12 Tips for Christmas Email Marketing Campaigns

 Christmas is well and truly just around the corner. Take a look at our 12 Christmas email marketing top tips to help you build and send fetching, festive email campaigns.

Analyse

Take the time to view and analyse past email marketing campaigns to see what worked well and what didn’t. Once you have acquired this knowledge you can plan your future festive campaigns to give them the best chance of getting good engagement rates.

Research

Spend a bit of time researching what’s hot and what’s not in your industry and check out the competition to see what they have up their sleeves. Try and incorporate these trends into your email marketing to show that you are also on trend.

Set A Goal

Whether it’s to get 20% more opens or 30 more clicks than last year, it’s good to set a goal as it gives you something to work towards. This way you can also aim towards improving results and statistics which always goes down well!

Plan

The old saying ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’ is something to abide by here. Without having a plan of action for your email marketing it’s bound to not do as well as it could. Take a bit of time to sit down and think about individual emails and overall email campaigns. Look out for key dates and content that can be included to target specific audience members.

Punchy Subject Lines

As potentially the most important part of an email, your subject line needs to be powerful and punchy to encourage the recipient to read on. The best subject lines create excitement, urgency and curiosity. This can be done using personalisation or even emojis! Just be sure to keep them short and snappy.

Engaging Content

Probably one of the most important elements of an email – the content. Create engaging content by including clear images, gifs and easy to ready text.

Mobile Optimised

The festive period is a busy time, people are out and about on the move so you want to be able to target them whenever and wherever they are. Do this by ensuring your emails are optimised for mobile. Up to 75% of emails are opened on mobiles or tablets so it’s crucial that you make them compatible with mobile viewing!

Clear CTA’s

Call to actions are essential, they catch the readers eye and give them direction/instruction. Whether this be ‘BUY NOW’, ‘SEE MORE’ or ‘SHOP’ make sure they are direct enough to encourage recipients to click through to your website.

Test

Before any campaign is sent it’s imperative to carry out the necessary tests and checks. This includes making sure your email looks correct across multiple platforms, any spelling mistakes, images load properly, link errors, plus split and multivariate testing. For peace of mind, it’s always handy to have someone else take a glance as a fresh pair of eyes may notice things you haven’t spotted!

Dynamic Content

Some of your subscribers will be previous customers and you will have details of their last purchases. Use this to your advantage and tailor emails using dynamic content to include products relevant to recipients. This way you will have a much better chance of engaging them and potentially making another purchase.

Automation

Automation is crucial for email marketing these days. It allows you to set up multiple workflows for customer journeys including welcome programmes, nurture programmes, basket abandonment programmes, loyalty scheme programmes and many more!
Find out more about our visual marketing automation system, Maxautomation.

Review

Once an email campaign has been sent don’t just forget about it! Use this time to review and analyse how the campaign did. Without tracking and analysing results how will you know if they have been a success or not? Take the time after each campaign to look at delivery rates, open rates, click through rates and conversion rates.



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24 Days of Christmas – Email Campaign Idea

With the festive season imminently creeping up on us you should have all your Christmas marketing collateral planned. If not we have a handy, and fairly easy, idea that can be created quickly using Maxautomation.

Something that has become quite popular over the years is online advent calendars. These can be used by many industries including retail – offering discounts and gift ideas or others businesses simply offering resources and tips.

Here’s our quick guide to setting up a ‘24 Days of Christmas’ automated email marketing campaign within Maxautomation:

The overall workflow will be made up of emails and delays with a few decisions thrown in there but to begin with we’ll start with a list of subscribers who have signed up to your ‘24 Days’. You should aim to send these subscribers an email welcoming them and thanking them for signing up – this way they are reminded of what they can expect to receive from you over the coming weeks.

The next item to add to the workflow would be a delay. As this is a Christmas advent calendar the first email should be sent on 1st December so, adding a delay until this date will ensure the email is sent on that specific date and at a time of your choice.

This can then be followed by a ‘Day 1’ email and offer. The delays and emails can then be repeated for your whole advent calendar workflow.

Some examples of offers you could be sending within your emails include:

Free delivery

2 for 1 offers

Discount deals

Free gift with purchase of another item

3 for 2 offers

They can also include:

Free resources (download of guides, images, webinar etc.)

Links to useful content

Featured content

Tips and hints

As with many things in life, they are great to begin with but the novelty soon wears off and people become disengaged. A good way to ensure your subscribers are still interested is to add a decision into the workflow after a certain amount of days.

We added ours in after 7 days and asked if the previous email had been opened. If ‘yes’ the user would continue to receive ‘Day 8’ email, if ‘no’ the user would be sent another email asking if they are finding the calendar useful and still wish to receive emails going forward. If they were to click they would then receive the ‘Day 8’ email and continue to receive daily offers. If there was no response they would be added to the ‘end’ of the workflow and would no longer receive emails of this nature going forward.

The workflow can then continue again right the way up until Christmas.

