London has a great selection of salons and spas to choose from. Therefore it is a city where you can unwind and get some rest and relaxation after a busy week at work.

For those of you, who have just moved to London, keep reading on, you will find out how you can get the best salon services in the city. London has some of the best spas in the world. Amida Spa in Hampton is one of the best salons in the city. It is a great place to unwind and begin a journey towards complete wellbeing. There are a wide range of therapies and treatments available. There are spa rituals which you can opt for, these include a wide range of therapeutic and holistic treatments, and you can go in for a makeup consultation, anti-ageing treatments, mail grooming and a complete lifestyle assessment.

If you are looking for a full scale body experience, then you must visit Saks Hair and Beauty, in Fulham. It is one of the most renowned salons in London. It is part of a leading beauty and hair care group of salons present nationwide. This salon gives you the latest in hair styles and beauty, it also has clinical treatments that will pamper you and leave you looking and feeling a lot younger. Some of the treatments available at Saks include the oxygenator for your face which is a needle-less oxygen injection of specially formulated serums right into the deep layers of your skin, thereby leaving it looking younger and wrinkle free. You can also try out the Tri enzyme Resurfacing facial which uses the latest in technological developments to resurface the skin to leave it looking smoother and it gives you a younger, better looking complexion.

London maybe a concrete jungle, but there are a lot of spas and salons for you to choose from. You can rejuvenate your body, mind and soul by visiting one and escaping from your mundane and hectic city life.

Before you pick a salon out of the umpteen options you have, it helps if you know the services on offer. Most Londoners these days prefer going to a salon that has a wide array of treatments and solutions for your hair and skin. You may have to indulge yourself in a facial, manicure, pedicure, spray tan, hair styling, a massage and considerably other things. Some people prefer going to a salon with a certified medical practitioner so that they can get more complex treatments like Botox, face-lifts and laser therapy. So, before you commit to a particular salon, scrutinise the various services available.

Choosing a salon that is closer to your place of operation will be most convenient to you. Look for fair rates that are worth the services provided. Go to a salon that has your kind of ambience. Once you find the right beauty salon for you, test the waters before you jump right into it, get minor treatments like your brows waxed and see if the place suits you.

About the Author

These are a few of the procedures available, for a complete guide on the different beauty salons in London log onto http://www.onlyuncle.com/

From here, we’ll take a look at newsletters and direct sales email in detail. You can then use this information to help determine what type of email content you should send to for the various goals of your email program and to which user lists.

Email Newsletters: Content Is Still King

The purpose of an email newsletter is to provide users with relevant information that will accomplish the following goals:

Cause subscribers to think of, be aware of and build a relationship with your brand

Create continued exposure of your brand and products in a customer’s mind for the time when they are ready to purchase

Drive page views to your website

Create viral awareness of your company, product, or brand through email forwards of useful information

Generate sales through product features and advertised specials

What is the Typical Content of an Email Newsletter?

While the specific content of an email newsletter will be largely driven by industry, the segment of users on your email list who receive the email newsletter, and your own in-house testing of what content your users respond to, the following is a list of the most common types of content that can be found in an email newsletter.

Articles about issues related to your industry

Opinion columns from experts

Tips and advice columns that will be useful to the consumers of your product

Question and answer columns

Product testimonials

Product reviews, features and announcements of new products

Upcoming events calendars

Special offers and discounts

Featured quotes

Featured customers or users

Links to partner websites

Links to useful sections of your website

Links to social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

A call-to-action to forward the newsletter to friends

Of course, the more creative and unique you get with your newsletter content, the more engaged your users will be. Consider this list a “jumping off point” in order to get you thinking about what the content that your readers would like to see in your newsletter would be.

Email Newsletter Pros and Cons

Like any marketing decision, the decision to include an email newsletter in your marketing mix will involve balancing some pros and some cons. Here are some things that you’ll want to keep in mind as you determine whether a newsletter format is the right format for your email marketing campaign.

Email Newsletter Pros

The following are the pro-points of sending an email newsletter:

Engaging email content means that users are more likely to open, read, and click through your email than they would a direct sales piece

Customers respond well to feeling as though not every communication from you is a solicitation for them to buy something and this causes them to advocate your brand

Sales are generated, though typically not in as high a volume as with a direct sales email

Newsletters are the most effective email type for generating page views to your website, which is important if your business model is dependent on page views or impression-based advertising

Because a newsletter is not a pure sales tool, you can rent or sell advertising space to partner sites within the email itself as you are not reliant on raw sales figures to determine the success of the email

Unlike sales emails, newsletters are typically not as time sensitive and therefore retain their value even if they sit unopened for several weeks before the user reads them

The longer content form of an email allows you to promote more items, website sections, and even company personalities as well as to write in a voice that reflects your brand or company

Email Newsletter Cons

The following are the con-points of sending an email newsletter:

Because a newsletter email is not a direct call-to-action to purchase, your generated sales will be fewer

There is an increased effort in creating a newsletter, as it requires content generation, editing and inputting as well as typically the creation of multiple on-site web pages to host full versions of articles and columns

Because email newsletters have many sections, it is more difficult to test the effectiveness of changing anything within the body of the email such as the headline of a section or a single image.

In short, an email newsletter may require more work in its creation than a direct sales email would and still result in fewer direct sales. However, email newsletters build customer loyalty and ultimately drive sales both in the short and long term. When considering the pros and cons of an email newsletter, consider your in-house content resources as well as your need to drive immediate revenue from a newsletter via email.

Email Newsletters and the Types of Email Marketing

When thinking about the types of email marketing described above, newsletters are best for emailing as part of your customer loyalty and brand building email program. They may also play a role in customer retention email marketing. However, they are typically considered under-performing for customer acquisition, direct sales, or customer win-back email programs.

Email Newsletter Best Practices

While we will cover various email best practices in extensive detail in Section 5 of this book, here are the top five best practices that you should always consider when thinking about and designing an email newsletter.

1. Excerpt Content and Link to the Full Version: If you are including a column or article, always simply include an excerpt or “tease” within your email newsletter and then link to the full article or column on your website. Not only does this drive valuable page impressions to your website, but it also avoids your email newsletter being flagged as spam instead of going to the inbox because of a questionable word usage in your full content.

2. Make Links Clear and Visible & Use Text Links: Make sure that all links to your website, partner sites or other locations are clear and visible. When possible, default to blue, underlined links for easy user recognition. Though in web design it is often unadvisable to use the words “click here” in a link, in email design it typically is more effective to use the words “click here.” Make sure that your links are text links and not image-based links as images may not appear in all emails.

3. Prioritize the Content That Users Will Care About in the Top Three Inches: In a typical email preview pane, you will have approximately three inches to display your content and allow a reader to decide whether to read the full email or not. Make sure that your most engaging newsletter content appears within these top three inches and do not waste the space with graphic headers or filler “welcome” content.

4. Use a “Table of Contents” or “In This Email”: Because email newsletters tend to be longer and users tend to scan them quickly, use a table of contents or a quick list of what’s in the email near the top so that users can quickly refer to it to see what content they may want to read.

5. Allow Readers the Option of Reading the Newsletter on a Webpage: Particularly for users who read their email on their mobile device, the option to click a link and instead see a hosted version of the newsletter on a webpage instead of having to read the entire newsletter within their inbox is a huge benefit. Offering this option will significantly increase the number of users who explore your newsletter.

Email newsletters are a great way to provide users with the history, resources and emotional motivation to make purchases or visit your website. Though the time-to-produce an email newsletter can be lengthy, the ultimate benefits are also long term.

Direct Sales Email: One Action, One Result

Unlike an email newsletter, a direct sales email has one goal: to drive sales and revenue of your product or service for clicks to your website. How you do this may vary with the specific content or tactic of your direct sales email, but the beauty of a direct sales email is that its purpose is simple. That also means that tracking its success is simple, either it generated sales…or it didn’t.

What is the Typical Content of a Direct Sales Email?

