. There are some techniques like using equipment like “people meters” or some surveys regarding popularity of certain programs in which your ad was broadcasted but it is not so accurate, at least not that accurate like email marketing tracking. In this case you will usually have to pay to some marketing agency that will make that research. Another option is to include a special phone number or web site in your offline campaigns but even then you won’t know exactly how many people have seen your ad.

Getting feedback

Another advantage that you get using email marketing is in getting feedback. With products like free PollDaddy you have ability to easily create polls and to get feedback from your visitors, prospects and clients, whether you want to use it on your web site or email newsletter. Using polls in your email marketing campaigns, you will get feedback about your company or products very fast and inexpensively.

How about if you want to get feedbacks from people using traditional survey techniques? Depending about your survey size, you will have to hire people who will ask questions. Later, they will need to make survey analysis. You already know that this way your costs will be much higher and you will get the feedback much later than using email marketing.

Unless you use the Internet only for surfing and never use your email address you’ve probably received something that is called spam. There are different definitions for spam but I will say that spam is unsolicited email commercial. Many people harvest other people’s email addresses on email and web forums and send them info that they didn’t request. This is very frustrating because you loose your precious time deleting those unwanted messages. In this article I will explain how NOT to appear like a spammer.

Opt-in

If you have an email newsletter it is very important that you don’t appear like a spammer. If you want to stay long in email publishing business your newsletters have to be based on opt-in method. It means that a subscriber chose to receive your newsletter and that you have their permission to send them your newsletter. It is called Permission Marketing. I would suggest that your list be double opt-in. Now what is double opt-in? Double opt-in means that your subscribers have to confirm

their request to join your list. Confirmation is done by replying to the message that you send to everyone who had initiated subscription. Beside replying, people can confirm their request by clicking on a certain link. This ensures that one person can’t subscribe another person against his or her will. Also, never buy so called opt-in lists and also never sell or rent your members base.

Welcome message

I would suggest you that you ask your new subscribers to save your welcome message. There you can put the necessary info about your list and list management: list description, subscribe/unsubscribe address, digest address, owner’s email address, list rules…

This is important because of the following. Many people promote their newsletter for some time, until they get enough subscribers and then publish the first issue. However, it is most likely that someone who had subscribed to your list several months ago forgot that he or she actually requested to be a member of your list. And then, they can accuse you that you are a spammer. If they save a welcome message they can see that they required to be your subscribers.

Subject line

Subject line is very important in email newsletters. Beside, From field it is the most important thing for someone to decide whether to open your newsletter or not. I would suggest that your subject line consists a title of your article, issue number and date. If your From or To field doesn’t consist your

list name than you should put your list name in Subject line, too. Preferably in brackets. If you have your subscriber’s first name in your database you should definitely put their name as the first

thing in the Subject line. Then it is more likely that they will open your newsletter. Never use spam techniques like putting Re: at the beginning of your Subject line so that people think that they sent

you an email and you are sending them your reply. Nobody is fool.

Filtration

Many people use email programs with powerful email filter options. Many people set their filters to delete messages with get-rich-quick-schemes, porn and similar content so it is wise that you don’t put that kind of text in your messages if you want that people read it. Also, don’t

capitalize your words like FREE, MAKE MONEY, GUARANTEED… I wouldn’t suggest that you use this or similar words in the first place beacuse these words are often used by spammers.

If you have an option that in To field be your subscriber’s email address and not, for example your list name, that would be ideal because some mail washer programs automatically flag messages which don’t have a recipient email address as possible SPAM.

List management

Always provide very clear information regarding list management in your newsletter. Very important thing is that your list management provides very easy way of unsubscribing. For example, some email newsletters have at the very bottom an unique unsubscribe address for every subscriber. It can be something like leave-yourlistname-111327893L@yourlistserver.com This way, your subscribers can unsubscribe only with one click and they don’t have to worry if they sent unsubscription request from address which is in your subscriber list. Good list management is, also,

useful because you won’t loose your time explaining to your subscribers how to do something, for example unsubscribe or set receiving messages in digest mode.