As this is an advent calendar, you should promote that users sign up before the 1st of December. This helps to increase engagement by creating a sense of urgency to sign up. On the first day of the calendar, I would suggest switching the form to sign subscribers up for a new workflow that offers a range of resources not in an advent calendar style.

So there you go, a simple 24 Days of Christmas automated email marketing campaign set up in no time at all! Why not have a go for yourself by signing up for a free trial account of Maxautomation!

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4 Email Marketing Integration Tactics

Email marketing remains one of the key communication tools for business. Eighty-two percent of companies today are leveraging email marketing. The ability to segment lists plus personalize and tailor messages to any part of your audience has wide appeal. But with so many companies leveraging this channel, how can you differentiate your email marketing campaigns? One effective way is to integrate other marketing channels into your email marketing.

Integration can actually help take your email marketing efforts to the next level and provide added usability and connectivity benefits for your customers. These are four key areas to consider as you begin email marketing integration.

Email and Social Media

Leveraging social media platforms within your email marketing can drastically impact the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Emails that include social media sharing buttons have a 158% higher click-through rate than emails sent without them. Most email marketing service providers make it very easy to add social sharing buttons within email campaigns. You can also segment your email lists by social media network to better target specific types of users, offering them a more personalized experience.

You can also use social media to drive email sign-ups. The pin tweet feature of Twitter enables users to leave a Twitter card at the top of a profile, urging people to sign up for an email list. Tactics like this can be effective in growing your email list.

Email and Mobile

Today, 64% of decision-makers read their email on their mobile device. And this number is only going to grow. Integrating your email efforts with mobile optimization is a natural progression. When you craft email marketing campaigns, it's important to test them on different mobile devices. Since many of these devices have different screen sizes, testing compatibility is key.

Email optimization doesn't end with testing for mobile devices. If your email contains links sending customers to landing pages or web pages, you need to ensure that these spages are optimized for mobile. You worked really hard to get them to click through to your landing page; you'd hate to ruin your success by taking them to a non-optimized piece of content.

Email and Search Marketing

Integrating email and search marketing can have a positive effect on your website search engine optimization (SEO). When you create email marketing campaigns, you can also generate HTML versions of emails and host them on your domain. Inside most emails, there will be header text that reads "not viewing properly, view email in web browser." This will take you to the HTML version of the email. Since you're creating a webpage with the email content, your domain will become more relevant to Google for the search terms associated inside of the email text. Doing this allows for an extra boost in usability for your customers plus it can help your site's SEO.

Email and Marketing Analytics

Tracking your marketing initiatives is as important as implementing them. Only 22% of mid-sized companies use analytics to manage their marketing campaigns. Without analytics, you can't gather any data to decide if the campaign was a success or failure.

Your email marketing platform should provide you with specific data around your email list. Items like open and click-through rates should be studied and used to enhance the content and how you communicate it.

Another easy way to track success is by implementing Google Analytics into your email campaigns. You can accomplish this by creating unique URLs for your landing page using Google's URL builder. These will show up in Google Analytics and allow you to easily track visitors and conversions. With this type of tracking, you can also A/B test your email marketing campaigns to understand what type of messaging, imagery, and content your users like best.

Integration of email marketing initiatives with other marketing channels will create a more streamlined and pleasing customer experience, plus enabling you to consistently build a unique marketing experience for your customers.

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The Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing in 4 Easy Steps

Email marketing. If you’re here reading this blog post, you know it’s important.

But there’s probably one other thing that’s true if you’re here reading this blog post. You’re not quite sure how to make email marketing truly work for your company. With so many services offered and opinions shared on how to get started and build a sustainable and successful email marketing plan, how do you even know where to start?

That’s where we come in! Not only does Sendlane offer a full-suite package to get your email marketing on track, we’re also here to help you understand how to make it a big hit for your office, your audience, and your overall sales success.

Read on for the ultimate beginner’s guide to make you an email marketing master!

Phase 1: Figure Out Your Goals

The first step to any new initiative is to figure out what you actually want to accomplish.

How will you know if your email marketing is successful if you don’t have a goal to test it against?!
And while it can be tempting to set up a tool like Sendlane and get rolling immediately, it will be even more beneficial to take a few minutes and figure out what you really want to achieve – that will dictate everything else.

The best way to establish the right goals for email marketing is to match them up with your company’s overall goals.

Have a set quarterly sales goal? Want to see more attendees at your annual event? Looking to widen your sales funnel and gather more leads?

Take a look at Buzzfeed. The news and entertainment website is taking the internet by storm, in large part thanks to their email marketing efforts. Buzzfeed makes almost all their money through selling advertisement spots on their website, so of course their company goals are centered around increasing that traffic.

With that in mind, every single one of Buzzfeed’s multiple email newsletters is built around piquing the reader’s interest just enough to get them clicking back to the site.

Phase 2: Create Your Email Distribution List

Now that you know what you want to accomplish with your email marketing, you’re ready to start sending, right?

Wrong.

You can’t send anything if you don’t have a list of contacts to send it to! And with so many ways to build your email list, taking some time to do it the right way will make a huge difference in the overall success of your email marketing.

