Online Marketing Business Blog

Landing Pages: The Key To Your Email Campaign's Success

Email marketeers spend all their time working with you, the designer, in coming up with relevant and great looking campaigns. Both you and your client do countless tests on subject headers, and ensure sharp targeting of the recipient profiles.

All set? Campaign launched and you see great results and click through performance. Yup, you got the email portion down pat. But your client isn't seeing any great increase in sales. And the reason is, only half the battle is won through email, the click-through to website conversion was lost along the way. Welcome to the world of landing pages.

What's That All About?

Recipients of your client's email campaign may click through to different areas of their website. This page which they land on is called the "landing page". Yes, practically any page on the website could be a landing page (and that's a very important consideration as well when designing a website). The important part is what the visitor should do next. Strong call-to-actions are staple here. As with all websites, landing pages have the task of funneling the visitor towards a goal, defined by your client.

The potential here is, through email marketing, you control the pages which recipients enter from. Many researchers have found that a web page that does not match the look and tone of the email can lead to visitors leaving the site.

One of the best stategies is to repeat the same offer on the landing page. Use the same or similar promotional copy that you did in the email. Things brings a sense of familiarity to the recipient/visitor and they are more likely to explore further and eventually convert (they did click the link in the first place didn't they?). The natural path is from clicking to converting, and for this instance, it starts at the email, all the way through to the website's goal point.

What This Means for the Designer

Since you can dictate the landing page from the email, you'll be able to put specific content on the landing page through a design that encourages the visitor to do what you want them to do. Design the landing page to fit with the goals of the email marketing effort that got the visitor to land there in the first place.

Creating custom landing pages for various promotions or communications can create a huge impact for marketing results. And your client will love you for it!

As a web designer or agency, you'll be presented with exciting challenges in conversion: designing for visitors to take a desired action. This naturally means and up-sell on your email marketing and design services, leading to additional revenue.

There's some highly focused design agencies who have specially tailored packages that includes email design together with landing pages. They're doing to right thing for themselves, and their client. Results breed recurring business. Helping your client achieve better results through their email marketing efforts is a win-win situation for them, and you.

Why You Need Email Authentication

Email is essential to our daily business lives. And for an email marketeer or any design/communication agency providing email marketing services, it is their livelihood. Email has been a convenient and cost-effective way for us to communicate, be it through peers, work or engaging our clients. Unfortunately, email is also very easily forged.

Email authentication proves the authenticity of your email and its source.

And the great thing is, its starting to grow in popularity amongst the large ISPs and corporate email servers in their effort to control incoming spam. This gives legitimate email marketeers and opportunity to differentiate themselves from spammers, and aids in better deliverability.

Authentication Methods

There are a number of popular authentication methods currently being used at the moment. SPF and SenderID looks for a file on your server that they can cross-reference with.This helps prove that the "From" address is legitimate according to your website domain. SPF and SenderID are easy to implement as it requires you to add a few extra lines to your domain records.

The 2 other popular methods, Domain Keys and DKIM, embeds code directly in the email itself. These methods make it much tougher to forge emails, but can also be tougher to implement for the sender, and the receiver.

Due to the various methods being used currently, empoaying all authentication types would perhaps be the safest method until a certain authentication standard has been reached and widely accepted among all the major ISPs. 

The Email Sender and Provider Coalition has provided a handy checklist for major ISPs and their authentication methods.

BlinkCampaign's Support for Email Authentication

To help your email campaigns look more reputable, and thereby increasing deliverability (not to mention aiding our server's sender reputation) BlinkCampaign supports multiple authentication methods to cover all bases:

SPF is automatically setup for all client accounts in BlinkCampaign. You can, however start to setup the DomainKeys / DKIM and Sender ID authentication methods for all your client's email campaigns.

To setup authentication, under your Agency Console, simple edit any of your client's account info. Look  for the Sending Domains Authentication box on the right. Provide the domain of the "From" email address that your client is using to send their email campaigns, and follow the next few simple steps to add those records in to the DNS records.