Also, it is wise that if you use advanced email marketing software like Group Mail to include important information about your subscribers in every issue of your email newsletter. In other words, to personalize your newsletter.

For example, you can make a section at the beginning of your email newsletter where you will write several text lines so that your subscriber see that he or she really chose to be your subscriber.

Many email marketing software have an option to include a code in your issue that will be automatically parsed after sending so the subscriber will see his or her info.

Something like this:

_____________________

MEMBERS SECTION

Your name: !*COMPLETE_NAME*!

Member since: !*MEMBER_SINCE*!

From IP address: !*IP_ADDRESS*!

_____________________

And in your Editor’s Section you can start your writing with:

Dear, !*COMPLETE_NAME*!…

That’s why personalization is very important.

At the end, you can read several spam messages and - do the opposite in your email newsletter.

Deliverability is today’s biggest issue for every email marketer. Email marketers face deliverability problems because of email overload. Many people who spend much time online and that have businesses very much related to computers and Internet often get more than 100 emails per day. Usually, 8 out of 10 emails are considered as SPAM. Problem is that your email message, supposedly that you are legitimate marketer and have permission for contacting, can be flagged as SPAM. This can make harm to your business and reputation.

Here you can find some interesting facts about deliverability and SPAM:

http://antispam.yahoo.com/funfacts

Using some Hosted ASP email marketing software you will loose money because of the fact that you will pay for every message sent and not for every message delivered. Beside that, you will loose money in lost sales. Using desktop email marketing software like GroupMail you will pay one-time-fee for software licence and not for number of messages delivered.

You can have deliverability issues because of anti-spam lists, because of ISP filters and because of corporate/user filters. So there are three hurdles you have to jump over to get your messages delivered. So, how can you improve your deliverability rates?

Subscriptions

The first necessary step in getting your email message delivered is that you have permission of your members to send them your messages. Never, and we mean never, put people on your list without their permission. We recommend you double opt-in method for getting new subscribers so that they have to confirm their request to be your subscribers. It is recommended to ask them to enter their work email instead of free email addresses. Some companies go that far that they don’t allow subscribing if you use free email address. It is because of the fact that work email address is considered as more reliable and stable than a free email address.

Welcome message

So, after they confirmed their request you have to take the next step. You have to automatically send them your welcome message where you will give description of your company, email newsletter and list management info (information about subscribing, unsubscribing, digest mode, archives…).

In this welcome message it is very important not to forget two most important things. To tell them to put your From address in their Whitelist filtering rules to ensure that your message will arrive in to their inbox and not in their Bulk folder. And second very important thing, you should ask them to save your welcome message for future reference. Many people forget that they subscribed to certain email newsletter. Because of that they can accuse you for spamming and report you to your ISP or email marketing company.

Regulations, relations and reputations

You have to constantly have good relationship with major ISP in order to ensure good deliverability. ISP relation often can be a complex job so many email marketing software companies have special people assigned for this type of job. They have to actively watch news about ISP politics and to fulfil their request.

For example, some ISP won’t deliver your message if your messages don’t have a so called DomainKeys or Sender Policy Framework (SPF) key to ensure that the message really came from your domain name and to protect email sender identity. This prevents email spoofing. Some other companies won’t deliver your messages if you are not compliant with Habeas Sender Warranty Email Header. The Habeas headers allow you to guarantee that the emails you are sending are not spam and bypass filter systems.

Speaking about DomainKeys, for example if you send your message from one Yahoo email address to another Yahoo email address the recipient will see this info below From name:

“Yahoo! DomainKeys has confirmed that this message was sent by yahoo.com.”

You can have your own DomainKeys so that your recipients get similar message like above only with your domain name in it. Not only that it is recommended to have your own DomainKeys it is also very professional to see that your company is have one. It shows that email communication is very important for you.

For more information about those standards and regulations visit:

http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

http://www.habeas.com

You have to ask your email service provider what steps they take in order to ensure the maximum deliverability. If your email service provider is blacklisted your messages won’t be delivered on many places. Also, you have to check whether your domain is blacklisted. You can use different services like http://www.dnsstuff.com, http://www.spamhaus.org, http://www.spamcop.net, http://www.OpenRBL.org. Having a good reputation with major anti-spam lists and policies ensures that your messages won’t be filtered.