First and foremost do not (we repeat, DO NOT!) buy an email list.

While it may seem quick and easy to purchase a list of email addresses, it will hurt you way more than it will help. For one thing, you’ll see a huge number of people unsubscribing from the very beginning. Wouldn’t you rather measure who’s saying yes than who’s saying no? Purchasing a list will also reflect poorly on your brand and the credibility of your company.

Oh and did we mention it’s just not cool? Respect people’s privacy and only contact them if they give you permission!

So now that you know what not to do, what DO you do to build your email list organically and with integrity? First off, start with the email addresses you already have.

These can be your current customers, event attendees or even that random stack of business cards you’ve collected over the years. Once you have permission (because, yes, you ALWAYS ask permission!), you’ll have a nice list of people who are already familiar with you and are just waiting to be cultivated through your awesome email marketing campaigns!

But of course you want your email marketing to be an audience builder too, not just a way to keep in touch with people you already know. In order to build a new contact list for email marketing you just need two things:

An incentive and an easy way to subscribe – AKA: Lead Magnets

When it comes to an incentive, a special offer or discount pretty much always does the trick, but compelling content can be just as much of a motivation factor. This can include:

• Free Ebook
• Case study
• Customer story
• Free Checklist
• Free ReportFor a FULL list of lead magnets and how to create them… check out this blog post!

These can be a powerful incentive to encourage readers to hand over their email in exchange for the entire content. Heck, we even take advantage of it on the Sendlane blog! Scroll up and see how we offer a free eBook just for giving us your email address.

As for an easy way to subscribe, think quality and quantity.

Quality in the sense that they should be SUPER easy to complete. Don’t ask for their full name and their birthday and the organization they work for and their spouse’s name and their mother’s maiden name! All you really need to get started is their email address – so don’t ask for anything more!

Quantity in that you should have more than one place for people to sign up. Think headers and footers and even those fancy pop-up windows that are actually pretty easy to create – we love how it looks on Birchbox’s site.

Phase 3: Hit Send on Your First Campaign!

You’ve set your goals, you’ve built your list, NOW it’s time to send out your first email marketing campaign! But what will you send and to whom? And how? Here are three questions to ask when launching your first email marketing initiative:

#1: What kind of email will you send?

The goals you set in Phase 1 should have the biggest impact on what type of email you send. Want to sell more of your product? Focus on product announcements with awesome imagery like Portland-based coffee connoisseur Stumptown Coffee Roasters.



What if you’re trying to build your credibility and drive more traffic back to your website? Try a newsletter like Airbnb’s weekly highlight of all the best things – not just of their specific product (which is renting spaces, of course), but also of things related to it like food and entertainment.

And of course, if you want to get more people excited about your upcoming event, send them an invitation like Dribble did for one of their regular designer meet up events.

#2: Who will you send your email to?

When you spend a lot of time dreaming up the perfect email, you want to make sure it hits the right audience to be the most effective it can be. Take the time to get to know your subscribers and use Sendlane to segment them and create automated campaigns based on their behaviors and interests.

#3: How will you send your email?

There are lots of options when it comes to sending out your email marketing campaigns and when deciding between them, here are a few things to make sure your solution can do well:

1. Design

2. Automation
3. Landing Pages

4. Segmentation

Lucky for you, Sendlane does all these things really well! Explore our email marketing suite  with a 14-day free trial!

Phase 4: Measure Your Results … and Adapt Accordingly

Your job isn’t over once the email hits those inboxes. In fact, for some people, this is the real job … and the really fun part! We wrote an entire blog post on how to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing and what to do to make it even more successful. You can read it here, but in the meantime, remember that these three things are the most important to track when you’re analyzing your email marketing.



These metrics will give you a high-level view of how your emails are reaching customers and how they are receiving different emails. And don’t be afraid to take a few chances! Especially as you’re building your email marketing strategy, try new things and if they don’t work just move on to the next idea. You never know what will hit your readers and make them want to get engaged further!



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10 Best Practices for an Effective Email Marketing Strategy

You’ve spent countless hours and valuable resources building your lists.

But, they’re not growing.

You’ve sent out mass emails to all of your subscribers.

But, they’re not converting.

If this sounds like you, you may need to improve your email marketing strategy.

In this post, we’re going to talk about some of the key ways to give your email marketing a boost and nurture your leads so you can bring in more revenue.

There are countless things you can do to grow your online presence, get more followers, gain more subscribers, and increase your digital following.

However, these things are still not as effective as nurturing the leads you already have so you can convert them into paying customers.

To help you get the most out of your existing email marketing strategy, we’ve put together the following list of sure-fire, yet simple, actionable steps to improve your email marketing.

1. Spring Clean Your Existing Database

It’s Spring, so it’s time to do some cleaning.

And we’re not just talking about your house, either.

Now, it’s time to clean up your list.

See, if you’ve had your website for a while, you’re probably got a good amount of subscribers from all of your email marketing efforts.  They may not be converting now, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to complete write them off.