With a direct sales email, the content will often be driven by seasonality, industry, the segment of your email database that is being sent to, internal sales goals, and revenue targets. However, the following are typical types of content and promotions that you may see in a direct sales email:

New purchaser incentives

Percentage discount off (automatic or via coupon code)

Dollar amount discount off (automatic or via coupon code)

Free gift with purchase

Buy one, get one free

Free shipping

Free shipping upgrade (to priority or expedited)

Clearance item notification

Bonus dollars or bonus points offers

Refer-a-friend offers

Free trails

Sample products

Exclusive VIP offers

Seasonal products

New product announcements

Product testimonials and reviews

Celebrity endorsements

Direct Sales Email Pros and Cons

Direct sales emails have their own list of pros and cons to consider when putting them into your marketing mix. As you determine the roll of direct sales emails in your email marketing plan, consider the following key points:

Direct Sales Email Pros

The following are the pro-points of sending a direct sales email:

A direct sales email requires less effort to produce than a newsletter, with reduced copy and image needs and typically only a single web-based landing page

Because a direct sales email only has a single call-to-action (typically), it is easier to segment your user list and put the most appropriate offer in front of them

Revenue and sales numbers generated will be higher with a direct sales email than with a content-driven newsletter

Because a direct sales email is shorter in content and includes only one call-to-action, testing individual elements of the email such as headlines and images becomes easier to accomplish

Direct Sales Email Cons

The following are the con-points of sending a direct sales email:

Direct sales emails can often generate higher spam complaints and opt-outs from users.

Direct sales emails can often cause “ad blindness” among subscribers who may stop opening emails altogether if they begin to feel that each communication from you is simply a solicitation to purchase something.

Direct sales emails focus on a single task, which means that they do not offer an opportunity to cross promote other sections of your website, partner sites or content.

Direct Sales Emails and the Types of Email Marketing

When thinking about the five types of email marketing described previously, direct sales emails are best for customer acquisition, revenue generation and customer win-back. Direct sales emails may also have a role in your customer retention plan but should not be used as the exclusive means for retaining customers via email communications. Direct sales emails should not be used at all for customer loyalty and brand building email efforts.

Direct Sales Email Best Practices

In Section 5 of this book, we will cover email best practices in great detail. However, here are five key best practices for direct sales email that should be practiced.

1. One Call-to-Action: Though you may feature multiple products in a direct sales email, do not ask customers reading the email to do anything other than purchase as you will distract them from the intended goal. Do not clutter your direct sales emails with content links, information links or even social media links.

2. Use Equal Amounts of Text and Images: Though it is important to use images to show your product or engender emotion, always remember that many email clients do not display images. Always make sure that there is an amount of text equal to the amount of space taken up by images so that users can know what the offer or product feature is without having to load images into their email browser.

3. Be Careful of Spam Words In Your Text: We’ll talk about common spam words later, but a direct sales email has a higher risk of using words that may trigger email provider spam filters. For example, words like “free”, “sale” and “discount” can result in your email going to spam if not used properly.

4. Make Links Clear and Visible & Use Text Links: Make sure that all links to your product purchasing pages are clear and visible. When possible, default to blue, underlined links for easy user recognition. Though in web design it is often unadvisable to use the words “click here” in a link, in email design it typically is more effective to use the words “click here.” Make sure that your links are text links and not image-based links as images may not appear in all emails.

5. Put the Best Offer at the Top and In the Subject Line: Offers are what sell products, so be sure that if you’re making multiple offers or promoting multiple products, your best offer is not only first on the list, it’s also featured in the subject line.

Direct sales email is a key method of driving and increasing revenue, sales and page views. Any email marketing mix will include them. Simply always be aware to be tasteful, aware of spam issues, and do not overwhelm your email subscribers with too many offers.

Whether you decide to emphasize a content-driven newsletter or more direct-sales driven emails, your ideal email marketing mix will include both used at appropriate times. Take some time to think about the different versions of emails and how they fit into your email marketing goals, the size and content of your email database, and your own in-house resources. Now you can begin to fully visualize the types of emails you may want to send. However, there is still one more factor to consider, and that is the use of an email auto-responder program.

About the Author

Comm100 Email Marketing takes a look with you at newsletters and direct sales email in detail and helps you determine what type of email content you should send to for the various goals.Comm100 Email Marketing Provides powerful email marketing software that can help you develop and maintain good relationships with your customers and increase your sales revenue at a very low cost. For more information about us, please visit:http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/

Now that we’ve covered some of the basics that you’ll need to think about as you decide how to develop your mail marketing program, it’s time to give you the most comprehensive list that we can think of that includes all of the email terms that you’ll need to know as you get into the details of learning about mail marketing. You may want to refer back to this section at various points if you come across the mail terms later in the book and are confused!

Above the Fold: When talking about a webpage or landing page, this is the portion of the page that appears in the user’s web browser without the user having to scroll down. When talking about an email, this is the portion of the mail that appears in the email client’s preview pane without the user needing to scroll or open the full mail.

Auto Responder: This is a series of emails, typically between ten and twenty, which are automatically triggered and automatically sent after a user signs up for an mail list with no ongoing effort by the sender. They are covered in detail in section 2.3 of this book.

Black List: In email marketing, being on a black list means that an mail service provider has identified you or your company as spam and will no longer allow your emails to be delivered to users’ inboxes, instead sending them into the spam or junk folder.

Brand Building: This mail term is any activity that serves to make a product or company’s brand name more prominent among users or the public. In specific to email marketing, it refers to mails that do not overtly strive to sell a product or service but instead work to build a relationship between the customer and the brand or company.

Call-to-Action: Any portion of a landing page or email that drives a user to take a specific action, such as to click a link or to purchase a product or to provide an mail address.

CAN-SPAM: The U.S. law which governs the rules of privacy and consumer rights regarding the receipt of promotional email. It is covered in detail in section 2.4 of this book.

Customer Acquisition: The process of finding, converting and acquiring new and potential customers who have not previously been exposed to your brand, product, company, or website.

Customer Loyalty: The process of building a relationship with customers so that they continue to patronize your brand, business, product, service, or website rather than switch to a competitor.

Customer Retention: The process of ensuring that customers who have made a first purchase are retained in such a way that they make future purchases, site visits, etc.

Customer Win-Back: The process of converting customers who have lapsed or abandoned your product, service, brand, website, or business back into active customers.

Direct Sales Emails: Marketing sales emails that have the sole purpose of using a single call-to-action to convert users to purchasing a product or service or filling out a lead generation form.

Double Opt-In: This form of opting in to an email mailing list requires a user to confirm twice that they want to be included on the email list. The first time is when they click their acceptance of the email terms and conditions and add themselves to the list. The second time is when they click a confirmation link sent to them in an email immediately after signing up. While this may reduce overall quantity of email sign-ups, it often increases overall quality of sign-ups.

Email Personalization: This is the act of using client information, such as a first name or user name on a site, to personalize an email template. Many email marketing platforms, including Comm100, offer this personalization feature which can increase user engagement and conversions.

Email Service Provider: Any company that provides email services is referred to as an email service provider (ie: Hotmail, Yahoo!, Netzero, Gmail, etc.)

From Field: The section of your email that identifies whom the email is from. To be CAN-SPAM complaint, this field must accurately represent the individual or business that sent the originating email.

Gmail: The third largest Email Service Provider in the world. Gmail typically strips out email formatting and images, so your email must look acceptable primarily as html text in order to appear appealing in Gmail.

Hotmail: Compared with other similar email terms for email service providers, this is the world’s largest and first free one. Hotmail is known for having one of the most sensitive and restrictive spam filters of any of the email service providers.

HTML: Short for Hypertext Markup Language it is the programming language that web pages and email templates are typically written in. To be a proficient email or internet marketer, you should have an understanding of basic HTML, commands. Image Links: Clickable links that are shown using a gif, jpg or png image on a web page or in an email. While image links are quite effective on web pages, they are not recommended for email due to the fact that many email service providers do not show images within emails by default.

Junk Folder: The email term means the folder or section of an inbox where an email service provider sends emails that it considers to be spam or junk mail.
Newsletters: When referring to email marketing, these are emails that contain useful information and may or may not also include product, service, brand, company, or website promotions.