List maintenance

You have to track which email addresses are undeliverable and if it repeats several times you have to remove those email address if your software won’t do that for you. Also, if you don’t use double opt-in method for getting subscribers it can happen that someone make a typo in entering their email addresses so instead of, for example, username@domain.com they enter username@domain in your subscription form. Email marketing software like GroupMail has add-on called Email Inspector which removes bad email addresses and can validate recipient addresses by format, using DNS lookup and full SMTP user account testing.

Content and consistence

“Content Is King!” – one of the best known rules on the Internet. In email marketing, it is not only important that you include quality content. It is also important that your message don’t look too “spammy”, that it isn’t full of words used by spammers like: free, buy now, guaranteed, limited time offer…etc, thay you don’t write words all in capitals. It is considered as SHOUTING!

There are several useful tools that will check your content if it is considered as “spammy” before you send your message. One of those services is EzineCheck (http://www.ezinecheck.com).

Also, you have to follow one of the most important rules in email publishing and that is consistency. You have to choose your From field name and stick to it, you have to make your Subject line in that way that it clearly represents you, to choose one format and always use it.

For example, let’s say you have a newsletter called Best Practices Guide. You can design your subject line this way:

[BPG] Article Title, Issue No., Date

This can be your template so it is more likely that your message won’t be deleted by mistake. You can make your style even further. You can make a practice that your every article starts with number or question so this template can be:

[BPG] 7 Best Deliverability Tips, Issue No. 10, 10/10/2005 or [BPG] How To Get Your Emails Delivered, Issue No. 10, 10/10/2005.

We have said that you have to choose your From field name and stick to it. Beside that, your From email address is even more important. Many subscribers make filters based on From email address so if you change your email address it is more likely that your message won’t be delivered or read. That’s why your From email address has to be consistent.

Let’s face it – we live in a world full of information. Just take a look in email publishing industry. There are several hundred thousand email newsletters and we are all aware of rising spam problems. People are reluctant to give their email address to email publishers. Moreover, you have to offer top quality email newsletter to retain your email subscribers. However, quality email newsletter is not always enough. It is usually only one thing in building strong email relationship and making your subscribers loyal.

Building long-lasting email relationship is essential for your online business. If you have loyal subscribers who eagerly await your new message in most cases they will be your loyal customers, as well. That’s why smart marketers know that it is much more important to focus on keeping your current subscribers than to focus in finding new subscribers. Moreover, it is much more expensive to look for new subscribers than to focus on present ones.

In order to have loyal subscribers you have to treat them like kings! You already know that customer is always right and in most cases your subscribers are (or they will be) your customers.

We have already said that people reluctantly give their email addresses to subscribe to email newsletters. They are afraid that this way they will have even more spam in their inboxes. That’s why you have to assure them how you will use their email address. You need a good privacy policy. There you will explain all important items related to privacy of your subscribers. Also you can make your privacy policy reviewed and approved by TRUSTe. It gives more credibility to your privacy policy. TRUSTe, the online privacy leader, is an independent nonprofit which certifies thousands of web sites to strict privacy standards.

If you send an email newsletter, one item in your privacy policy should be about the use of the emails of your subscribers. Here is an example:

“We only collect and hold your email address in order to send you the newsletters you have requested. You can unsubscribe at any time for any reason. We never rent or sell our email lists! If you ever have a problem with your subscription, feel free to contact us at privacy@yourdomain.com.”

Also, here you can see an example of Infacta’s privacy and security policy for GroupMail: http://www.group-mail.com/asp/common/privacy.asp

It is useful that you offer your subscribers an easy way to subscribe and unsubscribe from your email newsletter. The best thing is that you offer a so called “one click” unsubscription using unique address. This will assure them that they can unsubscribe at any time if from any reason they don’t want to receive your email newsletter anymore.

