We have updated our post from Sept 2011 on New Zealand Smartphone Penetration statistics. Head back to that updated post to see who has what in their back pocket. How many kiwi’s are using smartphones? How much? How often? We’ve got it.  Click here to view all of the mobile stats we found last year and the new ones too.

We’d also like to update the telco market share stats to see who won and who lost in the Christmas-present market, so stay tuned.

You know you’ve done too much email marketing if…

From the  2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report

• you don’t end friendships or love affairs…you “opt-out” of them
• you can’t read any text wider than about 600 pixels
• you can think of 17 different ways to describe something as free without actually using the word “free”
• the shopping list you give your spouse has all the important items squeezed into the top left-hand corner of the piece of paper
• you look for the unsubscribe link in direct mail
• you reject birthday cards that don’t have the postal address of the sender printed on the reverse of the envelope
• your signature on checks includes your job title, address, phone number, fax number and website address
• you delete people from your address book if they fail to return your phone calls three times in a row
• when people accept your dinner invitations, you send out another invitation asking if they’re sure
• the photos in your wedding album don’t have labels…they have alt tags
• you send everyone two Christmas cards…one text-only, the other with images and colors

The team at Jericho hope you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year break,  and we welcome you back to the world of email marketing.

Continuing on from our post last week around personalising your email campaigns, I thought I would expand on this. This week we explore dynamic content as a way to enhance your campaigns, increasing the relevance and personalisation, by tailoring the content to specific recipients using dynamic content.

What is Dynamic content?
It is an element within an email campaign that changes from one subscriber to another depending on the data you have for them in your database.

In other words, it’s the perfect way to customise your email, improve the relevance of your content, and better meet your recipient’s individual needs. And it starts with knowing your recipients’ preferences.

In our Top Tips post we introduced preference centers.  They are a handy but often under utilised tool, that allows your recipients to update their own contact details, quickly and easily. This means you’ll obtain their correct email address, know which of your emails they want to receive, and what their individual preferences are in terms of content, frequency etc.

Once you have your preference centre up and running, and your subscribers’ details are all up to date, you can really start tailoring your campaigns to better suit each individual. So you can make sure its toys for Molly and tools for Ben and not the other way round!

So how do you set this up? What’s involved?

Well, dynamic content essentially comprises of two key parts:

1. Dynamic content blocks
2. Dynamic content rules

The first step is to create the different blocks of content that will swap out within your email. These blocks are called Dynamic Content Blocks. This is where you would create dynamic content block 1, named ‘Tools’, and dynamic content block 2, named ‘Toys’.

Once you have created the different blocks and filled them with juicy content, the next step is to create and manage the rules that will pull the content into your email.

Once you’ve set up these rules, and put the dynamic content links into your email, the best way to test this and see that the right dynamic content is pulling through for the right people is to test. If you’re using the SmartMail PRO platform, we recommend you use the ‘Live Test’ function, which allows you to send a mock live send using your real data, but to yourself, not the recipient, so you can cross check your data against what is pulling through in the email to ensure that Ben is getting tools and not toys.

If you would like to talk more about what dynamic content can do for you, contact us at support@smartmailpro.comfor some expert advice.

Dear {first name} – think before you personalise.

This week we continue on from our ‘Top Tips’ post from last week, and discuss clever personalisation of email campaigns.

If you’ve been subscribing to email marketing campaigns for any length of time you’re probably familiar with personalisation. Done well, it can feel like the sender is reaching out to you and you alone, calling you by name and making you feel special by offering relevant content or offers just for YOU. On the other hand, some personalisation can look like it’s straight out of the spammer’s text book. And that doesn’t make you feel very special at all.

Personalisation isn’t a good or bad thing in itself. But when it gets misused for the sake of an extra open or click, it can have a negative effect on your campaigns. In these instances, it generally becomes less effective over time. And it can allow us to think that we’re creating “personal” emails when really all we are doing is just merging a name into the message.

