Set expectations for new subscribers

A common way to build your email address list is to provide a free resource such as an eBook or PDF in return for contact information from the reader.  While this is a good way to be mutually beneficial to the reader and the company, often the reader is providing their information only for the free resource and does not want to receive the emails.  This leads to sending to an unengaged recipient or worst, sending to a bad email address.
Another way to build your email address list is to pre-check the “subscribe to the mailing list” when a user creates an account on your site.  The same problem with the free resource offer, the user may not want the emails.
You can combat both of these types of unengaged users by providing them with an example of what they will be receiving from you via email.  Displaying the most recent mailing or providing them with how often you send out monthly will not only help you collect accurate information but also helps set the expectations of what the recipient will be receiving. Examples of sending expectations would be to inform the recipient that you only send once a month but then allow them to select an onboarding program that may send daily for 10 days.
Email.Simple-6Providing the end user with information about your mailings encourages them to provide accurate information and helps build your mailing list with recipients who want to engage with your emails. If you offer a free resource such as a whitepaper or ebook behind a signup form, send the download link within the email so that it encourages readers to provide accurate information.  By sending the email with a link the recipient clicks, it shows ISPs that this mail is wanted and helps boost your sending reputation.
 
 

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Content marketing

beddingpic There are a lot of mailing lists I’m on simply because I can’t be bothered to unsubscribe. Every week or every few days mail shows up in my inbox. I may look at the subject line, I may even open the message. But most of it is not interesting. It’s yet another sale at Sur La Table. It’s another promo from Macheist. Virgin America wants me to book a flight. All of these messages are useful and all, particularly if I’m trying to book a flight or looking to replace the dish I broke last week. But many of these companies send content that’s so close to the same, it’s not worth a whole lot of my attention.
I don’t think I’m that unusual in this respect. People are used to getting offers and so they know they can sit back and wait until they’re ready to shop and they’re ready to buy.
This is why content marketing can be such a win. It’s different, it’s new. It’s worth my time to dig into the email and read it. We recently bought some sheets from a company and they added me to their mailing list. Every week now, I get an email with lovely pictures of relaxing bedrooms and articles on how best to sleep and wash my sheets and replace my pillow cases.
From a consumer perspective, it makes me want to have a showroom bedroom with lots of comfy linens. From a marketing perspective I appreciate the hard work and dedication that goes into generating both the lovely pictures and the useful content. But I wonder if the effort put into the content generation provides a decent return on investment.
 

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Salesforce State of Marketing Report

Salesforce published their State of Marketing report last week. The report was compiled after receiving 5,000 responses to their questionnaire. Reading the report it is clear, email is critical to businesses. 73% of marketers believe email marketing is core to their business, 71% felt mobile marketing was core, and 66% of social media marketing was core to their business.
Other interesting figures are, 47% reported that the click-through rate as the most important email marketing metric and 23% didn’t know what device emails are read on.
Comparing the 2015 responses to the 2014 survey, email as a primary revenue source increased from 16% to 20%, email as a critical enabler of products and services increased from 42% to 60%, and email as an indirect impact of business performance decreased from 42% to 20%.
It is clear that email as a marketing tool will see increase usage in 2015. The report isn’t just reporting responses, it has several good recommendations such as doing a spring-cleaning of your email list and suggests sending a re-engagement campaign that invites subscribers to update their preference. This would give users the ability to opt-out as they may only have been interested in holiday deals and making it easy to opt-out will help prevent users from reporting the email as spam.

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The best time to send email

This subject comes up over and over again. Many senders are convinced clock_at_sign that there is a best time to send email. Countless research hours have been dedicated to finding that best time to send email. Numerous blog posts discuss what the best time to send email is.
From my perspective, there are better places for senders to spend time than figuring out what the exact right time is.But, senders still ask when the best time to send mail is.
There are a lot of reasons I can come up with as to why there’s no best time to send email. But the really big one is that when you send a mail has no impact on when it gets delivered.  There are multiple steps between hitting the send button and the mail being delivered to the inbox totally outside the control of the individual sender.
Email is designed as “store-and-forward.” This means there are potential delays at multiple steps inside the process.
Sending queues are called queues for a reason. Emails are sent out individually, particularly when an ESP uses VERP as part of its sending. There is actually a time overhead for making a connection to a recipient server and sending the email.
Receivers have queues, too. They can only accept so many incoming connections at a time. They have limited resources to accept all the mail their users want.
Receivers may delay mail between accepting it at the MX and delivering it to the inbox. This isn’t ideal and it’s not usual, but it can happen.
Recipients using IMAP accounts may not check mail regularly. They may only collect mail a few times a day.
These are only a few of the reasons that send time doesn’t necessarily equate with delivery time. Of course, 99% of the time email is mostly instantaneous. The internet is robust enough that a message sent is delivered seconds later. I see it happen all the time, when colleagues and I send email during calls. But, when mail fails, it sometimes fails spectacularly. Back in the dark ages (of the early 90s) I had an email that took almost a year to get to the recipients. Best I can tell, it got stuck somewhere in the depths of a machine in the middle of the university mail system. Eventually that system fell over and someone noticed and rebooted it (maybe it was walled up somewhere?).  The reboot shook my message out of where ever it was stuck.
 

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