All too often, email is an afterthought. For many marketing departments, it is not included as a budgeted item and is frequently overshadowed by Search and Online Advertising. However, if fully integrated in your online marketing plan, email can deliver your highest ROI. Email can drive targeted and purposeful customers to your website, increasing your traffic and sales.

When you incorporate email into your online marketing, you must give it the same attention and respect that you give to the other components of your plan. Email can no longer be looked at as a last minute “blast” to try to increase sales, but as a planned communication that works in conjunction with Search and Online Advertising. When executed properly, email marketing can generate high open rates, strong click-through rates, and ultimately the conversions that you seek. Once you have you your overall marketing goals set, it is time to see where and when email fits into the picture. Then, set your marketing calendar and stick to it.

Your email marketing program may include several types of communications: newsletters, sales, and promotions. The focus of the newsletter is to build a relationship with your customer. It is paramount to remember that the newsletter should be focused on your client. If the content isn’t valuable to them, they will unsubscribe. A short introductory paragraph to each article should be featured with links to the remainder of the article on your website. The frequency of your newsletter will depend on the amount of relevant content that you have to offer your client base. While some companies may have enough content to send a weekly newsletter, many will only be able to send monthly or quarterly. Also, remember to design your newsletter to compliment your other communications and your website. Including navigation to your website from your newsletter will also help increase traffic. Connecting with your customers through a newsletter now will result in sales later.

Sales emails, also referred to as catalog emails, are basically the same as your print brochures or direct mail catalogs. They are used to sell products. It is not necessary to show all of your products in the sales email, but feature a few and include links to the areas of your website where you have items for sales. Be sure to include strong calls to action that will engage your customers and drive them to your site. Be creative. Instead of using a general “click here”, try using verbiage that will make them want to go to your website. For example, “See more colors” or “Want to find similar products?”

Promotional emails are generally used to advertise a special sale, one-time offer, coupon or event. These emails should be short, easy to scan and have one call to action that will take your customer directly to your website. While the purpose of these emails is the sell, it is important not to use them too often. If you send a coupon weekly or offer the same special over and over, your customers will not see any value in the email or the need to act immediately.

You will want to carefully plan the landing pages that your sales and promotional campaigns link to. If you send everyone to your home page and require them to look for the product you featured in your email, you will most likely lose them. The landing page should contain the exact information they were expecting and also have the same look and feel of the email that sent them there. Your customers should be able to take action with as few clicks as possible.

If you carefully add email into your marketing mix, engage your clients through a well-crafted newsletter, and make it easy for them to purchase through your emails, you will begin to reap the benfits of a well-executed email marketing program.

Last week, I blogged about how we set up our new subscription page on www.blueskyfactory.com.  This week, I’d like to go over how we set up our new welcome email.  Everything we did was set up using our Publicaster application, so Publicaster users should have no trouble mimicking what we did.

First, the nitty-gritty about how we set up this form and mailing list.  You’ll notice on our subscription page, we offer four different types of email publications - Factory Direct (our monthly e-newsletter), Blue Sky Factory Webinars, 52 Email Marketing Tips in 52 Weeks, and News & Press Releases.  The Publicaster opt-in form, however, only allows you to select one mailing list to have opt-ins added to.  To work around this, we created a master subscription list in our Publicaster account that this form was tied to.  We then set up each of the four publication types as database fields in our mailing list.  Anyone that checks off to subscribe to a particular publication on the form is given a value of “Yes” for that particular field in the master mailing list.

Since all the subscribers are in one master list and are categorized by a field within the mailing list, we’ll need to use a segmentation to launch an email campaign.  If, for example, we want to send an issue of Factory Direct, we’ll set up a segmentation that Includes Subscribers from the master subscription list and has the segmentation condition of “FactoryDirect” “Is Equal To” “Yes”.  This will pull all people from the master subscription list that checked off the box on the opt-in form to subscribe to Factory Direct.

Now, let’s talk about the welcome email.  We set up the opt-in form as a Notified Single Opt-in, which means all subscribers are sent an automatic welcome email.  It is a best practice to acknowledge and welcome your new subscribers within minutes of their subscription.  Your welcome email should be fairly simple.  It should (1) welcome your subscriber to your mailing list, (2) remind them again of the benefits of subscription, (3) outline the type(s) of emails they will receive and the frequency of each, (4) give them the option to change their subscription or opt-out completely, and finally (5) ask them to whitelist your email address to ensure proper delivery.  Check out our new welcome email here.  You’ll notice that all five of these points are covered.