Instead, spend some time cleaning up your contact list by:

Using segmentation

Make sure you’re sending the right type of emails to the right people, at the right times with list segmentation. Segment your list by demographics, poll or survey results, frequency (Who opens your emails the most? Who prefers them spaced out more?), purchase behavior, and email activity (open-rates, click-throughs, shares, etc.) You could see some amazing results like the ones outlined here:

Getting them back

You’ve likely got some inactive subscribers on your list. Exclusive offers, highly personalized content and discounts are some great ways to get your inactive subscribers to come back.

2. Use the Right Opt-In Forms

It’s hard to get people to sign up without opt-in forms, but it’s more than just having forms available. You need the right kind of forms.

This is where the difference between single opt-ins and double opt-ins comes into play in a HUGE way.

They’re exactly like they sound, with single forms only requiring the input of information and double forms requiring a confirmation after they give you their information.

Both are great, but both have their own benefits and drawbacks.

Single forms can result in a lack of subscribers because they enter their address with typos, use spam emails, or use an address that doesn’t belong to them.

Double forms require confirmation, so you KNOW the person definitely wants to sign up for your content. On the other hand, you can lose out if they forget to confirm or if they have certain spam filters in place.

In the end, it comes down to A/B split testing to see what your website visitors prefer. Everyone is different, so give each form a shot and see which yields the best conversions.

Once you’ve figured out which type of forms your visitors prefer, it’s time to get the most use out of it. You can do that by:

• Placing a signup option on each page of your website, especially the landing page.
• Include a link to your opt-in form or landing page in the signature of your email.
• Add an opt-in to your invoices, product order forms, surveys and polls, giveaways, and other offers.

3. Offer Value and Purpose

There are so many brands that just send out mass emails without any clear purpose.

It’s just a random collage of company updates, tips and tricks, promotions and offers, and other news. It’s disorganized. It’s not entirely relevant.

It gets deleted pretty quickly.

What you’ve got to do is avoid this. Instead, spend time focused on marketing and sales to figure out what the purpose of each message should be.

Then, use that focus to come up with the most effective design and sales copy to ensure each message is directly relevant to the subscribers in your list segments.

To start, consider these primary email marketing campaign goals:

Demonstrate brand value

Let your message prove that your brand is a valuable resource and industry authority. Offer tips, strategies, and other valuable information to your subscribers. Include a link back to your website, along with a compelling call-to-action that persuades them to take action.

Traffic generation

Share some information from your latest blog post or article, and include a link to it on your website.
That little snippet and preview should be compelling enough to make them click through to the actual page on your site.

Promote a product or service

Let them know what you’re offering, and hire a professional copywriter to create a message that showcases this product or service in a way that creates a sense of urgency. Make them want to use your service, and use this message to bring in repeat business from your existing customers and encourage subscribers to convert to new business.

4. Revamp Your Design

Just as with most things in life, less truly is more.
When it comes to marketing, simplistic design is usually more effective.

Some of the best ways to design an effective email campaign that grabs your reader’s attention and gets them hooked are:

Make it readable

Make sure you pick a font for readability, rather than aesthetics. Fonts like Arial and Helvetica are easy to read across the majority of devices.

More text than images

A good rule of thumb is to make each message 80% text and 20% images.

Optimization

According to Litmus, 54% of emails are read on mobile devices. Make sure your campaigns are optimized for both mobile AND desktop.

Incentivize

Not only do you want to include a strong call-to-action, but you also want to make sure it’s compelling enough to make them follow that action. Pair it with the promise of great information, an offer, or other must-have item. Include the call-to-action in your message as both text link AND with a simple graphic, such as an eye-catching button.

Make them focus

Use graphics and other design elements that get your readers to focus on the most important aspects of your email copy.

5. Invest in a Copywriter

Image Source

Great copy goes a long way and can make all the difference between a simple open and an actual conversion.

You want your reader to sit up and take notice. You want them to stay hooked, unable to stop reading. You want them to stay engaged the whole way, right down to your call-to-action.

That’s how you create the conversions you need to boost your sales and grow your brand.

Investing in a qualified copywriter to produce great copy for your email marketing is highly recommended, but there are ways to do it yourself.

If you choose to go that route, sign up for some newsletters from top marketing agencies and copywriting services so you can learn tips for effective email copy.

Regardless of whether you have an eCommerce website or one that pairs up one for your brick-and-mortar store, strong copy helps boost your sales and keeps your conversion rates up.

6. Strengthen Your Subject Line

Just like great copy, the subject line is one of the most important aspects of an effective email marketing campaign strategy.

This is the first thing that determines whether or not your subscribers read your email or simply move it to the trash without a second thought.

Take these subject lines from Ramit Sethi, which lead to lead to millions of dollars in revenue:

They are attention grabbing, targeted and really make you want to open the email, which is the first step of email marketing success.

Think about it: How many times have you scanned through your inbox, and deleted emails without even opening them?

Dozens of times, right? And it’s usually because the subject line seemed boring, irrelevant, or just plain scammy.

