I have a lot to say about what to do in your email marketing campaigns – tips, best practices, that kind of thing - but I thought it might be a good idea to share with you some of the biggest mistakes I find our clients making in their campaigns.

1.    Neglecting to manage your mailing list

Ensuring that your mailing list is always up to date is vital for a healthy campaign.  Sending to outdated email addresses waves a red flag at spam filters, so it’s important to make sure that you regularly remind your subscribers to update their profile.

It’s surprising how many email marketers simply don’t delete unsubscribes from their mailing list!  Not only is that illegal, but it disrespects the subscriber’s request.  Why not stay on good footing with those unsubscribers?  There’s always a chance that they might subscribe again at a later date.  Perhaps they signed up for your real estate emails because they were in the market – then they found the perfect nest through you and unsubscribed as they no longer need to receive your emails.  That doesn’t mean they won’t be moving again in a few years…  Make use of our automated mailing list management tools to ensure that unsubscribes are removed from your mailing list and spam complaints are added to your block list.

2.     Not sending targeted, relevant emails

As I pointed out last week, relevancy is one of the make-or-break elements of your campaign.  If your content isnt’ relevant to your subscribers, they won’t read your emails, won’t click on your links and will, eventually, unsubscribe.  According to this chart by Emarketer, 55% of email recipients said their reason for not opening marketing emails was because the content didn’t interest them.  (The survey is about how subscribers respond better to targeted emails, so it’s worth your while to have a look.)

Targeted sends mean the content is more relevant to the person receiving the email, making it much more likely that they’ll follow your call to action – whether it’s clicking through to your site or donating to your cause.  How to target your list?  Segmentation and automated responses (TriggerMail).  To find out how, read this article recently posted on our US blog on how one company increased their email generated revenue by 322%, simply through segmenting their mailing list, and this one on how you can implement TriggerMail to target your sends.

3.    Overlooking the importance of testing

Subscribers are a whimsical bunch; their preferences and topical interests are constantly changing.  Your email campaign needs to evolve with them, or you’ll risk becoming irrelevant (I won’t bore you by repeating myself – see point 1!).  Using our A/B split testing tool gives you the ability to constantly test how variations of different campaigns perform against each other.  Test with a clear objective in mind:  If you want to see how recipients respond to longer or shorter subject lines, or a subject line that contains your brand name against one that doesn’t, test it.  You can test longer versus shorter newsletters, one that contains more or fewer  images, or even test different placements for your logo. 

Testing ensures that you send out only the most effective newsletters with every send.

4.     Not considering timing

Some days are proven to yield higher open and click-through rates than others.  There’s no point in sending out a newsletter late on a Friday afternoon when most of your subscribers have already knocked off for the weekend.  Midweek (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) are generally considered the best sending times, but this might differ depending on your business.  I’ve given more tips on send times a previous article, but the most important thing to keep in mind (as always) is the subscriber.  What time best suits them?  When will they be most likely to sit back with a cup of coffee and read your email – and when are they likely to be most responsive?  If you’re trying to get them to make a purchase, why are you sending a week before pay day?

5.    Disregarding social media

I’ve written a lot this year about the rise of social media – and you’ve probably noticed the social versus email debate.  The general consensus is that social media, when implemented properly, can complement your email marketing very well.  Email is more personal, but social has the ability to expand your audience drastically.  It’s time to make use of this quality to grow your email marketing reach.  Add social widgets and forward to a friend links to your footer and make use of our new social share tool which allows you to share your newsletter with your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter.

Some of these may seem obvious or clichéd, but unfortunately that’s because these mistakes happen.  I suspect it’s because often clients think that these measures are difficult to implement, or that it doesn’t apply to them.  GraphicMail offers you the tools you need to avoid these mistakes at no extra charge.  They’re part of the service we provide and without fail they’re easy to use. 

Remember when I introduced you to our new social share feature?  It’s a tool that enables you to publish your email newsletters on Twitter.

Why would I want to do that?

Through social media you have access to a whole new audience of potential clients, plus there’s the benefit that you’re likely to reach people who are actually interested in your product.  Think about it:  Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogging – these have become daily networking activities for most of us.
Social media is the way I tell my friends what I “like” and if one of them recommends I follow a particular topic or person, I take them at their word.  After all, who would know my interests better than my social contacts? They’re bombarded with my status updates every day!  So, if someone recommends I follow your company on Twitter, I probably will.

At the end of the day though, social media speaks to the masses – email engages customers on a more personal level.  So, our social share tool makes it easy for you to integrate these two marketing channels! 
When you send out your email newsletter, we give you the option to automatically post a tweet from you GraphicMail account that contains a link to your full newsletter.  That way, all your Twitter followers can also stay in touch with your latest news. 

