Enabler provide best practice advice covering all B2B and B2C email marketing communications, email software and email consultancy.

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Scheduling emails, especially those going to large audiences, can be a daunting task. After all, how can you be 100% sure that your recipients are receiving the right communication, at the right time, without any glitches?  The truth is, mistakes do happen – but there are a number of measures you can put in place that will make sure you get it right as much as possible. I’ve put together something I like to call your ‘preflight checklist’ *cue aeroplane noises*. It will help you get your ducks in a row before pressing that all important send button.

 

Test emails

Sending test emails is one of the best ways of checking how your email will display for your customers. The part where people trip up is by sending the test emails to one email account (usually themselves) and marking this down as the email having been fully tested. The issue with doing this is you end up only seeing the email on one email client (i.e. Gmail), and perhaps only on one device – normally desktop.

There are a number of ways you can view your emails on multiple email clients. The most obvious (yet time consuming) way is to have different email accounts with different email clients (e.g. having an Outlook, Hotmail and Gmail) and send tests to each of those accounts. If you have no other options then this will, at least, give you insight into several views your customers will see.

However, the best (and more efficient) way I’ve found to test emails is through a tool called Litmus, which allows you to check how your emails will look across a wide variety of email clients and apps. There are tools similar to Litmus out there which are based around the same concepts, all ranging in price and functionality. It’s definitely worth having a look around and finding the best fit for you.

 

Plain text

This one is particularly important if you partake in much B2B mailing. When an email client cannot read a HTML email it will default back to ‘plain text’, which is exactly what it sounds like, lines and lines of basic text without images. Sounds pretty dull right? But what would you prefer, lines and lines of text which your customer can read and get the general message of your email from, or a blank space. Personally I’ve never found blank spaces to be much use in marketing – for one thing ROI on them is rather low…

In this tech-savvy age, most email service providers, will provide you with a way to auto-generate your plain text based on the HTML it can see. If your current system doesn’t provide this feature… come have a chat with us at Enabler! You can check how your email will look in plain text in a couple of ways. The best way I’ve found is to either view it through Enabler’s email marketing software, or send yourself a test and turn off your email client’s ability to read HTML temporarily.

 

Date and time

This may sound incredibly basic, but have a think about when you are planning on sending out your communication. If it’s B2B, don’t try and send on a Saturday, no one will read it. If you’re B2C, have a look at the success of previous communications and plan around it. Think about if your message has a specific time frame to it (e.g is it a limited time offer). When you come to actually schedule the send, double check all these things!

 

Sending List

Choosing who will receive your email is really important. When choosing who to send to, think:

“Will this customer find the content of the email:”

  • Relevant

  • Useful

  • Interesting

If you can’t satisfy that criteria, then don’t bother sending the email, chances are they will not open, and even if they do open, they wont click, call or respond to CTA’s in the way you want. Once you’ve decided who you will send to, make sure you segment the data properly in your email database, and please name it something you are going to remember at a later date!

 

Dynamic content tests

This is only applicable if you are using dynamic content in your emails. With dynamics, it can be tough to figure out how each individual customer will view your email, so testing the variations is incredibly important.

Email clients such as Gmail have a really handy way of doing this. All you need to do is set up multiple email addresses for yourself which have ‘+’ in the email address, each with a different variation associated with the email address. For example, if you market for a pet insurer and want to test different content variants in a pet-orientated email, you might have:

  • firstname.lastname@gmail.com

  • firstname.lastname+cat@gmail.com

  • firstname.lastname+dog@gmail.com

  • firstname.lastname+rabbit@gmail.com

In this situation you would have assigned yourself a cat profile to the +cat email address, a dog profile for the +dog etc. What this allows you to do is have multiple versions of the same email sent to your inbox, meaning you can test multiple versions of the same email without having to constantly change your settings within the system.

 

Send logs

This is really the holy grail of avoiding send anxiety, and it’s something we do in my team at Enabler. Send logs provide a safety check before you hit the send button. They force you to look at each of your settings right from ‘am I sending the right template’ to ‘what time is it going’. For added security at this stage, get a colleague to double check it for you.

If you want to see an example of the send log we use at Enabler, for inspiration, get in touch and we will happily send one across.

I really wish I had a fancy acronym to give you to remember all that… hang on let me give it a go…

T.P.D.S.D.S.

Hmm – Nope, not enough vowels. Oh well, have a go at making your own one up to help you remember, but if you can’t and you want a reminder, read this blog again, or give me a call, we’re always here to help at the Enabler team!

Happy sending email nerds!

Email marketing traditionally has the highest ROI of any digital channel and is one of the most effective tactics to use within an integrated marketing mix.

In an era when existing and potential customers are accessible 24/7 via a smartphone, not optimising your email campaigns for mobile devices could mean you might be missing out on some great opportunities.

You might be surprised to hear that the average adult spends over 20 hours online per week – more than doubling in a decade.  As well as having on average three social media profiles to maintain, your potential customers are browsing online for almost everything. From grocery shopping to booking flights, streaming their favourite programmes or making bank transfers – your customers are doing anything and everything online – so having a strong digital presence is vital.  Although I’d suggest using an integrated marketing mix to target your customers using at least three channels, I’d like to focus on the benefits of one of those core channels: Email Marketing.