Opt-In & Opt-Out: These two email terms mean the process of giving consent to be added to an email list and the process of telling the sender of an email that you no longer wish to receive emails from them. To be CAN-SPAM compliant, you must offer all subscribers to or recipients of an email an opportunity to opt-out of future emails.

Outlook: The email reading program of the Microsoft Office suite. It is important because most email campaigns should be optimized to present the most important information in the space that is the size of a standard Outlook email box preview pane.

Pixels: A unit of measurement of length or height for web pages and graphics. For example, a typical email header graphic should not be more than 700 pixels in width.

Preview Pane: The section of an email that is seen in an email client before a user opens up the full email. Typically, this preview pane is no more than three inches in height and approximately seven hundred pixels in width.

Reply To Field: The field of your email that tells a user where to “reply to” or that is the address that fills out when a users clicks “reply to” in their email client. Typically, a marketing or mass email will not have an active reply-to address that goes anywhere. However, to be CAN-SPAM complaint, your email reply-to address must accurately reflect the company or individual who sent the original email.

Sender Reputation: A metric that is used by email service providers and that is tied to your domain name and the IP address from which you sent your email that allows the email service provider to assess the likelihood that your email is spam or wanted by recipients. Sender reputation is compiled using data that includes, but is not limited to, spam complaints, email open rates, unsubscribe requests, IP address, the size of your email list, and the quality of your email list.

Single Opt-In: Different from the email terms of opt-out and double opt-in, it’s a method of opting into an email list where a user simply confirms that he or she wants to be on the email list when he or she signs up and is not required to click a second confirmation link in an email that is sent to him or her afterwards.

Spam: The common name for unwanted or unsolicited email that makes its way into a recipient’s email box.

Spam Folder: The folder or section of an inbox where an email service provider sends emails that it considers to be spam or junk mail.

Spam Score: A variable ranking of your email, usually factored pre-send, which determines the likelihood that the email will be considered spam by email service providers. Factors that determine the spam score include the content of the email body, the content of the subject line, and a number of other smaller factors.

Subject Line: The subject line of your email that appears in a user’s inbox when he or she receives your email. To be CAN-SPAM compliant, the subject line must accurately reflect what will be in the content of the email once opened.

Text Links: Links to web pages that are contained in text rather than in images. In email design, text links are preferable to image links since not all email service providers display images automatically in emails.

To Field: The field in your email that identifies the user or address that you are sending the email to.

Unsubscribe: Another email term for opting-out, or otherwise telling the sender of an email that you no longer wish to receive future emails. To be CAN-SPAM complaint, you must offer all recipients or subscribers a valid and easy way to opt-out or unsubscribe.

Welcome Email: The first email that a user or subscriber receives when he or she signs up for an email list. This email typically includes a confirmation link for the user to click as well as a request for the user to white list the sending address of the email.

White List: As one of the email terms, white list can mean two things. The first is that your domain or company is on the “white list” of an email service provider, which means that the email service provider always sends your company’s emails to the inbox rather than the spam folder. The second meaning is that individual users have “white listed” your email for safe delivery into their individual inbox by adding your send-from address to their contact list or address book. It is typically considered an email best practice to always ask users to add your send-from address to their contact list or address book in your welcome email.

Yahoo! Mail: The second largest email service provider in the world. Yahoo! Mail is one of the few email service providers that typically displays images by default.

About the Author

Comm100 Email Marketing takes a look with you at newsletters and direct sales email in detail and helps you determine what type of email content you should send to for the various goals.Comm100 Email Marketing Provides powerful email marketing software that can help you develop and maintain good relationships with your customers and increase your sales revenue at a very low cost. For more information about us, please visit:http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/

Free shipping or fifty percent off? Free gift with purchase or deferred billing? What kind of email will get you not only the best user response but also the best return-on-investment and repeat users? In this section, we’ll discuss offer tests and promotion tests in your email marketing campaign.

Why Use Email Test and Promotion Test?

Subject lines and content may drive your email marketing metrics such as open rates and click through rates, but your offer or promotion drives the actual financial success of your campaign. If nobody cares about your offer, if it’s not competitive enough, if it’s not easy enough to understand, or if it’s not a product that anybody cares about, then you won’t make any money. You can have a one hundred percent open rate, but a zero percent purchase rate if you promote the wrong email. Additionally, the difference between a “good” offer and a “great” email can be the difference between a status quo email performance and a real winner. How will you ever know what offers get you the best return if you don’t test them?

Types of Email Tests and Promotion Tests

The offers and promotions that you want to test may vary extensively based on your product and market segment. However, some common tests to run are included below.

Types of Offers: The most obvious test that you’ll want to run is an email type test. While this may vary, as noted above, based on your market segment, common offer types include: shipping offers, bonus gifts, discounts, free upgrades, and extra loyalty points if you run a loyalty program. You’ll want to consider testing all of those as well as any types of offers or promotions that are specific to your line of business.

Percent versus Dollar Amount: If you’re going to be offering discounts, you’ll want to test whether your users are more motivated by seeing their discount presented as a dollar amount or as a percentage amount. Most case studies imply that a percentage amount will convert better, but that may not be true for your demographic.

Discount Amount: You’ll also, obviously, want to test different discount amounts to find out where you get the best return on investment. This may, as noted in the tips below, vary by user segments on your list.

Free Shipping versus Shipping Upgrade: Free shipping has been shown to be one of the most effective ecommerce promotions available on the internet. However, sometimes you can get just as much value from offering a shipping upgrade from standard shipping to an expedited form of shipping. Test free shipping versus shipping upgrades and see if you can improve your profit margin with an upgrade offer instead of an entirely free shipping offer.

Minimum Purchase Amount: For many promotions, you’ll require users to make a minimum purchase amount. After you do the math of what you can afford in terms of how low that minimum purchase amount needs to be, test making it higher. You may get the same response to the offer whether you require people to spend twenty dollars or fifty dollars. If that’s the case, you should always make the minimum fifty dollars!

Seasonal Email: You’ll obviously want to develop and test seasonal offers as well. Do your respondents buy more when it’s promoted near a holiday or vacation time? Test offers that are seasonally themed. Then you can decide in the future if it’s worth putting seasonal campaigns together at all.

Time Sensitive Email: Finally, test whether your users respond better to time sensitive offers that need to act on immediately or longer-tail offers. There are many arguments that time sensitivity causes users to take quick action, but as people spend less time in their inbox, that may not be as true. Be sure to test it to find out what’s right for you.

Best Practices for Email and Promotion Tests

In addition to testing your offers for bottom line revenue and profit margin promotion, consider the viral and acquisition value of an email . Did an offer get you a lot of shared attention on the internet or did it get you many new customers? That may be worth it even if it didn’t generate as much up front revenue as you were hoping for.

Don’t lose money! Particularly in the era of social shopping and huge discounts, it’s often considered necessary to offer massive promotions to generate customer interest. However, the math on that often doesn’t add up and you end up losing money. A less well-responded to email that makes a profit may be better than a popular offer that loses money for you.

Remember that there may be segments of your database that respond to one type of email better than to another type.offers may not be “one size fits all”, and you may want to test different email to different portions of your database.

Consider that timing plays a role in offer success as well. You may want to run an email test several times in case you’ve inadvertently sent an offer at a time when a product was unpopular or people were generally not spending as much money as usual.

About the Author

Comm100 Email Marketing tells you what kind of email offer will get you the best user response, ROI and repeated users.Comm100 Email Marketing Provides powerful email marketing software that can help you develop and maintain good relationships with your customers and increase your sales revenue at a very low cost. For more information about us, please visit: http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/

Email Testing and Email Marketing: Partners in Success

You’ve got your email campaign up and running, and now you want to make it even better. Or perhaps you’ve read some advice Comm100 has given and said “That’s not right. I KNOW my audience would respond better to an image based email.” For whatever reason, you’re not convinced that your email is providing the best results, and you want to see if you can improve it. That’s great, because Comm100 believes that marketing can always be improved.

One of the great benefits of email marketing is that it can make it extremely easy to run testing on your marketing concepts, especially because it’s somewhat easier to control keeping things random with email.

