Smart Email Communication

Every day when we open our inboxes, we encounter different types of emails: messages from friends, family, coworkers as well as promotional discounts and coupons from our favorite retailers or service providers.

Upcoming sales? New cross-selling suggestions? Reminders to visit a dentist or local bank? All of these messages end up piling up in your inbox with one purpose – to provide you with an incentive to buy something. Relevancy and visual attractiveness of the email will eventually determine whether it results in action or ends up in junk mail.

Thinking about how to make your email campaign successful? Nicole Birdsall, Group Product Manager of Communications at eBay, reveals several factors that happen behind the scenes of email marketing:

• 58% of consumers start their online day by reading their emails. Meanwhile, 20 percent begin on search engines and 11 percent check their Facebook pages. Email popularity is growing and almost 2.85 million emails are sent out in the cyberspace per second;

• Email marketing has the highest ROI comparing to other media channels. Per $1 spent in US email generates approximately $43 in return comparing to $21 from other non-email Internet marketing channels and $7 from print catalogs;

• With growing popularity of smartphones, email marketing is projected to transform the way we read our emails. Special attention should be paid to phones where users can "interact" with emails through the touchscreens. Therefore, most important mobile platforms for testing today are Android, iPhone, Blackberry, and Palm;

• As a marketer you should know that it's important to keep all of your important information above the fold since many of those users who open your email will never scroll down;

• Even though we may think that Microsoft Outlook 2003 is outdated, we will be surprised to find out that it is being used by 28% of all B2B clients and 18% of B2C. Therefore, prior to launching your email campaign that features high resolution pictures or Adobe flash, keep in mind that your recipients may only see black boxes with small dots instead of all the fancy graphics;

• Keeping up with new technology may be extremely useful for your company, but it's worth to note that testing different platforms is a key to your success. Are you sending your email from Yahoo? Do you know how it will look like in MSN inbox? The graphs below may help out during your testing process

• Lastly, as ethical marketers, we all have to comply with regulations of CAN SPAM Act 2003 and always use permission marketing to opt-in and opt-out our customers. To find out more about the act please follow the link http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/canspam.html

Hope that these hints will help you to improve the effectiveness of your email campaign. Please feel free to share any thoughts or comments you may have.

P.S. Special thanks to Nicole Birdsall for graphics and data.

Marketing Terms - Email Marketing

In case you plan to go to a email marketing seminar any time soon, here are some commonly used terms you may want to brush up on. In fact, sprinkle some of these throughout your sentences and you'll convince anyone that you are a seasoned marketing professional!
Word.

Graphic obtained from VerticalResponse

ROI (Return on Investment) - The measure of the profit you make and/or costs saved at your business.

Open Rate - The number recipients who opened your marketing material, typically measured as a percentage of the number of total recipients. It's a useful metric for judging response to a particular campaign, with a few restrictions.

Above the Fold - First, you have to know what the "fold" is - it's the last area of your browser or email right before you have to start scrolling. Any area that requires some scrolling in order to see the content is "below the fold." Rule of Thumb: Your most important information should be located above the fold, since it's the first thing your customers will see!

Copy - Any body of text on your marketing material.

Phishing - It's a bad term, and you never want your brand to be affiliated with anything phishing-related. VerticalResponse describes a phishing scam as "a spammer, posing as a trusted party such as a bank or reputable online vendor, sends email messages directing recipients to Web sites that appear to be official but are in reality fraudulent. Visitors to these Web sites are asked to disclose personal information, such as credit card numbers, or to purchase counterfeit or pirated products." Sounds like "sketchy-quervos" to me!

Preview Pane - If you have Outlook, Entourage, or Mac Mail, you should be familiar with the preview pane, which allows users to view the email through a preview pane before opening it. If you want to grab your recipient's attention fast, use the preview pane to your advantage and insert attention-grabbing opening lines to entice recipients to actually open the email.

Targeting - This is an easy one, especially if you have taken Michael Savod's MKT 300 class. "Target marketSSSSSS," he emphasized. As aggravating as those extra S's may sound, his intended message holds true. Use geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral information to narrow down the group of people who will most likely respond to your marketing campaign. Do so, and you might just hit the gold.

Web Friendly fonts - Times, Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana, and other "standard fonts". These universal fonts can be read by 99.99% of all browsers. If you want to get creative and stray from these fonts, however, you might run  into some compatibility problems. Most browsers will automatically convert your pretty fonts into something uglier, more standard fonts. You wouldn't want recipients' browsers to hinder your creativity now, do you?