A truly personal email is one that addresses the subscriber’s needs, desires, fears, preferences and other aspects of their lives, and gives them something tailored to them. Click here to see our earlier posts about preference centres.

Truly personal emails look at things like:

• Which emails an individual subscriber has opened and clicked through from in the past
• Where on your site they visit
• How they originally found you and what inspired them to sign up to your list
• Where they live geographically
• Whether they like weekly digests, monthly updates, or daily emails
• When their birthday is so you can send birthday emails
• Their travel preferences so you can send them relevant updates
• And many more options

A lot of this isn’t typically considered personalisation – it falls more under discussions of segmentation and targeting which leads us into dynamic content (which we’ll discuss next week).  But I think it’s worth considering that relevance and personalisation are somewhat interchangeable when we think about it from the subscriber’s perspective, and not our own. A relevant email is personal, and a truly personal email is relevant.

So does personalisation really work? Have some people gotten too lazy or too cheeky with it? Some people would argue all personalisation is good personalisation, it all drives up open rates. Done well, yes I agree.  But it would need to be tested to see how effective it was for your campaigns and whether it had any effect on open rates. The other side of it is, are we all about open rates? Or do we think it matters more that we connect with the recipient and create engagement, and an email that people enjoy reading? (We do)

And while merge fields are great for pulling through small snippets of information, such as First Name, Account Number and Email Address, Dynamic Content is used for more complex arrangements.

Next week we look at how you can use dynamic content to further enhance personalisation to customize content depending on your recipient’s preferences/interests.

Top TIPS!

Carrying on from last week’s post about the best tips for your Christmas campaigns, we came up with many more top tips we wanted to share so here are our top 5 tips for right now:

1)       When is the best time to send your campaign?

What we often say to clients is that your audience can influence when your send an email, i.e. Whether it is B2B or B2C, Gen Y or Baby Boomers, Mobile or Desktop, people who work in an office or people who work on the road.

If you want to test the best time to send to a particular audience, use the open rates as a guide, and test the same email across different times and dates over a period of time to see if there is a more definitive best time. 

2)       Get personal and let your customers speak for you

Giving your emails a more personal feel so that they grab the recipient by their name (literally) leaves a great impression that can’t be underestimated.

And go further by giving your recipients personalised content. Try incorporating customer voices into your messages, by including peer reviews, testimonials and comments into your emails. Having your customers talk about your products for you instantly humanizes your brand in a way that even the best promotional copy can’t match.

3)       Surveys, Forms and Clickthroughs

Clickthroughs are a great way to find out what content in your emails your recipients like reading more about – obviously the higher the clickthroughs the better. Use clickthrough reports to see what was popular and then tailor content and links accordingly in future email campaigns.

Take it that step further by including forms and surveys in your emails. They are a great way of asking for more information about your subscribers, for example what they are interested in and what they would like to see more of in your campaigns, that way, you know what they want and you can send more relevant emails, which drives up open rates. After all it’s all about engaging your audience, so give them what they want!

4)      Preference Centres

On the subject of finding out more about your subscribers, preference centres are a great way of getting to know your subscribers better by asking specifically what they are interested in. You can also use it to offer them a way to update their contact details and preferences, so you know you have their correct email address, and you know whether they want that weekly digest or just a monthly update.

Have these tips given you food for thought? Send us your own best email marketing tips! You can submit them to us at support@smartmailpro.com. Your tip might even get featured in a future blog post!

To complement our two part email series on preparing for Christmas, we wanted to share our tips for maximising the effectiveness of your Christmas campaign, and how to stand out amongst all the other Christmas mail.

1) The first step is to prepare.
It’s the Christmas season and everyone gets busy, so plan in advance.  Here are our top pointers for preparation.

Think about who your target audience is
WHAT are you offering
WHY you are offering it
HOW often you will email people (Will you set up a fun series of Christmas emails, or send just the one super Christmas email?)

After spending all year building rapport with customers and sending great email campaigns, the last thing you want to do is hurriedly put together a last minute Christmas email. This is where it counts! Send something they’ll remember all of next year and keep them coming back for more.