Email Testing Best Performer: a/b Test

When talking about email testing, a/b tests come the first place. An a/b test is simply a kind of email testing where you present one option to one randomized segment of your audience and a different option to the other segment. Then you see which one performs bet ter. It’s that simple!

It’s common to perform an a/b test on a website, randomly serving different offers or creatives using a javascript or Google Website Optimizer. However, email presents an alternative way to test things, without running the risk that a repeat visitor to your website may see something different than they saw the first time and skew your response rate.

Setting up an email a/b test is simple. Just divide your email list into two parts, and send them two different emails. Each email has a different part of the test in it. The one that gets a better response will tell you what the better offer, creative or sending time to use in future campaigns is.

Email Testing Metrics: What Kinds of Things Should be Tested?

If it’s anything that can impact the success of your email campaign in any way, then it should be included in your email testing! This includes:

Subject lines

Day of week of the send

Time of day of the send

Offer or email content

Email creative and layout

Html template vs. text email

Headlines within the email

From address

Concepts such as personalization, email tone, etc.

The list above is fairly comprehensive. However, your industry and the end goal of your email campaign may mean that there are other factors that you want to test.

Email Testing Don’t DOs: Common Mistakes with a/b Tests

There are some common pitfalls to email a/b tests that you’ll want to avoid.

Make sure your list is truly random: To do this, we recommend taking your email list and putting every other name in one test group. A good coder can write a script to do this pretty easily. One of the most common mistakes we see is that mailers will take their list, just divide it in half and then use those two halves as their a group and their b group. The problem with this strategy is that it means that one half of your list will be comprised of older sign-ups. That portion of the list will always perform in an inferior way to the newer segment of the list.

Also, once you have split your list into two, do a quick check of each half of the list as well. If one half has a predominance of, for example, Hotmail addresses, then you may experience email deliverability issues with only one half of your list. That will impact the end results of your email testing. In general, pulling every other name and splitting your list that way will give you the best randomized representation.

Only test one thing at a time: Another common mistake is to try to test more than one thing at a time. For example, we’ve seen people try to test a subject line and an image within the email on the same email testing. The only way to accurately know if the item you’re testing is, in fact, the item that created the change in results is to limit what you’re testing to one item. If you test more than one item at a time, you can’t properly determine what impact each element had on performance. As tempting as it may be to try to collect more data in less time, using more than one test factor will make that data less valuable, less accurate and less usable.

Don’t over analyze: If you’ve set your test up correctly by making sure your list is completely random and limiting your test factor to just one element, then the results are the results. You’ve just learned something. Don’t muddy the waters with a lot of “what if” and “but”. The beauty of a true random a/b tests is that the results are typically quite conclusive. Remember, in the numbers game of email marketing, it only takes a small percentage increase to make a big difference.

What to Do With Your Results

If you’ve never completed an a/b test to your audience before, then the first thing to do is to start saving the results. After you’ve been running tests in all areas of email optimization, you’ll have enough data to create a best practice manual that you can follow in the future for creating the best headlines, subject lines, email creatives, offers and more. Then you’ll be sure that you’re running the best holistic email program that you can.

After you’ve got a best practice manual, however, there’s no reason to stop your email testing. The context of your audience will continue to grow and change, as will things like price point acceptance for your product, competitor activity and more. Marketing and Email Marketing in particular follow just one rule: Test, then test again.

At that point in their customer life cycle, customers will still have brand awareness and loyalty. It may take just a small offer from you to get them back into the purchasing cycle. Sending them an offer to respond to before they become further distanced from your company or brand will have the greatest impact on lengthening customer lifespan.

About the Author

Comm100 Email Marketing explains how running email testing can lead to improved email marketing performance.Comm100 Email Marketing Provides powerful email marketing software that can help you develop and maintain good relationships with your customers and increase your sales revenue at a very low cost. For more information about us, please visit: http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/

Personalized Email or Not

These days, almost all third party email marketing platforms offer the option to send personalized email by including your client’s user name or name. Is this a good idea and can it improve your email marketing results? The answer, of course, is both yes and no.

The Basic Conversion Fact on Personalized Email

Numerous studies have revealed that the more personalized you can make your email, the better it will convert. The simplest version of this would be to include your client’s user name or name in the intro to the email. The most complex version of this would be to send multiple versions of your email with different offers and products displayed to users based on their on-site behaviors and purchasing patterns.

Let’s assume that, for most of us, we will be operating on the “simple” end of this spectrum. Studies from multiple sources have revealed the following:

Using a name or user name in a subject line will improve open rates as users typically assume that this email has come from a trusted source.

Using a name or user name within the content of the email itself improves conversion rates and has the added benefit of creating brand loyalty with the user.

So, it would seem as though it would be an easy decision to have personalized email in your sendings, right? Unfortunately it’s not that simple.

The Issue of Privacy in Personalized Email

Unfortunately, the issue of user’s concerns about email privacy and the use of their information can throw a wrench in your belief that personalized email is the best move for you. Selecting a bad context to use as a piece of personal information in your email can result in the abandonment of users from not only your email list but also your brand. Here are some important elements to keep in mind when deciding whether to incorporate any form of personalized email in your email campaigns.

Would your users want other people to know that they use your product?

There are many numbers of industries out there where clients and users might not be comfortable with others knowing that they use the product or service. This can range from anything as salacious as gambling or adult sites to something as essentially harmless as dating sites, medical information sites and financial advice sites. While, in theory, a personalized email will only be seen by the person it was intended for, it can have the unfortunate side effect of creating uncertainty about the safety of their identity with a user. If you have reason to believe that any significant portion of your user base would be concerned with the security of their identity, veer away from personalized email in your email campaign.

Test…then test again! Are you tired of hearing this phrase yet? But it’s true. If you’re willing to take the hit that your test may result in some people leaving your list, run two separate a/b email testing. The first test should use a name or user name within the email, and one that test should use that information in the subject line. If there’s any question, you’ll certainly know after that test if your users like personalized email. Just remember, pay attention to all four key metrics when you do this: open rate, click-through rate, conversion AND unsub rate. It’s one of the few tests where you may see a variation in unsubs that
NEVER use a last name! The one thing that Comm100 can tell you for sure is that you should never use a client or user’s last name as a personalization field. By just about every study ever done that is one step over the line of what people are comfortable seeing being used in a piece of marketing collateral. No last names! We would recommend not even using last initials!

Name or User Name?

One of the larger questions of how to create a personalized email is whether to use a client’s actual first name or their user name. Once again, there are arguments for each option.

First Name: Using a user’s first name as your personalization element has the advantage of making the email, well, more personal! It takes the user out of being a nameless face or possibly randomized user name and into the area of having a relationship with you or your company. However, the downside is that it’s less anonymous than using a user name, so clients who are uncomfortable about user privacy will have a more negative reaction to it. The other downside is that a first name is actually a more readily available piece of information to a spammer. Spammers regularly buy lists of emails and registered users from list brokers and include the first name field, and a first name is actually a relatively easy piece of information to phish for spammers who scour the internet stealing user information from insecure forums and registration sites, so it can, in some cases, have the opposite impact of creating company trust. However, at base, it’s true that nothing makes a person feel more like they’re in a personal relationship than the use of their name!

User Name: Using a user name counteracts some of the issues that you’ll encounter with using a client’s first names. For starters, it’s a more anonymous piece of information, so clients or users may not experience the same concerns about privacy. Secondly, a user name isn’t a field commonly used or even obtainable by spammers, so you’ll overcome what may be an initial reaction by users to seeing a potentially spam-like message. However, the downside is fairly obvious, which is that a user name is not as friendly or personal as a first name.

Whether you use first name or user name, be careful about where you put that information in the personalized email! Because personalization is designed to improve your metrics, if you’re not including it in the first two inches of the email, you’ve probably negated its positive impact already!

Personalization is an important tool in optimizing your email campaigns, but it needs to be approached with caution and a specific plan. Be sure to monitor your email performance closely once implementing it! And be prepared to test several different versions of it as well!