Official Authentication Standards

• DKIM.org
• DomainKey Library and Implementor's Tools
• Sender ID by Microsoft
• Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

Permissions in Email Marketing: Educating Your Clients

Its a tricky situation: selling your email marketing services and educating your clients about permission based email marketing. Sure you'd love to close the deal, but just because your client's got a fishbowl full of business cards doesn't necessarily make email marketing right immediately.

Whether your using BlinkCampaign, or any other ESPs for that matter, permissions are taken very seriously and most ESPs have a zero-tolerance anti-spam policy.

Permission is simply determined by individuals who has given permission to contact them via email regarding a topic they've explicitly signed up for.

This usually comes in 2 forms:

• mailing list sign up through your client's website
• dropping a business card which states that your client will be contacting them regarding various offers, promotions, etc.

Of course, you'd also need to check out the CAN-SPAM definition for more detailed definitions.

But I've got tons of addresses collected over the net through the years!

So they say. To your client, it may seem that each address is an opportunity cost. However, spammers work on the same principle of throwing a wide net to hook a few. It works (and therefore SPAM is still around) but its not right. Needless to say, it doesn't bode well for your client's reputation as well. ESPs (us included) will cease to support such practices and essentially, you and your client will be back at square one.

Selling the idea and benefits of permission based email marketing

Your client's options may seem limited for the on-start and they have to understand that building a good list takes time. However,with patience and good practice, the benefits or email marketing really start to shine.

Subscriber retention and loyalty

People who have opted in, would usually stay on your list, provided content is relevant to what they've opted in to in the first place. Send your subscribers newsletters if they've signed up for it. Not promotional emails. There's tons more on this in an earlier post.

Hook, line, bait and sinker

As you have more people on your list that are starting to get engaged, they're also likely to be more interested in what you have to say. Soon, further interaction could come in the form of preferences, polls, feedback as well as segmentation by interests or profiles.

Benefits all around

Subscribers get relevant information, your client improves customer relations and loyalty, your services are retained based on excellent reports, and the ESPs continue to deliver timely content on your behalf with less deliverability issues. Its a win-win situation all around.

Take a step back (you, and your client) and have a look at your junk mail folder. You and your client wouldn't want your content to end up there. Its valuable time and money wasted which could've been put to better use in building a solid subscriber list.

Deciphering Those Bounce Error Codes

If you've been conducting some campaigns recently, you might've notice the new swanky  (but rather daunting) bounce reports being generated from BlinkCampaign.

Here's a quick low-down on what those error codes really mean:

500

The recipient's email server is not recognizing the email that was sent out or was not formatted in the way the server expected. This could occur for longer emails.

501

This is due to syntax errors in the email address, outside of those that are automatically cleansed by BlinkCampaign. Some of your client's email servers may not recognize, and do not have addresses with underscores for example. This is also indicative of an invalid email address.

502

The mail was not delivered because it is not supported by a particular server. This may the case for email campaigns with a HTML only version (no plain text version) and the recipient's email server can only receive plain text format.

503

This usually indicates a problem with the network and communication to the recipient's email server.

504

A particular valid command was not implemented on the recipient's email server, and thus, cannot deliver the mail. This is a rare issue.

550

This is probably the most common bounce error you'll receive for your email campaigns. Basically it means the mail was not delivered due any number (but not limited to) the following reasons in plain English:

• The account doesn't exist (The recipient might have closed the account or left an organization
• The recipient's email server requires authentication (which has to be manually setup and varies from server to server
• Certain ISPs require you to have the same From address as the domain where the mail is being sent from
• The recipient's server is down and has given up retrying x number of times

552

In a nutshell, your recipient's mailbox is full and needs some spring cleaning before your email campaigns can get through.

553

This error code means the email address is invalid. The difference from a suspended or closed account is that this email account never existed in the first place.

554

Yet another sort of invalid email address or does not exist anymore. This error is quite typically specified and returned from Yahoo:

554 delivery error: This user doesn't have a Yahoo.com account

554 delivery error: Sorry your message to [email address] cannot be delivered. This account has been disabled or discontinued.

Other less common bounce errors you may encounter

421 - the email server or ISP is unavailable. This may be caused by many things such as the server administrator stopping the mail service, or rebooting the mail server.