And speaking of WHO, WHAT, and WHY, keep in mind the relevancy of the campaign to the recipients. Those Christmas garden galoshes may be superb, but if you are sending them to someone who would rather hear about your garden cricket set, you have lost a major opportunity to both appeal to your customers and sell them something.

And with everyone struggling to be heard at Christmas, relevancy is more important than ever! Mail that is tailored to your recipients and personalised will grab their attention over the emails that are bland and generic. So think about how you can tailor your Christmas campaigns to your recipients.

2) The first thing someone sees before opening your beautiful email is your subject line.
If you have done all that planning, then people don’t open your email because of the subject line, then it doesn’t matter how great your email is. So getting your subject line right is important. Make sure it is intriguing, catchy and stands out amongst the rest. Some key things to think about are whether or not personalization is relevant or suitable. Also you don’t want your email getting picked up by spam filters, so avoid using words like “sale” and “free” too much.

3) Once you have got into their inbox….
A creative, well designed email with a Christmas theme that is interactive and fun is great for this time of year.  Also, sending your clients an email to thank them for their loyalty over the past year is a great way to encourage loyalty in the coming year and make your clients feel appreciated. So make it a goal of yours this year to have the smartest and most memorable Christmas message of all!

If you would like any ideas, our creative team has loads! Get in touch with us now  

Top Tip:
Your subscribers are about to be inundated with communications from various businesses and chances are they‘ll unsubscribe from a few of them. So why not get to know them a little better, and ask your subscribers to update their preferences with you before they get bombarded. Then you can use this information to provide them with more relevant communications during the Christmas onslaught. The more relevant your communication is, the more likely they are to be engaged and the less likely they are to hit that unsubscribe link.

Today we have received a lovely email from Anytime Fitness with a great deal. However we couldn’t really identify said deal from their email…

 Some of our staff go to this gym and they are great, and their staff are lovely. However from the email we received from them today, we identified a few things they could do to improve on their email campaigns.

1) Font color. Their header font is white and their footer font is black. And the blue link in the footer is almost impossible to read. It is always important to ensure that you stay with your brand look and feel, and stick to consistent design, font colors, etc.

2) Font size. This font is OK but any larger and can have the tendency to look like spam. Be aware that the optimal font size is 10 or 12 (This is what we stick to when designing emails) and if it is any bigger it usually gets picked up by spam filters.

3) Watch your use of jargon. Note the sentence “You are able to use your access fob…” Now I have spoken to someone who attends the gym and even they don’t know what the fob is. Always watch your use of jargon.

4) Template. You may have seen some of the stunning templates we get to put together for clients at Jericho. They are structured, have a set width, includes images that catch the eye, they are structured into tables that help certain elements stand out and makes everything easy to read. More importantly, spammers don’t tend to use templates, instead choosing to use line after line of plain text. So this only serves to highlight how this email could have been improved by a template.

5) Centre Aligning. I think this came and went with comic sans.  It is very difficult for people to read so be sure to keep things left aligned.

6) Lack of prominent offer or call to action. We here at the office are struggling to identify what the offer actually is and where to find it in the email. And what do we do now? Where is our clear and simple call to action? One of the most important things to include in your email is information that answers these questions – who is this from, what is it for, what’s in it for me, and what do I do now?

7) Line height. It doesn’t help that the font is large and centre aligned, however we suggest increasing the line height to improve readability.

Contrast. The contrast of black on white generally is quite hard on the eyes – we suggest using a softer colored font, or a subtly colored background.

9) The main thing we noticed was what initially appeared to be Name and contact number fields that hadn’t been filled out correctly. The words in capitals do say ‘your free membership links’ so I was expecting to see links to something that gave me free memberships.  So I thought this was a matter of them not having checked the email correctly before sending. However after looking at the email 10 more times I see that it is actually where I need to input the names of 6 of my friends and then reply to the them with that information… Not many people look through emails more than once, so if they were like me they will miss this entirely. I will now reiterate the importance of having a clear call to action as mentioned in point 6.