About the Author

Comm100 Email Marketing explains in this article the pros and cons of personalized email and the best times to use it for the best result.Comm100 Email Marketing Provides powerful email marketing software that can help you develop and maintain good relationships with your customers and increase your sales revenue at a very low cost. For more information about us, please visit: http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/

Content and Calls to Action Matter!

We don’t want you to read this section and think that links in email are the only thing that matters in terms of driving traffic from an email to a landing page. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be any reason to send an email that included anything but links! The quality of your copy and its ability to excite and incentivize users to click certainly matters. So do the offers that you may promote in an email marketing piece. Finally, writing and using good calls-to-action both around and in the content of your links can make a significant difference between an average click-through rate and an outstanding click-through rate. All of the elements of your email template design and content work combine to improve your click-through rate. However, there are some tried and true elements to keep in mind!

Images and Links in Email

We discussed this previously when discussing the best practices for embedding images in email , but as a general rule you do not want to use images as a way to indicate to readers that they should click something. Graphic buttons that say “buy now” or “click here” work great on web pages. However, since many email service providers do not automatically load images when an email loads, your readers may never see the “click here” or “buy now” or “join now” or “sign-up” button and may actually not know where to click. Make all of the images in your email links just in case they don’t load and users click them. Also, and more importantly, make sure that your main links in email are always text links. If you must use an image link (for example, if your design department insists on it), be sure to have a text link directly beneath it.

Formatting Links in Email

It’s incredibly important that your links in email both stand out from the text around them as well as appear in a way that users immediately recognize as links. The most “fool-proof” way to accomplish this is to use a traditional link-style. That, of course, means using a blue, underlined font. It’s also a great idea if all of your links are bolded. If you can’t use a blue underlined font, it’s strongly suggested that you, at a minimum, use an underlined font. Web users are trained to understand that “underline means link” even if the color is not blue. Bolding your links will help them stand out.

If your design standards don’t underline or bold links, it’s strongly suggested that you make an exception within your links in email. Again, even more-so than on a web page, the funneling of users from your email to a website or landing page where you can monetize them is the ultimate key to success.

Finally, if your web style guide involves denoting links by changing their color or style when a user passes his or her mouse over the links, do not replicate that in your email. CSS use in an email template, which would be required to create that effect, can breakdown in various email service providers. Additionally, you’re then relying on users and readers to actively mouse over your email text in order to find links. You want the links to “pop” and be obvious immediately when a user scans your email so that he or she can transition from the email to the web page as quickly as possible.

What to Say in Your Links in Email

Your links in email should be your email call-to-action. Don’t make links in email single words, and certainly don’t make them too long. Nothing is harder on the eyes than three lines of bolded, underlined link text! In short, the best links are ones that tell users what they will be doing when they click them. ”Buy Now.” “Click Here.” “Join for Free.” A strong, brief, clear call to action is the best text for your link!

Where to Place Links in Email

There’s really no set rule as to where to place links in email, but there are some basic trips and tricks that can increase click-through rate.

Don’t put links within big blocks of text. Instead, use your text to lead up to the link and then separate the link with a paragraph break so that it stands out.

Don’t put too much space between text and an associated link. You want users to understand that the link is related to the text.

Don’t put links in headlines – the conflicting styles may confuse users.

Make sure you have at least one, if not more, links in the top two inches of your email template. You want users who don’t scroll below the preview pane to still have opportunities to click through to your webpage or landing page.

As noted above, make sure that all images are also links.

We’ll also discuss below using permanent and static links in the header, footer or side column of your email.

Density of Links in Email

The question of how many links to put into your email template can be a tricky question. On the one hand, the raw numbers game says that you want as many links as possible. The more opportunities that you give readers to click-through to your website, the more likely they are to do it. However, if you load an email up with too many links, you risk triggering spam filters. Finally, if you put too many links into an email, you’ll ultimately deteriorate the readability of the text in the email. That may not sound like a situation that could really harm you, but you may be surprised at how important text can be in selling your product or service.

A safe rule of thumb is no more than one link per every fifty words of text. However, there’s no hard-and-fast rule here, either. Your best bet is to start with fewer links in your email templates and then continue to add links with each send until you reach a click-through rate that is your desired click-through rate.

Permanent and Static Links in Email

Many email templates are designed using permanent and static links in email header, footer, and side bar. These links may be navigational clones of your primary site to help create familiarity with users between the site and the email. They may be links to social network elements that you want to persistently promote.

They may also be links to customer service or other pages on your website that provide information that users consistently search for. Designing your email template with these types of persistent links can dramatically improve your click-through rate. The information or pages that the links drive to are content or destination pages that you’ve identified as high user interest. In addition, these persistent or permanent links also increase the number of links in email , which, in turn, increases the number of opportunities that your readers have to click through. There’s really no downside!

The same rules apply to persistent or static links as well. Don’t trap them in images. This is true even if you are trying to clone your website’s navigation within your email template and the navigation on the website uses images. Make a temporary presentation adjustment and design something “close” to your site’s navigational structure that uses text instead of images. The only best practice noted above that does not necessarily apply to permanent or static links in your email template is in regards to formatting. While you still want your links to look like links, because these are not your primary links you may not want to bold them or make them “pop” too much. You do not want your static, persistent and navigational links to detract from the offers or information in the email, so it’s perfectly fine to use a more subtle visual approach with them.

Links in Email and Spam

Too many links in email can trigger spam filters and alerts. We’ve already suggested that, if you’re just starting your email marketing program, you begin with templates that have fewer links and then build your way up. Another technique for determining how many links you can have in your email without creating a spam problem is to do some testing pre-send. Create an email with as many links as you want and test send it to your seed or test addresses. If it goes into the spam or junk folder (and if you’re sure that there wasn’t anything else in the content of the email that would have created a spam problem), then remove half of the links and test it again. You may find that you’re suddenly inbox-ready just by removing some links!

Links in the Text Version of Your Email

Obviously, it’s not possible to put actual links in the text-only version of your email. Whether your text-only version is the singular version of your email or whether you’re sending a multi-part message with both html and text components, it’s worth it to take some time to clean up the urls in your text-only version.

Here are a handful of best practices:

Keep URLs Short and Memorable: From a text-only email, you’ll be relying on people remembering, typing-in, or copying and pasting urls into a web browser to get to your webpage or landing page. Keep urls short and easy-to-remember to optimize visits to your webpage or landing page from your text-based email.

Space URLs Out From the Text: Because you can’t use any type of formatting to make your urls stand out in a text-based email, make sure that there is a full paragraph break between the text above and the text below a url so that users can easily spot and find it.

Put Your URL at the Top and the Bottom of the Email: You’ll want to make any urls from the email easy to find in the text-based version. Make sure there is one above the fold and one at the bottom of the email so that users can find the destination url quickly and easily at the beginning or the end.

About the Author

Links in email are the primary driver of traffic funneling from your email to your webpage. Comm100 tells you how to code and phrase your links in email.Comm100 Email Marketing Provides powerful email marketing software that can help you develop and maintain good relationships with your customers and increase your sales revenue at a very low cost. For more information about us, please visit: http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/

Perhaps you feel as though you’ve done everything correctly and your email is still hitting the spam folder instead of the inbox. Alternatively, perhaps you already had a deliverability problem with your marketing emails and were reading this book in order to learn how to fix your problem. Possibly, you’ve never had a problem before and suddenly a specific send hits the spam folder. What should you do? There’s actually a great tried-and-true process for attempting to determine what sent you to spam and how to fix it. In this article, we’ll walk you through your spam prevention.

Spam Prevention Step One: Test Addresses and Spam Deliverability

Hopefully, you took the prior advice in this book and tested your email send to a group of seed addresses or test addresses before you sent the entire email. That means that you were able to identity that your email had a spam problem long before you sent it to your entire list. If you didn’t do that, then solving your spam problem may be more difficult than the process that we are about to describe. Also, identifying and fixing your spam problem after it’s been identified in your pre-send tests means that you haven’t wasted an email send and you can, hopefully, correct the spam problem and still deliver your email to the inbox of your subscribers. If you only realized the spam problem retroactively, then you’ve most likely wasted an email send that landed in the spam folder of most of your email list.