Use these tips to produce a subject line that yields higher open rates:

1. Watch your words:Avoid the spam words that send your email straight to the junk folder. These words include: “Free”, “Urgent”, “Order Now”, “Limited time offer”, and “Guarantee.”
2. Keep it short:Use fewer than 50 characters, including spaces
3. Identify yourself:Include the name of your company or brand
4. Personalize it!Include the name of the recipient in the subject line, making them more likely to read it. It makes it directly relevant to them, and holds the promise of having content they absolutely MUST read.
5. Get them to notice it:Make it interesting – You want it to stand out!

7. Use Analytics

It’s hard to tell how successful your email marketing campaign strategy is without measuring anything!

How do you know if your campaign is performing the way you want it to without any measurements? Without these, it’s just a bunch of random numbers that don’t mean anything.

So, before you send out your campaigns, you want to make sure you’ve got proper tracking set up so you can maximize your ROI.

Some of the metrics you should be tracking through your email provider and analytics tool include:

1. Deliverability rates:How many of your emails actually went through.
2. Open rates:How many of your emails are opened by your subscribers.
3. Click-through rates:How many of your readers click on the links contained within your emails.
4. Conversion rates:How many of your subscribers become customers after receiving your emails and checking out your website.

8. Send Emails at the Right Time

Send out emails when someone is busy, and they’re going to put it off. They may even forget about it.

Send out emails when they’re sleeping, and they have to wake up to a full inbox – which means yours may very well be ignored.

This is why timing is everything!

While the optimal time to send out your email messages does depend on your subscribers (which is why segmentation comes in handy!), there are some times that are better than others.

10am is the best time to send an email, according to a report from KOI Creative Space. Late morning is pretty popular when you consider that most adults are settling in to work right around then:

The 2nd best time?

8pm.

It may seem like work hours would be a great time-frame for sending emails, but think about it: How busy are you while you’re at work?

Your subscribers are less likely to open, read, and focus on your email if you send it while they’re at work.

On the other hand, the time-frame of 8:00 pm (subscriber’s time), may yield a higher open rate, higher click-through rates and boosted sales.

9. Remember People Like Free Stuff

What better way to position your brand as a helpful resource that care about their customers than to offer free, value-driven content?

Exactly.

Consumers love free things, whether it’s a template, eBook, brand merchandise, or a spot in your next webinar.

Expert email marketers have showcased how well those emails with free content perform, versus those that don’t contain anything but regular links. While digital print media is great, from ebooks to email courses, other media is just as valuable.

In fact, when the town of Engfield, CT included a video in their email marketing campaign messages, they saw a 28% increase in their click-throughs.

Some other free, value-driven content you could offer to get more conversions include:

• Surveys with a gift card or giveaway
• Templates
• Tools
• Printables
• Infographics
• eBooks

10. Conduct A/B Split Testing

We could give you all the email marketing strategy tips in the world, but it won’t get you very far without having all the right elements in place.

You’d just be sending out mass emails without a direction or purpose to go with.

This is why split testing is so important.

The only way to figure out the perfect combinations of marketing elements, such as subject lines, designs, landing pages, and opt-in forms, is to conduct A/B split testing and track the results.

When focusing on improving these things, you’re going to want to keep track of a few different metrics.

Mainly, you want to test, track, and optimize:

• The subject line
• The design of the email message (Font, colors, graphics, and formatting)
• Call-to-action
• Delivery times

Final Thoughts

It’s important to practice effective email marketing strategies that will nurture your leads and guide them through the sales funnel so they can convert to paying customers.

They also help make sure your existing customers keep coming back for more of your products and services, growing your consumer-brand trust and your following.

We’ve outlined the ten essential steps for an effective email marketing strategy, as well as a great tool like ClickPerfect to really boost your efforts. Now, all you have to do is implement them!

What are your best practices for effective email marketing? Let us know in the comments below and, while you’re here, don’t forget to share this post!


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Deliverability 101: How to Reach Your Subscriber’s Inbox

Email accounts are getting swamped more and more each year. With reports of more than 205 billion emails sent and received each day and a 5% increase expected every 365 days, it’s safe to say that there is a real battle going on in everyone’s inbox.
Businesses everywhere are trying to win this battle and be more visible to subscribers. Everyone is constantly talking engagement and discovering different ways to increase interaction. But, that conversation overlooks a crucial component in any email marketing strategy: delivery of your emails.
When it comes down to it, your first priority needs to be making sure your message actually reaches your subscribers. Here are some best practices, tips and methods for ways to do just that.

Getting Started

Before you send your first (or next) email, there are some things you should know. These are the most basic of best practices and will help set you up for success with each message you send.

Don’t buy a list

Never (and I mean NEVER) purchase an email list.
As much as it sounds tempting to get your hands on a huge number of email addresses, this is a practice you should avoid at all costs.
As a trustworthy, credible online marketer there is no point in buying a list. Sending emails to users who haven’t willingly provided their addresses to you only leads to a large number of unopened or reported emails, which will have a negative effect on your reputation.
Plus, you have no way of knowing whether those addresses are even remotely relevant to your business, or if they are real emails in the first place.
So, from a business standpoint alone – if purchased lists contain fake or typo ridden email addresses or even users who aren’t in your target group, your email campaign would be in vain, as no results would come from it. That is a huge waste.
On the other hand, building an email list does require time and effort, but is worth it. You’ll know that the emails collected belong to real subscribers who are genuinely interested in your brand!