450 - The email server could not access the recipient's mailbox. This could be caused by a process on the recipient's email server tidying up the mailbox (think archiving in Outlook), the mailbox could be corrupt, or the remote mailbox may be stored on another server which is currently offline. It may also be caused by the remote mail server not wanting to accept the mail (user may have blocked the domain, blacklisting, etc).

451 - The email has bee aborted by the recipient's server due to overload. This is due to high traffic at certain times and prevents the successful delivery of the message.

452 - Insufficient disk space on the recipient's email server. This can occur when an ISP's mail server goes down, and when it comes back up, there is a huge spike in traffic as mails may have been queued for delivery or frequent attempts to re-try mails for the ISPs email account users due to the downtime.

We hope this analysis of bounces helps you understand your subscriber lists better. Analyzing your bounce mails is a great way to further profile your subscriber list and also help you determine which time and day would be the best delivery day for your email campaigns.

Be Wary Of How You Label Your "Unsubscribe" Link

File this under the "good-to-know" section for your email marketing developments.

Apparently, certain popular spam filters such as Spam Assassin consider the term "opt-out" to be spammy. Coupled with common design practices such as including two unsubscribe links (one at the header and the other at the footer of the email), this could be a double-whammy to your email design.

How about "unsubscribe"? Well, I've actually tried it again with Spam Assassin and it seemed to help. Unfortunately, I got word that "unsubscribe" may get flagged by other spam filters. I can hear the "OMGs!!!" right now...

The alternative is using other words like "remove" or phrases such as "take me off this list" and "I do not wish to receive anymore emails". Don't get overly creative. Be short, sharp and to the point. The more ambiguous it gets, the more likely someone's going to hit the "report spam" button. If its not a properly constructed or recognizable phrase, yup, there may be a tendency for the phrase to get caught by the spam filters as well.

Incidentally, the phrase "click here" is considered spammy by many spam filters as well. (Let's hear another round of "OMGs!!!")

Forward-a-Friend, Then?

I've been going through some past issues of email newsletters and promotional EDMs which I've collected over the years. It then dawned on me that many email marketers had taken for granted, something that should've fundamentally been there in the first place.

The lack of a "Subscribe" button.

Its really a curious find. Perhaps due to the short-sightedness of some email marketers, having their email campaign forwarded is already an achievement in their context. However, such hit-and-run tactics have little long term benefits. Why pass on any (every) opportunity to grow your mailing list?

I've posted some tips previously on creating good newsletters. In essence, good email newsletters should provide value and information of interest to your recipient. Now if recipient, John, feels that Jane shares a similar interest and might be keen on this month's edition of your email newsletter, John would hit the "forward-a-friend" button. That's free, bonus targeted marketing for you. Now why stop there? Let Jane subscribe directly so that she can receive future email newsletters from you, which have topics of interest to her. One more valuable permission-based addition to your mailing list. Nice.

Ditto for ad-hoc promotional campaigns. If John thinks Jane might be interested in ABC Inc's latest promotional offering, he'd forward it to her, just to spread the love around. Allowing Jane to subscribe from the email campaign means she's willing and keen to receive more in future.

Yep, allowing your recipients to unsubscribe easily is important. But creating an opportunity for a targeted lead to opt-in is equally as important and provides long-term benefits. Go on, call your designer now and re-look into that email newsletter template. You'll may even be pleasantly surprised that each email campaign you conduct might actually generate more addresses for your mailing list.

Sender Reputation

Being email marketeers, we all know that having a "good reputation" is essential to getting our messages into our recipient's inbox. But, do you know what are the factors that affect a sender's reputation?

Although white-listing your servers does partially attribute successful delivery, good sender reputation cannot be bought. Although proper email authentication protocols and setting up of Sender Policy Frameworks (SPFs) do play a part, there are 3 main factors that most large ISPs use in establishing your sender reputation.

These are:

1. Spam complain rate
   This is the percentage of people marking your email campaign as spam
2. Non-existent email addresses
   The percentage of hard bounces from your campaign, due to email addresses that may no longer exist
3. Spam traps
   ISPs often turn unused email addresses into spam traps. If your campaign continually hit these email addresses, the ISPs will start to take a closer watch

Should You Outsource Email Delivery?