In addition to knowing if you have a spam problem before you send to your main list, sending to your seed or test email addresses prior to sending the email as a whole can tell you if you will have a spam problem in just one email service provider or in multiple email service providers. This can help you make better decisions. If you’re ending up in the junk folder in Hotmail, for example, you certainly need to remedy your spam issue because Hotmail accounts for huge portions of most email lists. However, if you are ending up in the spam folder in a less important email service provider, it may be worth your time to simply send anyway and fix the spam issues retroactively.

Seeing if you have a email deliverability problem in all email service providers or just one can also make your “fix process” different. You may be experiencing a black list issue with just one email service provider. Or, you may have one email service provider whose spam filters are more sensitive than others. If you are lucky, you are caught in spam in an email service provider who has a streamlined contact for email marketers to request clarification, such as Hotmail. You can also make decisions, such as segmenting your list by email service provider and sending your multi-part html message to anywhere that did not flag you as spam and a text-only version to places that did flag you as spam. Regardless of how you proceed, the first step is to identify where you landed in the spam folder and then focus your testing efforts on perfecting that email template for that particular email service provider.

If you ended up in the junk folder in multiple email service providers, you may want to go back and start from scratch with your template. Alternatively, you may be in a scenario where you have recently had a high number of spam complaints or email list quality issues. While it’s important to go through the entire spam testing process described below, it’s equally important to take a moment to take a three-hundred-and-sixty degree look at your email marketing program and explore if you’ve violated enough spam best practices over the recent past that you may simply need to “wait it out” until you can return to the inbox.

Spam Prevention Step Two: The Subject Line

The subject line is often the biggest culprit in sending an email to the spam filter, and spam filters prioritize email subject line content highly. Begin by making sure that your subject line follows basic spam best practices:

Is it too long? Try to make sure it’s thirty-five to fifty words

Have you used ALL CAPS? If so, remove them.

Have you used excessive punctuation?!!? If so, remove it.

Have you used any of the spam-filter trigger words detailed in this section?

After you’ve checked your subject line for any of the potential spam triggers above, try resending the email with a completely safe subject line. It’s probably a good idea to send one test with the subject line that you used simply modified to remove any of the potential spam triggers above and a second test with an entirely different subject line. If you now get into the inbox, that’s great and you’ve fixed your problem. If not, continue to use the “safer” subject line and proceed to step three of this test.

Spam Prevention Step Three: The Content

The next most likely portion of your email that is sending you to spam is the actual content of your email. This can be time consuming to test, but we have a recommended method that can speed it up.

Take a look at the body of your email. Break it up into four or five “sections” of content. Begin by removing the first section of content. Send the email. Does it still go to spam? Then the offending content is in a different section. Remove the next section, and then send the email. Are you still in the spam folder? Then that section was not the problem either. Continue removing sections and sending the email until you finally hit the inbox. When that happens, you’ll know what section of the email included the words, links, or html code that set off the spam filters. You can go back and begin to rework that content and then reinsert it into the email until you find a version of it that no longer sends you to spam.

It’s important that when you begin to replace the content that you stripped out of the email, you replace it one piece at a time, just like you took it out, and resend the email each time. You may have more than one problem area, but it was how the areas worked in combination that sent the email to spam to begin with.

If the portion of your email that is causing you to go to spam is in the content, you’ll identify it using this process. If you do identify it, then you can fix it and send your email. If you don’t, then move on to step four of this testing process.

Spam Prevention Step Four: Images

In step four, you’ll want to remove all (or as many as possible) of the images from your email and then resend the email. Email images, particularly when heavily used, can increase your score in a spam filter since so many spammers use images to high viruses, spyware, and even inappropriate messages that they don’t want spam filters to be able to read in the text of their email. Start by removing all images from your email template and seeing if you then make it into the inbox. If you do make it into the inbox, you can begin adding images back into your email one-by-one until you’ve reached a “tipping point” and land back in the spam or junk folder. If you want to be entirely safe, it is probably better to send your email without any images at all if images turned out to be what was causing you to go to the spam or junk folder.

If stripping out or removing images solves your deliverability problem, you can now send your email. If not, continue on to step five of this process.

Spam Prevention Step Five: Text Only

Before you try the unlikely source of your “from address” or have to start looking at more drastic and complicated reasons why your email may be hitting the spam folder, attempt to send the text-only version of your email. Why would you want to do this? If the text only version of your email makes it into the inbox, then you have ruled out the health of your email list or a blacklist or sender reputation problem with your IP or domain name. List health and sender reputation issues are difficult and time consuming to remedy. If the text-only version of your email makes it into the inbox, then you know that if you simply strip down and sanitize your HTML version, you can get into the inbox. Of course, make sure that your text-only version also uses a clean subject line and content free of spam-trigger words. If the text-only version also goes to spam, you’ll need to proceed to step six of this process.

Spam Prevention Step Six: The From Address

Step six is the fastest test, and it’s also the least likely to be the cause of your deliverability problem. However, it’s certainly worth testing just in case. Change the “from” address of your email and try sending again. It’s likely that if you’re experiencing a deliverability problem due to something bigger than your subject line or your content, simply changing the “from” address on your email won’t get you into the inbox. However, at this point in the process it’s certainly worth testing.

The reasons that you’re experiencing deliverability problems if you aren’t able to solve your junk or spam folder issue with a change to content, images, or subject line can be much larger and much more difficult to fix. It’s certainly worth the ten minutes to see if changing the “from” address will solve your problem! If it does solve the problem, then you can continue with your email send. If not, continue on to step seven of this process.

Spam Prevention Step Seven: Email List Health

If you are using a third party email marketing platform provider such as Comm100, then your email marketing list is most likely in great shape given that most thirty party email marketing providers automatically prune and clean your list and ensure that unsubscribe requests are handled properly. However, it may be surprising to you how many times in-house email management systems fail to do this. If you have built an in-house system, then any small piece of change to your website code or server configurations, among other technical elements, can result in bounces not being pruned from your email lists, unsubscribe requests not being properly removed, and even bad addresses being mailed to repeatedly. If an error such as this has happened, then email service providers will begin to black list you. Spammers commonly don’t take the time to clean or manage their lists, so if for some reason your list management techniques have failed, you will appear as though you are a spammer.

List management and keeping a clean email list is one of the greatest arguments for using an outsourced email marketing provider. Managing the process in-house leaves a great deal of room for error and can be downright challenging.

If you discover through the course of investigation that you have made an error in email list management, you’ll want to take the following steps:

Immediately correct the error

For any email service provider that allows an inbound channel for questions from companies that send email, send a communication admitting your error and asking to be reinstated to inbox status

Be prepared to wait things out. If you’ve made a critical list management error, you may just need to be prepared to “wait out” your penalty phase.

If you discover that you’ve made a significant list management error, then you may not be able to remedy it in time for your next email send – or even your next several emails. However, you now know what the issue is and you can move on with correcting it. If, however, your list appears to be clean and healthy, you’ll unfortunately need to consider step eight of this process.

Spam Prevention Step Eight: Your IP or Domain

Unfortunately, if you’ve now tried all of the other steps on this email check list and have still not identified why you’re going to the spam or junk folder, it’s likely that you’ve taken a hit to your sender reputation score and that “black mark” is now associated with your IP or domain. While it’s possible to test this by attempting to send from alternate IPs or domains, most email spam filters are fairly smart and will still be able to recognize it as you. If you have alternative IPs or domains available to you, you can try sending from them. If they do end up in the inbox, you know that you have a sender reputation problem. You can make a business decision at that point as to whether it’s worth it to you to attempt to send your marketing email via your alternate domain or IP. However, whether you do that or not, you’ll want to consider steps nine and ten as well as the last resort in this process. Repairing your sender reputation can be challenging, can take time, and won’t always be successful. That’s why it’s so important to follow all email marketing best practices from the very beginning of your email marketing program.