Send from your domain

Another step in improving email deliverability is to establish a recognizable domain name. If you have your own website, instead of using external services, send emails from your own domain.
Users who have signed up via your website and provided their email address will recognize your domain and associate your brand with the site they already visited. This is a great way to up your credibility and maintain consistency for visitors and subscribers alike.
Don’t have your own site just yet? Not to worry. There are services out there like NameCheap that offer custom Domain Forwarding, so you can still begin establishing yourself in a more credible way.
Another plus for this step – it helps with raising brand awareness which is great for building your online reputation

Ask recipients to whitelist you

If someone chooses to whitelist you, it means that you have been added to the safe senders list of that recipient. Not only does this mean that the recipient in question will successfully receive all your future emails, but such action is also considered by ISPs and ESPs to be a good signal.
Getting whitelisted gives credibility to your email address and improves your reputation. Start off on the right foot, and ask subscribers to take this step as soon as they join your list.
Want to learn a really easy way to be whitelisted by new subscribers? Read this great post to do just that while also increasing engagement.

Monitor & Maintain

Once you’ve started to focus on getting your emails to subscribers inboxes, it’s important that you assess your deliverability with each message you send.
Email management tools, such as Sendlane, provide insights related to many different aspects of your email campaigns. Analysis of these metrics help you conclude the efficiency of your sending, as well as the engagement of your subscribers.

Here are some metrics that can help analyze the success of your email marketing campaign:

• Successful Deliveries
• Open Rate
• Click Rate
• Unsubscribed
• Bounced
• Spam reports

Once you know where you stand, it’s important to use the information wisely. But, you also need to have a frame of reference.
MailChimp compiled some really useful Email Marketing Benchmarks that should help you interpret your stats based on the size of your business.

Company Size	Open Rate	Click Rate	Soft Rate	Hard Rate	Abuse Rate	Unsubscribe Rate
1 to 10	21.73%	2.93%	0.64%	0.51%	0.03%	0.30%
11 to 25	20.84%	2.52%	0.63%	0.51%	0.02%	0.25%
26 to 50	21.59%	2.89%	0.40%	0.30%	0.01%	0.17%
50+	22.95%	2.83%	0.60%	0.56%	0.02%	0.20%

So, how do you stack up?
If you need to do some work, there are a few key places that often have room for improvement.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate in an email campaign is the percentage of sent messages that are returned by a recipient’s email host.  Or, the number of emails that were not delivered, which clearly is not a good thing when talking deliverability!
Bounces may be:

• Soft – an intermittent/temporary issue. Perhaps due to a full inbox, a server issue, an offline account or message size
• Hard – a permanent error due to an invalid email address or domain aka ‘unknown user’ – either because the email is not correct or no longer works – or blocked delivery

In both of these cases, your message didn’t reach its intended recipient.
Cleaning up your list (aka performing list hygiene) from time to time is a great way to prevent additional bounces.  List hygiene has the added bonus of helping reduce spam complaints and avoiding spam traps by helping you remove any subscribers with consistently poor engagement.

Spam rate

This probably sounds obvious, but while we all know spam is a bad thing, you may not know  why, or how to prevent being labeled as such.
If you’re new to email marketing, take a minute and learn about the CAN-SPAM Act before you move on.
Being marked as spam by a subscriber will send any future emails directly to spam for that email account. Not only that, but it also serves as a negative signal to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) & Email Service Providers (ESPs) who will then monitor your activity.
If you receive a number of spam complaints from different subscribers, this will significantly increase the chances of your emails automatically being filtered as spam every time you hit send. Of course, this will have a negative effect on email deliverability and you will not see valuable results from the campaign.
Here are a few tips on how to avoid being marked as spam:

• Don’t buy a list (I’m really trying to drive this point home here), borrow a list or send to someone else’s list
• Write relevant and engaging subject lines
• Send content driven and useful messages
• Include a clear area for subscription preferences & an unsubscribe button
• Make sure all of the links in your messages are fully functional
• Keep your frequency in check

Quick Note about this – Fluctuations in frequency, timing, or anything that conveys erratic behavior can be negative, not only in terms of spam, but also engagement. If you overwhelm your list with too many messages, neglect them with too few, or confuse them by sending sporadically/inconsistently or stopping & starting back up, subscribers are more likely to mark you as spam. Those that don’t will probably view you as an unreliable resource, lose interest or forget why they subscribed in the first place. Consistency is key!
These are just a few tips to help with deliverability. Want to read up on a few more?
Check out these 10 Tips to Keep Your Marketing Emails Out of the Spam Folder from Sendlane.