Not only that, but you can further increase your online exposure by adding social widgets to your email footers, so your subscribers can also share your newsletter with their contacts through their own social network profiles. 

Still a little unclear on how all of this works?  Well, just to make life a little easier, we’ve added a video on social share to our YouTube channel!  It shows you how to set up social share for your newsletter and add social widgets to your email footer - and you get to see both features in action.  Happy viewing!

Remember the blog article I posted about a week ago on the power of social media?  Well, if you’ve taken notice of how rapidly social media marketing has become a focus point in the online marketing world I’m assuming you’ve also wondered: “But if I can accomplish all this with just Facebook and Twitter, do I still need email marketing?”

Earlier this week, eMarketer reported that social media usage is on the rise, which explains the appeal of social marketing:  The new market potential it presents.  Yet a mere two weeks ago Marketing Sherpa’s weekly chart indicated that marketers still believe email marketing to be as strong as ever.  So…which one is more effective then???

It’s a matter of confusion for some, but I came across this case study on MarketingVox that perfectly illustrates the different effects of email and social media marketing:

Email marketing can convert double the number of sales that social media can.

At the end of the day, as much as you benefit from marketing a healthy brand and maintaining a high visibility and recognition across all channels, what you’re really after is converting that presence and those consumer relationships into sales.  Because that’s where the money is.

How did they find this?

Mary Spio is a partner in Gen2Media, an agency that works some big names in the music industry like John Mayer and the Black Eyed Peas.  She took a look at two of their music artists (in the study they refer to them as A and B, so I’ll stick to that) and compared their different marketing approaches and the effects on their individual sales.

A, a Latin artist, managed to get 20 millionviews on the social network YouTube, but showed little interest in pursuing an email marketing campaign.  Artist B, however, implemented an email campaign to be in direct contact with fans, gathered a list of 2 million subscribers and launched a personalized weekend-long email campaign in which he offered his subscribers exclusive tracks through iTunes.  In those two days the email campaign raised $ 700,000.

Social media, when managed properly, is a great tool to grow an audience of potential and existing customers for your brand, but it is a mass communication tool.  Now I know email is also a mass communication tool, but it’s more personal – with email, you take the communication to an individual follower, addressing them by name and through their inbox.  As Spio stated: “Emails can be close and personal as you individually address your customers versus posts that are impersonal and don’t offer that one-to-one experience. Conversions for social media posts are much lower.”

The winning strategy?  A firm believer in having my cake and eating it too, I opt for the best of both worlds.  The trick is to know the strengths and weaknesses of each tool and use them to complement each other.

As this case study indicates, broadening your reach through social media is fantastic, but remember that consumers value being treated as individuals – with email marketing you can target subscribers individually, building a loyal customer base.  And, of course, converting those sales.

If you read yesterday’s blog, you’re up to speed with the “social revolution”!  (If you’ve missed the hype watch this Socialnomics YouTube video to see just how powerful social media has become.)

As the internet’s “word of mouth” social media is a must-have marketing, branding and networking tool.  Being an email marketer, you’re probably aware that email has long been the top performing direct and online marketing channel – now I don’t know about you, but something tells me that combining these two channels (email and social media) should have quite a powerful effect.

So, as promised, we’ve release a brand new way of complementing your email campaigns with your social media presence. 

It’s called social share.

This tool enables you to publish your email newsletter straight to your Twitter account.  The newsletter title with a link to your full newsletter will then automatically appear as a tweet – without you having to log into your account to manually tweet about your newsletter. 
Our developers have even included an added gadget: GMtiny, our very own URL abbreviator.  As Twitter limits you to 140 characters per tweet, GMtiny will automatically shorten the link to your newsletter, cutting down that lengthy, unsightly URL to only a few characters.  (I’m sure you’ve seen bit.ly links in tweets before? It’s basically the same thing.)  Handy, isn’t it?

And this is only the beginning - we’re already working on extending this feature to enable you to publish across more social networks.  Next up, Facebook!  Keep watching this space, I’ll let you know when you can take your social sharing even further.

Enhance your brand presence online, increase your audience and subscribers and boost your sales by engaging more fully with potential clients – all with our new social share tool.

(While you’re at it, don’t forget that GraphicMail is also on both Facebook and Twitter, so let’s befriend and follow.  I always enjoy seeing what our followers get up to!)

Don’t forget:  GraphicMail also offers the tools to insert social widgets in your footer – for which we also provide social widget statistics in your reports.