10) I will give them this - they had a catchy subject line that was clever and worked well, and the email did pass all the tests on litmus that we ran it through. Litmus is the service that tests your email campaign against all major spam filters and will tell you if it will pass or fail the filters requirements, and gives you grades accordingly. Any number of things can influence this such as having all images or all text, or words such as ‘deal’ free’ sale’ and ‘$’.

So you can see how the little things can make such a big difference. We hope you use this as an opportunity to review your own campaigns and look out for the little things you could do to enhance your emails.

The “welcome” email may be the most important email you send. Why?

Because for many of your subscribers, it’s their first email experience with your brand, and for some it might even be their first interaction with your company. 

We all know first impressions count, so this is your best chance to create a good  first impression with your new subscriber. So don’t treat it like a simple confirmation email and fire back something bland and generic. And the worst thing you can do is send no welcome email at all.

If you don’t send one, it means you have lost an opportunity to engage with a potential customer,  and lost an opportunity to send a really great personalized introduction into your company. Beyond the welcome email, you don’t know what a new subscriber’s first email experience with your brand will be. It could be a notification, or a price hike. And what sort of first impression is that.

Here is how not to do it – the image below shows that more than 20% of the UK’s top retailers send no emails in the first 30 days – that is no way to win over new subscribers!

Instead, create a welcome email, or even a series, that gets new subscribers on board and engaged. This enhances the perception of your brand and the value of your email program. It’s also the best time to inform subscribers of what they can do on your website, who to contact for queries, allow them to update their preferences and details via your preference centre, and you can provides immediate value through content such as free white papers or loyalty incentives.

I have an example of one such welcome email that came into my inbox the other day. I was scouting around Marketing Prof’s website and signed up to their regular emails. Within moments of signing up, I had a welcome email in my inbox. It was well laid out, professional looking, reflected their brand, was welcoming, had informative content, and best of all had a list of quick links to more information and valuable resources, and it had their contact details at the bottom.

I couldn’t have asked for more – so below is a screenshot of the email just for you:

Your welcome email really is the best opportunity to engage subscribers, and there is also research that suggests welcome emails generate the best open rates – when done well – and can leave your subscribers and new customers with a lasting good impression of your company or brand, and sets the stage for any future email communications.

 Here are 4 ways that you may waste the golden opportunity presented by sending a welcome email:

1. Not sending a welcome email message at all
2. Taking longer than 24 hours to send your welcome email message
3. Not setting expectations for future email messages
4. Not having a call to action in your email message

Now, here are 5 ways you can immediately enhance your welcome email:

1. Set the stage for future email communication
2. Have a call to action in your welcome email
3. Have links to useful content, your webpage, etc.
4. Provide added value such as video’s or white papers
5. A welcoming and professional email that reflects your brand or company

So go and give your welcome email (Or the whole series) some love. Compare your email to the best practices mentioned above and look for ways to improve the way you communicate your brand, company and your value to subscribers.

For more on email Welcomes – see our most popular post of all time – 8 Outstanding welcome email examples

Generally, emails that fall into the spam category will contain either all text or all images. If it is the latter, it’s because they try and hide their spammy copy in images so it doesn’t get picked up by spam filters.

Click here to read our PDF that gives you a list of the top spammy words to stay away from…

Here at Jericho we are all about best practices, deliverability and improving your open rates. So a good balance of images to text is the way to go. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to this, however an 80:20 ratio is always best. That means 80% of your email should be copy, and 20% images.

Click here to read the SEO Addendum on Text To Image Ratio. It very simply outlines a good text to image ratio.

The next thing to tackle once you have a good ratio of text to images, it to make sure you include alt text against all of the images in your email so that those people that don’t see the images by default can still read what the images are and get an idea of what your email is about. If your alt text is good this often gets the recipient to download the images just so they can see what you are talking about.