If you've been doing email marketing for some time now, this question always pops up at one time or another: "Can't my email software do that? I could use the same email program to do email marketing just like sending ordinary emails.". At this juncture, we normally bite our lower lip for a moment, and proceed on with the following anecdote.

Your email campaigns are like poster ads. You could either start going around town yourself and sticking them up on walls and bus stops, or get a proper distribution team to do the legwork for you.

At which moment, the usual response from them would be some silence.

Who's Your Daddy? Your Client's Domain May Be At Ransom

The web has been recently abuzz when some light was shed on web registrar, GoDaddy.com, on abuse complaints stemming from email marketing. And its a real BIG DEAL to legitimate email marketeers and email service providers like Blink Campaign (Heck, our domain is registered with GoDaddy!).

So what's the big deal? For a start, GoDaddy is one of the premiere domain registrars for the web. A good bunch of our own clients are on GoDaddy. Now get this:

• Your client has their domain registered with GoDaddy
• Your client uses a third party email marketing service (namely you, the external online marketing/design agency) to advertise their GoDaddy registered site.
• IF there are any spam complaints from any campaign sent that go to GoDaddy, Go Daddy will charge you a "spam complaint management fee" of a whopping $200!
• AND if due to the above, your client decides to leave GoDaddy for another registrar, GoDaddy will hold your domain ransom until a "release fee" of $75 is paid off to them!

Getting Creative With Images Blocking

Most email clients, both online and offline, block images by default. The age old practise of web accessibility becomes ever more important in instances such as HTML email design.

Usage of ALT tags should be mandatory. But I don't just mean putting in ALT tags just to explain what's behind the image. Go one up and get your recipients to download the images and entice them to update their preferences in their email client so that future images from your campaign will be automatically downloaded. Gmail offers a similar function:

Steer Your Clients From Being Spammers

Spammers work on the notion of bulk mailing with a low conversion rate. That's why they require millions of email addresses for it to be of any real ROI. Unfortunately, it still works to a certain extent as there are recipients who still respond to spam, though unimaginable as it may seem. And its these sorts of recipients that are still keeping spammers in business.

Spammers steal almost everything they can get their hands on. Besides email addresses, they highjack server accounts and bandwidth. Worse still, some spammers use auto-generated email addresses just for sheer luck that a few of those might actually be valid email addresses.

Newsletters: How Often And When?

There's no real hard and fast rule (you knew I was going to say that, didn't you?) when it comes to the frequency of email newsletters. Depending on your client's profile, each would have their own unique demands and requirements, and so would their recipients.

Your best gauge on frequency for each of your clients would have to be from the horse's mouth. You'll know that its too often, or not often enough when you see the unsubscribes climbing.

Not often enough

As a rough aggregate, anything less than once a month is not often enough. Your client's recipients will start to forget about you. When they suddenly receive a surprise newsletter 3 months after they've first signed up, don't be surprised if they unsubscribe, or even worse, forgot that they actually signed up and simply marked you as spam.

Too often

Anything more than once a week is too often. Unless your client's subscribers have specifically signed up for more frequent mailings. Or they've signed up for multiple topics, each handled by a different department. As with daily spam, recipients will start to tire and get cheesed off by the frequency of your mailings. Again, don't be surprised if you're starting to get marked as spam.

Right, so based on the above, you've got to find your magic number by testing, testing, testing.

Ok, so when is the best time?

I"ll simply break it down into 2 types of newsletters

Professional interests

These are newsletters which recipients have signed up for out of interest or benefit to their professional knowledge. They're usually read briefly during office hours or tea breaks at work. Monday's are bad as everyone's just settling in and scoping out what they have to do for the rest of the week. Busy, busy, busy. I advise you to send these sort of newsletters mid-week, on Wednesdays or Thursdays where recipients are more settled in at work and would probably not have that many things on their mind.

Personal interests

These newsletters usually for into the category of the recipient's personal interests such as entertainment, hobbies, home improvement or any other topics or extra curricular activities which a relevant to the recipient's interest. For this sort of leisurely read at home, it is best to send them on a Saturday night or Sunday morning where it'll be waiting in the recipient's inbox by the time they check through their mail on Sunday.