Know your sending reputation

With 83% of email delivery failures reportedly caused by sending reputation issues, this is clearly something you need to pay attention to.
Your reputation is taken into account by ISPs and ESPs and basically determines whether an email you send will reach an inbox – versus junk or spam folders – or be blocked entirely.
Your reputation is based on many different things including:

• Volume of emails you send
• Sending patterns
• Spam complaints
• Bounce rate/Sending to spam traps

A better reputation will increase the number of delivered emails, while having a negative reputation might result in your message never being seen.
If you send a large number of emails each month, it is time for you to be proactive. Most Autoresponder tools provide built-in reporting, which is a great start. To really go above the standard, take a look at this great article from SendGrid about 5 Ways to Check Your Sending Reputation.
Keep in mind that investigating your sending rep will not solve all of your email deliverability problems but it is an important step in knowing where to make adjustments.

Coming full circle

Even though online users receive a TON of emails on a daily basis, the benefits of email marketing are still huge. Combine healthy email habits with analyzing your campaign performance and knowing your sending reputation to increase deliverability.
Since you know the basics of how to improve email deliverability, what’s next?
Be sure you learn what words to avoid and how to avoid the Gmail promotional tab.
It is worth investing time into exploring these techniques and applying them in your own campaigns. Soon enough, you’ll see the results of messages arriving directly in subscribers inboxes!

If you found these techniques helpful, chances are other email marketers will too. Please Like and Share this post to spread the word.

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Goal Setting 101: How to Set Goals for Your Email Marketing

As a marketer, you know that building an email list is a vital part of most online business endeavors.
But if your only goal is to simply grow your list, then you’re missing the point of email marketing altogether.
Confused? Let me illustrate it another way. Let’s say you want to run in a 5K race. (Ugh, exercise, right?)
In your mind, the goal is to run in the race.
So you do a bit of cardio a few days a week to get your body in shape, and some days you decide to eat a little better too. Come race day, you’re seemingly ready.
You have your game face on, your runner’s number pinned to your nice new running smock and when the gunshot for the start of the race goes off, there your are right in the thick of the race.
But after about 15 minutes, you realize something…
This whole time, your goal has been to simply run in the race. However, the goal of the race is to cross the finish line. And guess what? You didn’t train to finish the race. You trained just to run in it.
Your goal was wrong from the start and you didn’t know it until just now.
So, let’s end this little story and bring it back to our topic of email marketing. What does this have to do with list building?
Well, in many cases, when people are focusing solely of building a list they are like that runner whose only goal was to run the race. However, like that runner, they soon realize that  just building a list won’t help them “cross the finish line” into successful email marketing.
Building a list is only one part of marketing with email just like entering to run a race is just one part of actually finishing it.
If you want to win at email marketing than you need to have goals in place so that you’re not lagging behind or losing out altogether.

Why Set Goals for Email Marketing?

Why set goals? Because they matter!
Obviously, that’s an oversimplification, but it doesn’t change the fact that goals make a difference in just about every part of your life — including email.
What’s the simplest reason behind why you need them? Without goals you will have nothing to shoot at and you also have no way of measuring any real results.
Think of it this way:
A goal is a target and your efforts are the arrows. With no target to hit, your efforts are pointless.
The other side of the coin is goals are motivating. And if you work with a team of people, well thought-out goals can keep everyone on a similar path. They help cut out the frustration of everyone doing busy work without seeing the benefits.
So now that we’ve covered why you need goals, let’s dig into this a little deeper.

Email Marketing Goals Are Great, But You Need These Too…

Right now you’re at the point where you probably understand how much you need goals. But… they aren’t the only thing you need to set.
You should also be establishing objectives.
How are goals and objectives different?
Let’s go back to the illustration of archery. As we touched on before, a goal is like a target you plan to hit and an objective is like the bullseye.

Here’s what I mean.
Goal: I want to make more money from my email list.
Objective: I want to increase affiliate sales through my email list by 20% for the first quarter.
Did you catch the difference? The goal was broad, but the objective makes it specific.
So to make a goal even easier to measure, adding objectives to it is a great way to make sure you (and your team, if applicable) can stay on track and know exactly how your efforts are paying off.

How To Set a Plan That Works for YOU

Since every business is a bit different, there’s no such thing as a “one-size fits all” approach to setting goals.
And if you pick a goal without considering how it fits into your overall business strategy, you could be wasting a lot of your time.
However, one rather effective goal setting method is called Backward Goal-Setting which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like:
You start with your end destination (goal) and work back from there.

I don’t want to take too much time going over it, so I’ll just give you the cliff notes of how to do break this down:

1. Start with one of your main business goals.
2. Break down that goal into necessary milestones/objectives.
3. List out daily actions to help you reach those milestones.

Now, to make it easier to understand how the process works, here is an example.
Let’s say that Sam is a freelance Facebook Ad Specialist.
Sam wants to make $80K this year from her business. In order to reach this goal, she has a few milestones she needs to accomplish:

1. Increase conversion on her main landing page by 7%.
2. Make 50+ sales on her course for DIY customers.
3. Drive 5% more sales to her digital book about FB Ads for Entrepreneurs.

