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Email strategies - Five Email Messages You Should Be Sending

On May 6, 2013
By Alisa Meredith
In Email Marketing
With No Comments

Building Your Email Strategy – Five Email Messages You Should Be Sending

Wondering how to be more effective with your email marketing? Now that you’ve learned how to analyze the results of your email campaigns, increase your open and click-through rates, and increase social shares, it’s time to get down to email campaign strategy with five basic types of emails that you should be sending.

Email Newsletter

Your email newsletter works in much the same way as your old printed newletter used to, but it gets a much wider circulation, and allows for better tracking. Use your newsletters to: Build brand awareness – a nice reminder of who you are and what your company does for its customers. Create anticipation – new products or services coming soon? Give a teaser. Repurpose your content – share popular blog posts and press releases. Include all sorts of content – from blog posts to white paper download links, upcoming events, offers and surveys.

The possible weakness in newsletters is that putting in a variety of content dilutes the message and call to action. …

On May 2, 2013
By Alisa Meredith
In Email Marketing
With No Comments

Email Campaign Metrics – What Do Those Numbers Mean?

Looking at your email campaign reports with column after column of numbers can be overwhelming. A recent HubSpot webinar on email marketing covered common measurements of Email success and what they really mean – which should shape your strategy and which are just good to know. This post was written using my notes and some extra research. Enjoy!

Bounce Rate

Percentage of emails sent that could not be delivered. This measurement uncovers potential problems with your list, though a certain percentage is to be expected as people change workplaces and email addresses. Included in bounce rate are soft bounces and hard bounces. >A soft bounce refers to an email message that gets to the mail server, but is bounced back because the recipient mail box is full, the server is down, or your message is too large.

A hard bounce often results from an invalid email address or from the recipient mailserver blocking your mailserver.

Delivery Rate

Closely related to your bounce rate and the quality of your subscriber list, delivery rate refers to the percentage of emails actually …

On April 30, 2013
By Alisa Meredith
In Social Media Tips
With No Comments

Reach More People When you Use Social Share Buttons for Email Messages and Websites

“Websites that display Twitter sharing buttons are linked to on Twitter nearly seven times more often than sites that do not display tweet buttons.” (Entrepreneur.com) Clearly, adding “Share This” buttons to your websites and emails is a great way to increase the distribution of your content. Make it easy for people to share, and they’re likely to do so!

Want to add “Share This” buttons to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+ to your website or Email messages? Many platforms have plugins or built-in methods to do so (we like Slick Social Share Buttons for WordPress), but some landing page providers don’t, so we gathered the code for each. No javascript required, so they all work in email as well.

Just change the parts of the code in ALL_CAPS to your own values. To try them out, click on my text or button links.

Share to Facebook

<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=YOUR_URL/”>Share to Facebook</a>

Tweet This button

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On August 17, 2012
By Alisa Meredith
In Email Marketing
With 1 Comment

Email Campaigns – How to Increase Open Rate and Click-Throughs

Improve your Email Campaign Open Rate

Everyone wants a high open rate because that’s how you know people are seeing your emails, right? Well, if you are looking for a metric showing effectiveness, open rate is not ideal. If a subscriber has blocked images, they won’t be counted, even if they open it! How can you improve your open rate and overall email marketing effectiveness?

The first thing to do is to look at your list. Are the subscribers likely to be interested in your message, or did they come from a purchased list? Has it been so long since you emailed them last that they have lost interest, or even forgotten that they opted-in? Either of those factors will greatly diminish your open (and click-through) rate.

Try sending Email campaigns on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday or Saturday. Consider your audience, though. If you are addressing a business audience, during work hours might be the best time to send. If you are addressing consumers, you might find any time outside of work more effective.