Oops... Re-Sending An Erroneous Campaign

Just this month, one of our clients made a rather big mistake. He was sending his company's regular monthly email newsletter when he accidentally selected the wrong contents to be sent out. This resulted in his recipients receiving the base template with the default "lorem ipsum" text instead of the actual content that he had prepared beforehand. Hey, we're only human and make mistakes from time to time. We too are guilty of sending out a campaign with the wrong hyperlink, typos and other embarrassing mistakes.

Due to this, a number of things went wrong:

1. The content looked like spam due to the mash of unrecognizable words
2. The open rate was way lower as the preview pane of most email clients simply showed the gibberish text
3. Needless to say, click rate was 0
4. Unsubscribes spiked a little as recipients weren't sure where this email was coming from

The newsletter was really important to this company because they only get in touch with their recipients once a month. So they took a clever step and made a decision to re-send the campaign again, but with a little tongue-in-cheek humor. At the top where the main feature story usually is, he added another post:

Bounce Management: Don't Just Look At Your Open Rates

Many of us are guilty of this: looking and focusing on the click-open and click-through rates first each time we view our reports. That's fine and all but the reports don't just stop there. Too many a time, we've seen our users ignore their bounce rates. Bounce rates could indicate certain problems with the particular list.

Bounces reveal a lot about your client's list. If you've yet to make any sense of the types of bounces that Blink Campaign tracks, here's a quick revision:

Soft bounce

Soft bounces are temporary errors that Blink Campaign receives from the recipient's email server. There are a number of reasons why soft bounce occurs:

• Recipient's email server is down
• Recipient's email server is busy
• Recipient's mailbox is full and cannot accept any more mail at the moment

Blink Campaign resends soft bounces a number of times more, at a rate and frequency that would not seem "spammy" to the recipient's email server. If that still doesn't get it through, we finally flag it as soft bounce in your reports, ready for you to try again in the next campaign.

Hard bounce

Now hard bounces are where the important stuff is. The main reason for hard bounce is an expired or non-existent email address. We never retry to send hard bounces, simply because the address never existed or ceased to exist anymore. These addresses are immediately flagged as hard bounce in your reports.

Now why is this important? Its because email servers will start noticing and blocking you when you try to keep sending emails to bad addresses. Its also because of this that we remove these addresses from your cleansed list and flag them as hard bounce. You or your client should then decide what to do with them separately (we advise to thrash it most of the time).

Get back to your reports and check your hard bounces. If your hard bounces are rather random and none of them are coming from major ISPs (eg. Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, AOL) then you're fine.

However, if you start seeing a bunch of hard bounces from the same domain, its time to start sounding the alarm and looking into it. For example, say you got 20 hard bounces from AOL addresses, there's a good chance that AOL may be blocking you.

There's a number of things to look into. Firstly, have a look at your content and check out if there are any words that may trigger spam filters. Stuff like big caps, alternating caps, lots of !!! or special characters are a definite no-go. Naturally, spammy-words play a huge part too. Don't assume that you can hide behind your list because its permission based, or that our white-listed servers are bulletproof. Many a time, its content, not email delivery that triggers the filters resulting in blockage.

But if you notice that your content is perfectly ok, or its really a certain domain that's throwing out an unusually high number of hard bounces out, then we've definitely got a problem on our hands. If you ever face such a case, its time to get in touch with us or whichever email delivery service you're using.

Keep track of your hard bounces and don't just focus on your click-opens. The core to successful email marketing is deliverability. Its pointless if your knockout designs or excellent copy doesn't even reach the recipient's inbox.

Promotion Or Newsletter? Know The Difference

At present, email marketing is still rather deeply rooted in most people as promotion or sales based. Most of our own clients (end marketeers, not Blink Campaign users) would send out a promotional email once or twice a month, getting their recipients to sign-up for something, introduce their new products or spread word about a great sale coming up.

This sort of direct marketing has already established itself as an effective method of marketing. In fact, its so deeply rooted that we've noticed many people use the same lingo/tone/impression/content in general with their email newsletters.

Email promotions focus on ACQUISITION, email newsletters focus on RETENTION.