So, now that Sam knows the objectives she has to reach, she sits down and starts listing out ways to go about hitting her mark:

• A/B Test her landing page.
• Using FB ads to send warm traffic to this page.
• Drive all cold traffic to free email course.
• Increase email list by double.
• Add affiliate options.
• Promote affiliate options to email list and online friends.
• Add book to tripwire in her funnel.
• Send paid traffic to the landing page for her book.

This list could go on for quite a bit, but I think you get the point. Do you see what Sam did here?
By working backwards she was able to narrow down exactly what she needed to do to reach her main business goal. For each of the daily tasks she’s listed, there is more detailed strategizing to do, but this gives you idea of how to break it down.
Using that example, you should have a better idea of how to choose reasonable objectives and set up daily actions to reach your goals. If you want a more strategic approach to this, then the SELF Journal is a great option to get you moving in the right direction.
Now let’s get into the nitty gritty.

Email Marketing Goals For Your Business

The interesting thing with email marketing is that you can leverage it to meet other goals in your business strategy. For instance, you can use email to support content marketing goals like getting more readers to see your posts or help social media efforts by increasing social shares.
Below you’ll find a few goals that you can use for your email marketing campaigns.
There are more goals and objectives than the ones listed here, but they are a great place to start for just about any business.

Goal: Increase Open-Rate

Focusing on improving your open-rate is a great goal to start with.
While sending emails to your list is important, getting people to actually open them is the most important thing. After all, if subscribers are not opening your emails in the first place, your efforts from here on out are essentially a waste of time.
If you’re a bit lost as to how to do about this, first consider what your main objective will be.

Open Rate Objectives

For example, you may want to increase open-rate…

• for every email sent by X amount.
• by X percent for the entire year.
• of your less engaged users by X amount.

These ideas are just a few things you could focus on. Now, how do you accomplish this?

How To Reach Your Objective

1. Write Better Subject Lines
You probably already know this, but your subject lines affect your open rate by A LOT. On average, about 35% of people say they open an email based on the subject.
And let’s be honest, when you do that daily email purge, if you haven’t read it yet and the subject isn’t compelling it winds up in the trash, right? Yup, I do it too, so it’s not hard to understand this.
If you really want to spruce up your subject lines, this article has some proven ways to create powerful headlines so people actually open your emails.

2. Check Your Deliverability
What if you know your subject lines are killer? A deliverability issue could be the reason your open rate is struggling.
For example, do your emails land in the Promotions tab of your subscribers Gmail account? That can ding your open-rate.
Who is your email marketing provider? Some do better than others when it comes to getting your emails front and center of an inbox.
If you can figure out where your emails wind up and why, then you’ll be in much better shape moving forward. Start by reading up on how to reach your subscriber’s inbox with our Deliverability 101 post.
Now, let’s look at another possible goal for your email marketing efforts.

Goal: Increase Click-Through Rate

Ah, yes. CTR…
With every email you send, there is a link somewhere that you’d like subscribers to click on. Click-throughs to your linked content is what makes up your CTR and if you’re struggling with good numbers, you’re not alone.
But mastering this metric can help in more ways than one. Not only does it get people to where you want them to be, it also keeps up the health of your email account.
Yep, email marketing tools keep track of this stuff too and if you’re not doing well on things like open-rate or CTR, then your account could be considered spammy. How’s that for a kick in the gut, right?
So, how can you fix this? Again, first start with your objective.

Click Through Rate Objectives

I want to increase the CTR…

• of my new subscribers by X.
• of my entire list by X.
• of X segmented list by X.

Got it? Great!
Now the real issue. How do you do this?

How To Reach Your Objective

Depending on the objective here, the way you reach this goal could be a little different. But basics email marketing principles still apply. If you need to brush up on some of these basics, you could try one of these 11 surefire tricks from HubSpot to get you started.
But here are some great tactics that have worked for others:

1. Include Video
Here’s how you do this:
In your email, include a screenshot of a video with a play-button icon on it that links to your desired content.

The play button acts as a call-to-action that leads to an almost compulsory click.
Bam! Your click through rate just exploded!

2. A/B Test Your CTA
When in doubt, test it out.
I know that sounds like something Bill Nye might have said, but this holds as true in marketing as it does other things in life. Not only can you A/B test your calls-to-action to see if one performs better than another, you can also add tracking to see which links are getting the most action.
This gives you more chances to improve your CTR and help you figure out what is working better for segmented lists too.
One great tool to help with A/B testing, click monitoring and tracking links is called ClickPerfect. This is a tool we use ourselves every day which has helped Snaptactix get amazing results.

Set Email Marketing Goals

Email has a place in every business out there, but not every business has the same goals.
By hunkering down and establishing clear, attainable goals, you’ll have the ability to figure out exactly where it fits in the grand scheme of things.
Depending on your objectives and how you’ll actually reach them, you can decide just how much time you should be investing in your email efforts.
Mastering email marketing is not an easy feat, but as with just about everything else in life, practice can make all the difference.

Your turn! What areas of email marketing do you struggle with? Let us know in the comments below and if you liked this post, please share with a friend who could benefit from the info!

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