Email campaigns are not only designed to generate sales but also to inform, increase brand awareness, advocacy and trust. The most common forms of email marketing are newsletters, lead nurturing, paid email and so called ‘triggered’ email to mention just a few. All of these campaign formats come down to creating content that is of interest to your target audience.
Simple!  Or is it?  It all depends how well you know your target audience.

 

Before you press send: Set your goals

I can’t stress strongly enough the importance of setting campaign specific goals. This helps you to keep your campaign on track, gain meaningful analytics and gauge return on investment.
Before you start planning your email campaign, ask yourself: what do you want to achieve? You may want to drive traffic to your website or social media channels, or promote a product or service. Whatever your goal, setting targets helps you to measure engagement and ROI, draw conclusions, and implement any necessary changes to help improve future campaign performance.
Once you have set clear goals for the campaign, you can start planning content. Although it seems that content is king, there are still many companies out there who do not target their content effectively. There’s nothing more off-putting than wasting a customer’s time by offering them content of no interest to them. It’s also the quickest and most effective way of losing some great prospects by prompting them to press the ‘unsubscribe’ button.

 

Content: Be relevant and be informative

‘What’s relevant content?’  I hear you ask… Well, it depends on factors such as industry, data available, creativity or the abilities of your agency. There are many ways of creating great content.
For the fashion industry it could be all about seasonal trends, latest collaborations or ‘dress to impress’ tips. A company that operates within the steel industry could send their customers a useful guide to different steel grades, examining steel’s strength, parameters and the heat resistance of steel components for relevant industries.  Other ideas for relevant content could be recent changes in legislation that could affect your customers or advising customers about your new products and services.

The simple rule is to do some research on your target audience, via customer satisfaction surveys, seminars, social media monitoring and so on, so they can tell you what content they are likely to engage with.

 

Testing, testing…

Once the email content is finished and the campaign is ready to be sent, it’s time for testing. There are two ways of testing and I suggest you use both methods. The first one is to enter preview mode from the menu to get an overall idea of what the campaign will look like. The second and most accurate method is to send a test email to yourself and your colleagues. You should ask them to proofread it and give feedback on:

•    Subject line
•    Images/ design/ font
•    Links and call to action

When testing, inbox rendering should also be taken into account and that doesn’t mean just sending a test to your smartphone and email. Most customers don’t use the same device as you and as so the HTML will display differently on their device. It is a good idea to send a test to an email rendering service website that enables you to preview how it will display with different email providers such as Outlook, Android, iPhone etc.

Other aspects of email testing are dynamic and personalised content. It’s a good idea to do test sends to ensure all the merge fields like firstname display correctly when sent, and even better to preview test the different data your dynamic content is centred on, i.e. gender, industry etc, to see how the template responds and if it requires adjustment. Once you are satisfied everything looks great, all the links and CTA work, and everything renders correctly, you’re good to go and send your campaign!

 

Time to send

Timing is everything they say and your email campaign is no exception. Depending on your customer base, industry and the time of year, there will be certain times when your email campaign should be sent out in order to be most effective in terms of open rates and responsiveness. There’s numerous blogs out there, each giving you different days and times of when you ‘should’ send your campaign, but the best practice is to track your own campaign data.  Send customers your emails on different days of the week and different times of day, track when the open and click through rates are at their highest – your own data will tell you when’s the best time to send your campaign.

 

Bounce Backs or Unsubscribes?  What to do next…

So you’ve created the right content, chosen the right software and sent the email campaign. But you received an ‘undelivered’ message and your email bounces back. If this happens, common practice is to investigate why the email address is not valid and update it.  The ‘unsubscribed’ list should also be updated after each email campaign. Although it is a shame to see a customer opting out of email communications, it’s essential to update our customers’ preferences after each campaign in line with their request.

 

Tracking is vital

Your email marketing software will have a tracking tool built into it so you can work out what happened once you hit the send button.  As with any other marketing activity, tracking is crucial for measuring campaign success. The most relevant data to capture is delivery rate, open rate and click-through rate.  If you’ve got trackable links, then you should also be recording the traffic and leads your email campaigns have generated to really gauge their ROI effectiveness. Consequently, the more attention you pay to tracking your current campaigns and implementing changes, the greater the chance of future campaign success.

 

Don’t leave it with an email – Follow up

Follow up activities are crucial, especially for product-related, sales-orientated campaigns. Some organisations will gather the list of customers who opened and engaged with the email and follow it up with an additional piece of comms via email, a phone call, snail mail etc to discuss if the customer would like some more information or place an order.

 By contacting those customers who engaged with your initial campaign content, you can start to build relationships with your potential customers and generate new leads.

Moreover, following up enables you to put a voice to your brand that reinforces your campaign message, which should give you more trust with your customers, making them more likely to respond to any future emails you send them and therefore less likely to unsubscribe.

Using these simple tools, you’re sure to build targeted campaigns with content that’s engaging.

Email is just one string in the digital marketer’s bow, but it is probably one of the most vital in helping you build and maintain relationships with your customers and generate revenue.