Since we have four publication types, you’ll see that each is listed, along with a description of content and frequency.  Right under the description is a line that tells the recipient if they are currently subscribed to that publication or not.  Since the email types were all set up as database fields in the mailing list, this was really easy to do using a Publicaster snippet code.  As an example, in our Publicaster email, we included a line that read:

Subscribed? [~FactoryDirect~]

If the recipient was subscribed to the Factory Direct email, this would have read:

Subscribed? Yes

So that this line wasn’t left blank, we set up a default value so that it would read “No” if the recipient was not subscribed.  Right under the email descriptions, the recipient is invited to manage their account by visiting the subscriber preferences page.

And there you have it!  Now you have the tools to revamp your subscription process - all the way from your opt-in form and subscription page to the welcome email.  Please feel free to contact us or comment below if you have any feedback or questions.  If you are a current Publicaster user, please feel free to contact your Account Manager directly if you have any questions about setting up your own opt-in form or welcome email. 

Capturing customer intent can prove to be a difficult task if you do not use the right approach. I recently attended a webinar on this topic, hosted by Blue Sky Factory clients, Chris Brogan and John Stone of CrossTech Media and CrossTech Partners. Many of you may know Chris Brogan from his excellent blog, where he shares his insights as a social media expert. Chris joined John and covered how to approach this issue in “Capturing Customer Intent: Digital and Face to Face Channels.”

The purpose of the webinar was to explain how to capture customer intent from a company’s standpoint. These stages are attract, engage, transact, fulfill, support, and retain. All of the stages are equally important and Chris and John stressed the importance of communication in each stage. The key points I took away were:

• Consider content marketing and relationship marketing strategies right away.
• Build an audience intelligence solution.
• Listen across your touch points and across the web.
• Integrate your digital marketing and live event channels.

They also touched on social networking, blogging, and building strong relationships. It’s not easy to find a connected process to deal with all of these stages, but if you can get it right you have the opportunity to improve customer retention, create new opportunities, enhance service, and lower your costs.

 To view the recorded version of this webinar,  click here.

The industry sure has been atwitter lately with talk of the subscriber experience.  I recently blogged about one company that had impressed me with their subscription process.  Today, I’d like to start a two-part blog series about how you can improve your own process.  We’ll start with your opt-in page, and will continue with your welcome email next week.

Not to toot our own horn, but for both subjects, I’m going to refer to Blue Sky Factory’s new process.  We’ve just redesigned our website, and with that came an improved subscription process.  The opt-in form and welcome email were both set up through Publicaster, so Publicaster users will be able to mimic our process very easily.  You can check out our new subscription form here.  Notice that we’ve kept it simple, only requiring First Name, Last Name and Email.  Also, we’ve given four different email types in the subscription offerings, which cover the various content options available to subscribers.

To give your own opt-in page a revamp, you’ll first need to create a new opt-in form.  We’ve created a “how to” document for the Publicaster opt-in form builder.  This feature is found under the Account Manager section in Publicaster and is a simple three-step process.  The “how to” document will lead you through these three steps.  Once complete, Publicaster will give you HTML code for your new opt-in form, which you can simply paste onto your subscription page within your website.  Then, anyone that subscribes to your emails via this form will be automatically added to your specified mailing list within your Publicaster account.  How easy is that?!?  If you need help with the opt-in form builder, email us.

While integral, the form itself is just one part of the subscription page.  You’ll also need to include information about your emails and process on this page and throughout your site.  Here’s a list of best practices you should follow when creating your new subscription page:

• Put the form or a link to the form on every page of your website for maximum email capture.  Notice we have a link to our subscription page in the upper right-hand corner of every page throughout our website.

• Keep the form short and sweet.  Only ask for the information that you will really use in your email program.  Think of what information you might use later down the line to segment with.  Some choose to only ask for basics up front (email, first name, last name, zip), and then follow up later with an email asking for more information.  You can test different form lengths, but general opinion is to keep the initial form short and easy so you don’t get drop-offs.

• On the opt-in page, tell the subscriber what they can expect from your emails.  Include a content summary, promises of special offers and the frequency they can expect.  Setting expectations upfront and sticking to those will help keep your subscribers happy.  Also tell them the benefits of signing up for the email program … think “What’s in it for me (the subscriber)?”  You may also want to include a screenshot of a sample email so subscribers will know what to expect.  Check out the “What am I signing up for?” section to the left of our subscription form.  Subscribers can click on any of the four email screenshots to get an overview of the email content and frequency.

• When building the opt-in form in Publicaster, be sure to choose the Email Validation check so that the subscriber must enter an email address in the name@domain.com format.  This will prevent people from making a mistake or entering nonsense just to gain access to a sweepstakes, free whitepaper, etc.

• Set up your opt-in form to be a Notified opt-in form, whereby the subscriber will receive an automatic welcome email.  (This can also be set up through a Publicaster auto-response campaign, which is what we did.  More on this next week.)  This will also help to validate the email address, and will make your subscribers feel “welcomed” by your company.  In the welcome email, give them instructions on whitelisting your email address.  Feel free to link to our how-to whitelist page that we created for our clients to use. 