One main reason that we always include alt text is because so many email clients are blocking images by default now more than ever. A 2009 report from Merkle states that only 48% of email recipients see images automatically. This means that if an email campaign relies heavily on images, it’s probably not being read by over half of its intended recipients.

Campaign Moniter has a great post about image blocking in email clients -  click here to read their post.

What this all means is that you have to be prepared for the images in your campaigns to be blocked automatically when recipients receive your email. Here are some key points to prepare your email campaign against image blocking:

1. Begin an email with HTML text or logical ALT text. We can determine what a recipient sees in the preview pane or message window. This means we can optimise what they see when they are quickly scanning through their emails, and make sure they know what your email is about, and are intrigued enough to download the images and or open the email.
2. Use ALT text. This seems so obvious to us, and it is best practice to include alt text against all of the images in your campaign, however there are many emails that still go out without ALT text.
3. Use captions for contextually-important images. In lieu of proper support for ALT text across the board, we can add captions to images which are vitally important to the content of an email.

As a closing note, image blocking is something that we all have to take into consideration, especially now when so many email clients do not display images by default, it’s likely that they will either not display in most preview panes, or simply get junked/deleted.

The good news is that there are both practical and highly creative approaches you can take to this issue, most of which are easy to implement. If you have a favorite technique for ensuring your message gets displayed in any inbox, we’d love to hear it.

In our previous post, we looked at attrition rates and we mentioned how the average attrition rate is about 15% per year. In other studies we have read, they say that B2B data decays faster than consumer data, at 30% a year compared with 7% with B2C. Any way you look at it, it is a lot.

Attrition will erode your database, if you let your database degrade that much you are wasting time and effort marketing to irrelevant, out of date contacts. Cleansing your data before you deploy a campaign also ensures you get lower bounceback rates, and higher open rates. So this is why we place such a high value on data cleansing at Jericho – and needless to say everyone else we know does as well.

Data cleansing, if you are not already familiar with it, is defined as:
“The process of correcting records, and if need be, eliminating inaccurate records from your data”

It is also described as:
“The purpose of data cleansing is to detect the incorrect, irrelevant or incomplete parts of the data and either modify or delete it to ensure that a given set of data is accurate and consistent with other sets in the system.”

Which basically means going through your data to ensure it is as accurate and up to date as possible.
Data cleansing can be done either manually (Where possible in simple cases, such as manually cleansing your lists before you send them to Jericho to deploy your email campaigns) or automatically (In complex operations).

When undertaking manual data cleansing, you want to review all the data thoroughly. Here is a list of key things you need to look for:

• Accuracy – check all typos, spelling errors and things like ‘.com.co’ and missing or incorrect names.
• Integrity – check the data is correct and up to date
• Relevancy – make sure if you are sending an email out about gardening, that you don’t email your car club database or get them mixed up.
• Format – make sure data such as number sequences is the correct format, for example, customer numbers or phone numbers, as sometimes they lose digits if not in the right format in excel.

If you are not already convinced of its importance, data cleansing is very important to your attrition rates, your bounceback rates, and your open rates. Why? Well we covered off attrition in our last post (Link to post) and if your data isn’t up to date or incorrect you may get a lot of bouncebacks, and if the contacts in your data aren’t relevant to your campaign, you may get low open rates if the email doesn’t interest your recipients.

A well-maintained and clean database will ensure reduced attrition rates, eliminate old, incorrect or irrelevant data, and will allow you to focus on emailingpeople that actually want to receive your email to their inbox.

Cleansing your database should be something that you get into a routine of doing regularly. A good time to do it is before each campaign to make sure you are emailing out to a clean database, and after each campaign, by using your email reports to clean out bouncebacks.

Fortunately those who work with us are starting to recognise the benefits of data cleansing and are working closely with us to get their database up to scratch, but there are still far too many companies sending out fantastic email campaigns that are losing opportunities or are lowering the effectiveness of their campaigns because of something as simple as bad data.

Have you cleaned your data lately?