The second very important thing is that your subscription boxes should never be pre-checked. CAN-SPAM Act requires that people (and not publishers) should check boxes depending on email newsletters they want to receive.

If you want to build strong email relationship with your subscribers, you have to know what they are interested in. It is one thing and the second thing is to fulfil their expectations. Just because they subscribed to your email newsletter doesn’t mean that they are absolutely happy with the service you provide. At least you can always do better. That’s why you have to ASK them what THEY want. You can make periodical surveys where you will ask what they like like/dislike about your email newsletter. You can offer them some useful value-added content like white papers or discount on your products in order to more people participate in your survey.

Some savvy marketers offer to their subscribers and customers opportunity to have their Profile or Preference page. This way they will be able to even more personalize communication with their customers and their customers will be happy and grateful because they will see how much they are important for their email publisher.

It is obvious that you should always provide quality and targeted content in order to make them stay. However, beside quality content your visitors have to be sure in several more things in order to be your loyal customers.

They have to know the frequency of your email newsletter and the exact date when they can expect your email newsletter in their inbox. If they subscribed to a monthly newsletter they want to receive it once a month and not once a week or “when I have time I will send it” schedule. Also, like with print magazines you have to decide a date in the month when you will send your email newsletter. It doesn’t mean if it is the 1st, 15th or 30th in the month – just stick to that date. If you prefer days more, you can say something like this: “You will get our Messaging Times Newsletter on every first Wednesday in the month”.

You can see that making a strong email relationship is not so hard if you abide to several rules. Time invested in loyalty management is always rewarding, because the best customer is – loyal customer.

Some people say RSS is better than email, some people think that RSS will never replace email. I’m from one of those that thinks that RSS and email are a perfect match and smart marketers should use both chanels in promoting their services.

Dr. Mark Brownlow, publisher of well-known Email Marketing Reports, has compiled interesting articles about RSS vs. email marketing. Those articles can give you an answer how web feeds can be used in order to complement with email marketing and if you really want, to replace it.

Infacta Ltd. and Nooked have formed a strategic partnership to bring RSS marketing to mainstream online marketers with Nooked RSS integration into the latest release of Infacta’s email marketing software, GroupMail.

With release 5.1 of GroupMail, released on Tuesday, April 25th, Infacta is offering RSS marketing solutions in a click to its clients and prospects through a strategic relationship with Nooked, the leading RSS marketing solution.

According to Advertising Age’s Interactive Marketing and Media Fact Pack 2006, RSS is currently used or is planned to be used within the next 12 months by 63% of consumer product marketers, 65% media and communications marketers, 37% retail marketers, 37% financial services marketers and 38% equipment and tech marketers. According to a recent MarketingSherpa survey, 40% of marketers are definitely planning on adding RSS feeds to their marketing mix in 2006, and 19% who have already incorporated the technology are planning on spending more than they did last year. Email still tops the charts as the leading content distribution platform on the Internet, with 88% of men and 94% of women online using the platform according to Pew Internet’s report, How Women and Men Use the Internet.

Combining the growing popularity of RSS with the ever popular platform of email is a win-win strategy for marketers.

“We recognize the need for online marketers to offer both email and RSS marketing to their customers” said Fergus Burns, CEO of Nooked. “Infacta is a leading provider of online marketing solutions, and we’re excited by the opportunity of thousands more organizations driving their RSS marketing needs through Nooked”

Jonathan Hill, Managing Director of Infacta said “Using the Nooked API will allow users to insert items from their Nooked RSS feeds into their email messages, insert subscription links for their Nooked RSS feeds into their email messages and insert email messages into their Nooked RSS feeds.” But Mr. Hill stated that the real benefit of this partnership is that “GroupMail will now be able to generate and deliver custom unique subscription links to their feeds which will allow 100% user tracking. This means that you can see precisely what each of your readers is doing with your feeds.”

GroupMail is the first email marketing application to allow Nooked users to be able to leverage this type of functionality to their email recipients in such an efficient and automated fashion.

MarketingSherpa published interesting case study about Bell Canada titled How to Grow Your List to 2 Million Opt-Ins — and Which Tactics Give You Higher Quality Names.

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