This should get you started on building your new opt-in form.  As always, feel free to contact us if you need help with anything.  Next week, we’ll go over the welcome email, and I’ll dive into the specifics of how we set ours up.  Check out the image to the right for a preview of our new welcome email.

 The results are in from our Mobile Device Survey:
* 70% of you use a mobile device to view emails
* 41% of you receive HTML emails with images on these devices?
* 64% of you save emails on your mobile device to view later on your PC
* 62% of you use the view in browser link on your mobile device

Social Media’s growth and influence on the web continues to explode. We’re interested to see what kind of tools you use! Click here to share your thoughts, and look our for the results in the near future.

Most email marketers agree that their subscribers can sometimes be impulsive and unpredictable. Often at times they ignore messages or respond at large to a particular email. A lot of us don’t have a clear cut understanding of why one subscriber may take action differently than another subscriber.

 Let’s face it: the interest of your subscribers are d ifferent. If you don’t recoginize the differences you may be in danger of losing the value of your message and the attention of your subscribers. To read tips on giving your subscribers, click here.

 Don’t miss another issue of Factory Direct, our monthly newsletter. Click here to sign up.

Have you ever wondered why people are opting out of your emails? Don’t be afraid to ask! You could learn some very valuable information from sending a simple survey to your unsubscribers.

This information could help you improve your email program and retain more subscribers in the future. To learn how to stop beating yourself up about your opt-out rate and use the unsubscribers as a learning tool, read our latest article from our monthly newsletter, Factory Direct.

Proceed with caution. Having worked with databases since 1990, I know the risks and the rewards associated with using an append file. Should you want to institute this approach to increase your email list, make sure to follow some simple but extremely valuable guidelines.

Keep the append list separate from your house list until it is thoroughly cleansed and tested. Research the vendor you will use to do the append for you to find out how do they obtain their data, how do they perform a match, how often they update their files, and how do they handle bounces, unsubscribes, and complaints. Also, make sure you only send active customers to the vendor for append purposes.

Spencer Kollas has written a very extensive and informative article on this subject, Use Caution When Adding to Your List. In addition to list appends he also details the risks and rewards of email list rental.

Keep in mind the quality of your list is very important to your brand. In trying to increase the quantity of your list you can lose quality if you are not careful.

Summertime is made for vacations. Whether you go for spontaneous weekend jaunts or carefully planned extended stays, vacation is always something to look forward to. Travel and tourism destination emails are valuable tools to help prospective visitors gather information about your destination. With the economy on a downturn you want to make sure your email is noticed. An AOL/Zogby Travel Survey showed that 57% of Americans will be spending less on vacation in 2008 than they did in 2007. So how are you going to lure these prospective visitors to come and vacation with you?

When promoting a travel destination you want to make sure you give your contacts time to prepare for upcoming events. These folks have signed up to receive information from you so make it count. For recipients that are planning extended vacations you have a wider window of opportunity to send relevant content. If you have not done so yet, try segmenting your list by people that travel with children versus people that do not. For instance, the season opener of a theme park might be targeted to people that travel with children. Not to say we don’t all love to ride a roller coaster when given a chance but individuals with children would be more apt to interact with that announcement than others.

One of the easiest groups of travelers to target are the weekend travelers that decide at the last minute to get out of town. If you have an event or special happening on a weekend and you want to promote that event quickly, send an email out around Wednesday before the weekend event. Also, make sure to segment and target to contacts based on geography. Only target the email to folks that are within easy driving distance of your destination. Not only does this give the recipient time to make plans to attend said event, they will be able to get there in a short amount of time.

Even though there is no tried and true day and time to send an email you must make sure if you are promoting a particular event that the recipient receives the email in plenty of time before the event to make plans to attend. I recently received an email on Sunday June 15th, Father’s Day. The offering was a listing of restaurants that were promoting Father’s Day dinner specials. Seeing as how I rarely check email on the weekend I did not receive the offer till the Monday after Father’s Day. Poor planning, as I was obviously not going to be able to act upon the offer.

Be sure to include a very visible link to a calendar of events on all your emails. If your reader is not able to plan a visit that weekend or within the near future, a link to the upcoming events will allow them to peruse what is happening and make plans accordingly.

Have a safe and fun summer.

This week we held the third in our ongoing webinar series, Grow Your Subscriber Database.  We covered a variety of topics relating to getting new subscribers and keeping them happy, such as:

• Getting people to your site
• Getting the opt-in
• Following up with a welcome email
• Giving them options to change their preferences
• Spreading the love with viral marketing

To check out the presentation, click here.  You can also click here to view the notes.

If you didn’t make it to this session, we hope to see you next time!