Promotional based email's primary goal is for the recipient to click on the call-to-action. Taking a cue from Google Analytics, the email is designed and laid out to "funnel" the recipient through a persuasive process, giving the final push at the call-to-action. Even the copy is written solely for this purpose. The end "goal" would be either to register/participate in something (survey, contents, etc), download, go to the product page on the website, and anything else under the sun that prompts the recipient to take some immediate action. As immediate action is required from the recipient, promotional emails are very short-term. If the recipient doesn't take the intended call-to-action, the entire value of the promotional email is lost.

Good and Bad Email Newsletters

Developing a good newsletter can help your client see ROI in their online marketing efforts with you. Leading to further establishing a great working relationship between the both of you, as well as passive recurring income through email marketing as well as your client's regular correspondences through their email newsletter.

Here are a few simple good and bad points you should consider when developing your client's email newsletters.

The Good

A good email newsletter has to be of value to the recipient.

• Enjoyable to read (offers at least one: interesting, relevant or useful information)
• Easy to sign up to (didn’t create barriers or ask for too much information.)
• From a “good source” - known for expertise in the field, or a well-known brand.
• Easy to navigate - well designed, looks good, easy to read more then one article.
• Well written content
• Easy to share (read: forward a friend function)
• Offers exclusive content (special offers not available anywhere else)
• Arrives at times that are convenient

The Bad

• No useful content - nothing useful. no special offers. no new information.
• Hard to read - maybe it’s one big image that’s blocked and appears to be an empty email. Maybe the design and layout of the text makes it hard to read and decipher.
• Ignores permission - comes too frequently (or feels like it does) - or more frequently than promised. Or, the sign up appears to generate lots of third party mailings. (read about my experience with this in an earlier post.)
• “Hello, are you ready to buy?”  - Each newsletter gives the same feeling you would get if you walked into a shop and five sales people descended on you immediately to ask you if you are going to make a purchase. The newsletter is all sales, no information. All pressure, no enjoyment.

Learning From Your Recipients

At times as agencies, we get too caught up with timelines, client's requirements, planning and delivery that we tend to forget the most important person in a campaign - the recipient. Just a few days back, I've had the fortunate (or unfortunate) privilege to re-visit being at the other end of the inbox. A certain local web portal totally ticked me off and has tarnished its reputation and professionalism in my mind. I won't mention any names, to save mylifestlyemap the embarrassment. Through this experience though, it reinforced a few basic, but often overlooked lessons. Its was just simply amazing how the online marketing folks there could've gotten it so wrong, in such short a time.

Building That First Impression Through Welcome Emails

Guess which sort of emails have the highest click open rate among all email communications? Yup that's right, its the welcome email. And not utilising the welcome email to its full potential is a great opportunity cost to your clients.

"You never get a second chance to make a first impression"

Through the welcome email which your client's recipients have signed up for, you should (through good design and content structure) set the tone and expectations of the recipient. The old saying "You never get a second chance to make a first impression" couldn't be more apt. Properly executing your client's welcome email message can create anticipation in the recipient for future campaigns.

Creating, Designing and Coding HTML Templates

Traditional marketing has already started to becomes less effective and accountable since the advent of the internet. Businesses are constantly seeking ways to engage customers on a personal level and provide them with information that is in line with their goals as consumers and in turn, gather information on what sells. HTML emails allow us to do things that traditional email doesn't. Besides having a more pleasing and desirable design, at the same time reinforcing your client's brand, HTML email also allows you to track opens, click throughs and forwards. Communicating with your customers and providing them with information that they ask for is a great way to drive traffic to your client's site and ultimately generate business leads for you and your client.

Build Customer Value for Your Clients

Branding 101: Through strong branding, we build a base of customers who will keep coming back year after year. However, the truth of the fact is: all these branding and marketing tactics usually end up with a one-time sale, only benefiting a short-term revenue. To truly achieve the objective, you, as the online marketing guru in your client's eye, have to help your client build true customer value. Consider too, that each campaign requires more involvement from the end recipient. And thankfully, there are benchmarks which you can use to help your client measure each of these forms - Revenue, Loyalty, and Advocacy.