I’ve used the phrase “social media is the new buzz word for 2010” (or some derivative thereof) countless times recently, but something tells me there are many of you out there who either don’t know what I’m talking about, or simply aren’t convinced - which is why I was so excited to read Chris Moerdyk of Bizcommunity’s article yesterday. 

He reviews Socialnomics, a book by Erik Qualman, and summarises some of the important facts about the development of social media.  Moerdyk lists 41 interesting tidbits from Qualman’s book – and some of these made me think:

If Facebook gets more traffic on a weekly basis than Google in the US and YouTube has become the second largest online search engine, then your customers are more likely to find your product on a social site like Facebook or YouTube than on Google. So what happens if they can’t find your product in their social media searches?

Social media is the online version of what is traditionally referred to as “word of mouth”: Qualman states that “78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, only 14% trust advertisements”. So what happens when their peers aren’t recommending you through word of mouth (social media)?

Social search has become the new online phenomenon: Search engines now give preference to companies based on their social mentions.  (Our Head of Marketing wrote a very interesting article on this for Bizcommunity earlier this week.)  According to Qualman we will, in future, “no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.” So what happens when you don’t have a social media presence?

While I know our US clients can see these effects of social media in their business communities every day, in South Africa we (unfortunately) do not enjoy the same level of connectivity as our US counterparts and therefore also aren’t as exposed to online social content.  That doesn’t mean that the effects of social media aren’t reaching us here, or that the effects of social media won’t continue to snowball in our own business environment.  Many local businesses are already very active on Facebook running profiles, fan pages and groups – and the hype is slowly expanding to Twitter too.

A perfect example:  I hadn’t hear of the book Socialnomics until reading the article on Bizcommunity, but after reading it I found a blog and YouTube videos by the author, promoting his book.  There was so much information, and so much to convince me that the book must contain some interesting facts, that I’m recommending it to our blog followers the very next day. 
And that’s how online word of mouth works.

But what does this have to do with email marketing?

GraphicMail has been rolling out new ways of integrating social media with your email marketing – we want to assist you and your business to be prepared for this next wave of online expansion.  Last year we enabled you to place social widgets in your email footer so your subscribers can share your newsletters through their social network accounts - recently we’ve even added a new social widget reporting tool.  (It allows you to track who shared what, who they shared it with and through which network.)  Finally, we announced the release of our new social share feature in our newsletter two days ago!  I’ll be publishing a blog article tomorrow to explain the features of this exciting new tool, don’t miss it!

Now:  If social media is this powerful, imagine what you can do with the combined powers of email marketing and social media…

We’ve expanded our reporting tools!  You can now get reports for your social widgets.

Huh? You have added social widgets to your email footer, right?  Just in case you missed the call-out when we announced the social widget tool, here’s how it works:  These nifty icons appear in your email footer and link to social networks, enabling your subscribers to share your newsletter with their friends and connections through their own social profile – simply by clicking on the widget.

So what does the social widget report entail?

These reports show you how many of your subscribers clicked on the widgets to share your newsletter, and even who it was that shared it.  See, when subscriber’s choose to share your newsletter in their profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, or any of the other social networks, all their contacts, friends and followers can view it too – meaning your newsletter and brand are being exposed to an entirely new network of contacts!

The reporting tool offers an easy new way of tracking how much exposure your email campaigns are getting through social media, and with the great focus on social media networking and marketing, this is definitely one to jump on board with.  Let us know what you think!

We’ve finally developed a feature that bridges the gap between social media and email marketing. This is the first time the development lab have released a feature that allows your subscribers connect to their social media networks via your email newsletter.

It's simple. All we have done is added an extra field to the customize footer option which allows you to add social widgets at the bottom of your newsletters. When your subscribers read your newsletter, they can share it throughout their social communities opening you up to a world of new clients.  The ever changing landscape of the internet sees a rise in internet users wanting relevant information that is conversational rather than formal. Internet users want recommendations from people "just like them".

To encourage your subscribers to share your newsletters, all you need to do is navigate your way into Advance Mode >> Settings >> Header/Footer Settings.  Click on the Email Footer heading and select "add social media links on all emails". Let your subscribers share your newsletter, and benefit from the exposure to new audiences! Don't forget to start your own social platform - it will do wonders for your brand. It’ll give you an opportunity to announce promotions, specials and inform people of new developments within your company. 

For now, we’ve only added the major social network platforms (Digg, Myspace, delicious, Google share, Twitter and Facebook), but we will be adding more in the future.

Do you Digg it? I do!