Spam Prevention Step Nine: Contact the Email Service Provider if Possible

If you believe that you have a sender reputation problem or have been blacklisted and our content is valid, your list is opt-in or double opt-in, and you haven’t made list management errors or experienced high user unsubscribe or spam complaints, then you can proceed to contact email service providers where possible. Hotmail offers a contact form, as do several other email service providers. However, be aware that the response time may take quite a while and the burden of proof will be on you to prove that your email is both high quality and desired by your subscribers. If you have developed a sender reputation problem, there is likely a reason for that and you will have a difficult time convincing an email service provider otherwise.

Spam Prevention Step Ten: Reduce the Size of Your Send

You can also try reducing the size of your email send to only the most engaged users. Remove anybody who doesn’t regularly open and respond to emails from your email list. Then send to only your highest value, highest activity subscribers. This will improve your email metrics with email service providers because it will demonstrate high open rates and low unsubscribe or spam requests. A smaller list also means a higher chance of making it into the inbox. It’s not an ideal fix, but because you’re most likely in a situation where you’ll need to use the last resort described below, it at least allows you to continue emailing on a regular basis with limited results.

Last Resort for Spam Prevention: Attempt to Wait it Out

About the Author

Comm100 tells you a great tried-and-true process for spam prevention when you are marked by an email service provider as spam. Comm100 Email Marketing Provides powerful email marketing software that can help you develop and maintain good relationships with your customers and increase your sales revenue at a very low cost. For more information about us, please visit: http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/

It may seem as though getting users to open your email would be the first step in designing a successful email marketing campaign. In fact, setting the “from” address and determining the email subject line is typically the last step. Unfortunately, for many companies, “last step” often translates to “quickly done and not thought out.” Having a compelling “from” address and email subject line should be a task that you spend an ample amount of time for thinking about. It all begins with users choosing to open and view your email, and in many email clients that don’t automatically load a portion of your email into a preview pane, that begins with the “from” address and email subject line.

The From-Address: Personal or Professional?

It would be easy (and quick) to default your email from address to something simple like. However, the from-address that you choose at the beginning of your campaign should never change (you’ll be asking people to add it to their contact and address books to avoid having your email go to the spam or junk folder), so it’s worth considering whether you want that email from address to be personal or impersonal, as well as what email address may help incentivize open rates. You essentially have three options:

Impersonal: This is the most common format for a “from” address and looks similar to those described above. However, you can really select any word that is non-personal and non-incentivized and use it. Remember, though, that it’s an email address that people will not be able to reply to or will be using as an automated tool for unsubscribing from your email list. For that reason, don’t use an email address that you use for other purposes at your company. The benefit of using an impersonal email address as the “from” address is that it will be unlikely to experience any problems with spam filters. The downside is it may not “help” your email open rate in the same way that personalized or incentivized from-addresses may.

Incentivized: An incentivized from-address will utilize the “from” address field to include a word that may help to get users excited about opening your email.  What’s the benefit? Every opportunity to excite a subscriber about opening your email should be leveraged, and the subtle reminder that they may be about to get a deal or discount can be effective. What’s the downside? You may experience problems getting through spam filters in certain instances depending on your sender reputation and the content of your email.

Personal: The third type of email address for your mass email campaign is personalized.This type of from-address can be particularly effective if your company has a recognizable spokesperson or executive. However, it can also be effective if your business segment is one where one-to-one relationships can be helpful, such as the non-profit sector or even some retail emails. The upside is that it makes the email experience feel more individualized to the reader. The downside is that it can also negatively impact open rates just as easily as it can increase them by making your email look less professional.

What’s best for you? Because you don’t want to change your “from” address very frequently, you’ll want to limit your testing with this one. Certainly, however, one test using only different “from” lines can’t hurt. Another option is to take an informal poll of your best customers. Either way, make sure that your “from” address is at least thought through and be aware of the other options if you’re finding your open rates to be unsatisfactory.

Remember that it’s a CAN-SPAM requirement that the “from” address accurately reflect whom the email is from. No playing around with fake company names or clever url domains!

The Email Subject Line: Research, Research, Research

There is nothing that we would like more than to tell you exactly what subject lines will work the best for your email! However, subject line and what will work can vary dramatically by industry and email list segment. While we can’t tell you for absolute certain what will work for you, we can give you a list of common best practices for email subject lines.

Personalize: Using a personalization feature such as the one offered by Comm100 to insert a first name or user name into the email subject line can almost always improve your open rate. It’s important, however, to use only a first name or user name and not a first and last name. Most subscribers will consider the inclusion of their last name in an email subject line to be a privacy concern given how easy it is to hack into an email. Also, as noted when we discussed personalization earlier in this chapter, keep in mind whether your industry segment lends itself to using personalization or whether your customers would rather not have their name publically displayed on an email from you.

Create Urgency: You want subscribers to open your email as soon as they see it. The longer a recipient waits to open your email, the more likely it is that he or she will simply end up deleting it. How do you increase the chances that your email will get opened promptly? Creating a sense of urgency in the email subject line is effective in increasing this metric. “Limited Availability Sale Items” and “Clearance Sale for a Limited Time Only” are examples. Write subject lines that make readers or subscribers feel as though they may miss out if they don’t open the email and get the contents immediately.

Create Urgency Without a Date! However, while you certainly want to create urgency, you don’t’ want to write an email subject line that makes your email outdated in the near future. Though email still offers the highest return on investment of any marketing channel, with the rise of social network users often check their inbox less frequently. If you send an email that clearly says that an offer is out of date by Friday, you may miss out on potential lagging opens that only happen on the weekend. You’ll want to walk a fine line between creating urgency and also not making your email appear out-of-date too soon.

Keep it Short and Put the Important Parts First: Log into a Hotmail, Yahoo! or Gmail account and look at how your subject lines display. You’ll notice that you don’t see that many characters of your email subject line. Generally speaking, you have about thirty-five to fifty characters of text to display in a subject line that a user will actually see. Keep your subject lines short and make sure the most important content, such as the offer you’re making, is at the front of the subject line. Also, remember that the longer you make your email subject line, the more likely you are to end up in a spam or junk folder. Even if it takes you a while to craft your email subject line masterpiece into just thirty-five to fifty characters, it will be worth the time and effort in improved deliverability and open rates.

Repeat Your Company or Newsletter Name: Users will open their email from you based on two things after a scan of their inbox. The first will be the content of the subject line, but the second will be their relationship with you. Not everybody will scan the “from” address or even see it, so it’s often beneficial to put your company or newsletter name in the email subject line as well. Of course, you’ll need to balance between subject line length and reminding subscribers that the email is from you. Most likely, you’ll need to do some testing to determine the best course of action for you.

Be Careful of Spam Words: Finally, there’s nowhere that the use of spam words can come back to haunt you more quickly than in the subject line of your email. Subject line content is given huge priority by most email service provider spam filters. While it’s a fine line, be careful of words like “free” and “cash.” Yes, you want to use words in the email subject line that will encourage users to open your email, but doing that at the expense of getting into the inbox isn’t worth it. As always, be sure to test your email to a list of seed addresses before you send it to your main list. If you end up going into the junk or spam folder, one of the first “fixes” that you should try is removing any questionable spam words from your email subject line and making it shorter.

And, of course, again remember that it’s a CAN-SPAM requirement that your subject line accurately reflect the content of the email. Don’t be misleading.

The Most Important Best Practice for Email Subject Lines: Test! Test! Test!

There’s nothing easier to test (or more important to test) than email subject lines. It’s incredibly easy to break your email list into two parts and simply send a separate subject line to each and see which one gets a high open rate. Of course, make sure that all other variables such as the time of the send, the size of the list, and the breakdown of email service providers on the list are basically the same. Because subject line performance can vary so much based on industry segment, it’s important that you test a variety of keywords, calls-to-action, lengths, personalization, and other factors and then make your own list of what is most effective at generating opens of your emails. Starting with the above best-practices can help ensure that you don’t have a subject line that is designed to fail. Ultimately what’s best for your email campaign program will need to be determined over time.

Of course, the most important thing to remember is to take your time and think through the “from” address and email subject line. A little thought can go a long way to improving open rates.

About the Author

Comm100 Email Marketingtells you how to determine the email subject line and how to set the ‘from’ address. Comm100 Email Marketing Provides powerful email marketing software that can help you develop and maintain good relationships with your customers and increase your sales revenue at a very low cost. For more information about us, please visit: http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/

Are Your Subscribers Opening Your Email?

Your email template design can only be successful if your subscribers are actually opening the email. Most email marketing and newsletter providers such as Comm100 include email open rate tracking as part of the standard metrics package for your email program. Open rate numbers are typically not one hundred percent accurate due to the image pixel method of tracking email opens (not all email service providers load images automatically, so not all opens are automatically tracked). However, at the most basic level, you need people to open your email in order for it to be successful. If your email is not being opened at an open rate that you feel is adequate (we’ll discuss what a good open rate is when we talk about metrics in detail later in this book), then you should examine the following elements of your email template design:

Spam Content and Coding: Is your email template and email sending solution designed to get into your subscribers’ inboxes, or are you going to the spam or junk folder? While some spam issues will be due to the content contained in your email and the quality of your email database, html coding in your email template can also impact your deliverability rates. Before you assume that users don’t want to open your email, be sure that they are actually receiving your email.

Value of Your Content to Your Subscribers: At the heart of user engagement with your email program will be the value of the content that you’re providing to your subscribers. Make sure that your content is both well written and is the content that your subscribers actually want, not what you think they want!

Quality of Your Database List: The quality of the names and addresses in your email database may also be an issue. Make sure that your list is up-to-date, fully opted-in, and optimally pruned and cleaned regularly.

Time and Date of Email Sends: The day of week and the time that you send your email can also impact how many subscribers open it. Knowing how to choose the best day to send email can easily turn your email campaign from good to great.

Open rate is one of the most, if not the single most, important metric related to your email marketing or newsletter campaign. When dealing with your email template design, you’ll want to keep the first two elements – the content and coding of your template, in mind as they relate to spam, deliverability, and open-rate.
Are Your Subscribers Staying Subscribed?

Your email template design, and your email program, are successful if your subscribers neither unsubscribe from nor mark as spam your email messages. While it may seem as though the number of users who unsubscribe or file spam complaints is entirely related to the content that you choose to include in your email, there are other elements that you’ll want to consider as well.

Placement of Content in Your Emails: When your subscribers open their emails from you, do they see content that will immediately engage them? You may be taking up too much room at the top of your email or high visibility areas of your email with hard sells, images, or meaningless introductory copy. Making sure that your subscribers see the content that interest them will keep them active and engaged with your emails and your brand for longer.

Visibility of All Content in Your Emails: Much like the most important content should be immediately visible, the remaining content in your email should be easy to find. Is there an easy-to-see table of contents or listing of what’s in the email near the top? Are you using too many images and people can’t see the value of the email content? If you’re losing users from your subscriber base, make sure that the content of your email is easy to see and find.

Quality of the Content in Your Emails: Of course, at the end of the day, what it all comes down to is the quality of your content. They say that “Content is King” for a reason. If your email is too sales-driven for your users, is full of grammar and spelling errors, uses boring, “content-farm” style content, or just isn’t interesting, users will eventually unsubscribe. Worse, they may mark you as spam. You need to deliver a product that your users will want in their crowded inboxes.

Frequency of Emails: The frequencies with which you send emails can also negatively impact your database by encouraging unsubscribe requests or spam complaints. Make sure that subscribers know how often they’ll be receiving email from you. Also, be sure to test sending less email if you see an increase in unsubscribe requests and spam complaints.

Losing names from your email database is one of the worst things that can happen to your business. Not only does it mean that you have fewer users to market to, but it also reduces the value of your list as an asset to your company’s bottom line. When dealing with your email template design, keep the first two points in this section in mind in order to optimize email success.

Are Your Subscribers Forwarding Your Email and Content?

You may not personally care if your users forward and share the content of your email, but if they do they will ultimately increase your brand awareness and potentially the revenue-generating business for you. People take brand and product recommendations more seriously when they come from known connections, so if your users are forwarding your email newsletters or marketing offers, then your business is expanding with no additional cost to you. Consider the following:

Ease of Forwarding: Will it be easy for users or subscribers to forward or share your email? Is there an html link to the email in addition to the email itself? Are there prominent links to post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social networks? Is it easy to join your email list from within the email? Are all of these elements accounted for in your email template design?

Quality of Content: We can’t say it too often! The quality of the content or offers in your email will ultimately determine if subscribers want to share it with others. As we’ve said before, make sure that you are delivering an appealing email product.

Especially in the era of social networking, the potential to get a great viral impact from a forwarded and shared email promotion is significant. When dealing with your email template design, consider the ease with which subscribers can accomplish that goal.

Are Subscribers Clicking from the Email to Your Landing Pages?

Similar to the idea that your email is only successful if subscribers actually open it, your email template design is ultimately only successful if users then click from the email to your landing page or web destination (or, alternatively take another action such as calling your company or taking a coupon to an actual physical brick-and-mortar location). If your email is getting opened but nobody is taking action from it, consider the following:

Are Links to Your Site Clear and Easy to Find? You might be surprised how many times people aren’t clicking through to your website simply because they don’t’ see or recognize your links. While a slick design is nice, links that people recognize because they are blue and underlined can often be more effective. Similarly, if too many of your links in email are in the form of image-based buttons, users may never see them if their email service provider does not load email images.

Are There Enough Places in Your Email to Click? You may also simply not have enough places for a user to click from your email to your site. You don’t want too many links in your email because it may make you appear to be spam to email service providers. However, you also don’t want your subscribers to have to work or look too hard to find a link. You want them to be able to click through to your site as quickly as possible when they are inspired to.

Is Contact Information Clear? In case there is a problem with your site, you want to make sure that your company contact information is clear in your email. Some users may even prefer to call or visit a brick-and-mortar location. Make sure that you don’t lose any business by not making those options clear and visible in your email template.

Does Content Encourage Clicks? Finally, not only does the quality of your content matter, but so does its ability to use strong email call-to-action to encourage and incite users to click through to your website or business.

An email has a great deal of value simply as a branding, user-engagement, and customer loyalty tool. However, ultimately to drive actions directly from your email program, you’ll need to be sure that users are clicking through to your website. When dealing with your email template design, consider all of the points above to optimize click-through activity.

Are Your Subscribers Taking Advantage of the Offers You Promote?

Finally, if your bottom line is revenue or sign-ups, then what really matters the most to you is whether or not users are taking advantage of products or offers that you promote. If your response to offers or product promotions is not what you had hoped that it would be, consider the following:

Are Offer and Promotions Easy to Find? Similar to the note above regarding how to make sure that your most engaging content is noticed by users, the same can be said for your offers and promotions. Are your offers and promotions above the fold or in an easy-to-see location in your email? Do you reference them in the subject line? Is your entire offer or promotion trapped in an image that many subscribers may not see? Make sure that subscribers know where to look for and can easily find the offers and promotions in your emails.

Is It Clear How to Take Advantage of an Offer or Promotion? Also similar to the note above regarding the ease of finding, seeing, and using links, the same is true of offers. Have you presented a great offer, but then the way to click to the landing page or to contact your company is hard to find? Be sure that subscribers can not only find your offers; they can also easily understand how to take advantage of them.

Is the Offer or Promotion the Right Offer or Promotion for Your Audience? Of course, in the end, your offer will be most successful if it’s an offer that your audience wants. Is it the right merchandise for your users? Is the offer a good enough incentive? Is it a competitive offer? Is it time sensitive? You’ll most likely need to do some extensive testing to find the right offer mix for different segments of your list. However, it will be time well spent!

If revenue or sign-ups are your end goal, whether or not your subscribers respond to your offers is mission critical. When developing your email template design, keep the points above in mind in order to optimize your email performance.

While an email template design and email program is ultimately only successful if it increases customer loyalty, retention, activity, and typically revenue, you’ll need to master success in all of the areas above in order to reach the full potential of your email program.

About the Author

Comm100 provides you the metrics and elements that determine the success of your email template design.Comm100 Email Marketing Provides powerful email marketing software that can help you develop and maintain good relationships with your customers and increase your sales revenue at a very low cost. For more information about us, please visit: http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/