By: Gunter Haselberger, VP Deliverability, emarsys

Email deliverability can be a complex issue that involves a multitude of different factors. Success in this field requires changing one’s perspective – instead of seeing only the sender’s side, one must also consider the recipient’s view.

Although a lot has been written about this topic, many marketers and senders still hold the following beliefs:

• The more emails sent, the higher the response will be
• As long as I have a legal opt-in I can send what I want and ISPs have to deliver.

Unfortunately, this point of view does not reflect reality and shows only one side of email marketing.

For those familar with the concept of sender reputation and recipient (re)actions – which are the basis of the fomer – this advice will be a reminder. For those unfamiliar with these concepts, it should serve as guidelines for how to perform successful email marketing – by sending relevant emails to users who appreciate them.

Try to think like an ISP
All businesses need to keep their users or customers happy. Cluttering their inboxes will have ISP users switch to other ISPs which provide better filtering. However, false positives must also be avoided. An incorrect categorization of wanted emails as spam will have the same effect as filling the inbox with UBE/UCE. All major ISPs are constantly adding more criteria in order to determine which emails are actually wanted and which are not. In recent years providers have done a really good job in this area. ‘Cheating’ ISPs, so that they deliver large amounts of unwanted emails, has become virtually impossible.

ISPs search for factors in their customers’ behaviour to determine if they want the email messages you are sending. Positive reactions to your messages (among which are opens, flagging emails as important and many more) improve your sender reputation. Almost all actions which can be performed in a recipient’s mail account are used to weigh your reputation, either in a positive or negative way.

Remember: your recipients are ISP customers! ISPs will always want to make them happy, rather than a sender, even of legitimate emails. And: It is not possible to ‘force’ recipients to want your emails.

Put yourself in the recipient’s shoes
In order to determine how your subscribers will react to your emails and, subsequently, how ISPs will treat your emails, emarsys recommends running through your entire registration/subscription process and observe it from a recipient’s point of view. Register for your own services. Do you receive a confirmation email for your subscription, or even a double opt-in email asking you to confirm your registration? If you were the recipient, which process would you trust more? Are the services you offer sufficiently disclosed, i.e. is it clear to recipients what they will receive? What do recipients expect of your services, offers or newsletters? And do you change your sender name and sender address frequently?

Frequency
Frequency and timing matter. Monday, Thursday and Friday are usually the most popular days for sending commercial emails. Email frequency varies among different business types. Coupon or daily deal marketers are mostly high volume senders, with approx. 5 emails a week, while others send the same amount in a month. What works for one may not work for others. If your email frequency is too high, subscribers will turn away from your services; they will delete your emails immediately, unsubscribe, or report your emails as spam. All these reactions have a major impact on deliverability.

Compare the results for different frequencies, even if you already offer various intervals for your services on the subscription page or the user preferences page. Users and recipients who are engaged with a brand will accept a higher frequency. We recommend a separation of actives with high(er) sending frequency from less actives (moderate frequency) and inactives, who should only receive the occasional reactivation mail (e.g. once a month – these mails should constitute a maximum of 5% of your total daily volume to minimize negative impact on your reputation while making sure contacts are not completely lost).

Relevancy
Expectations matter. Sending messages which your recipients are not expecting can reduce your list size, as contacts are more likely to unsubscribe; this will also hurt your reputation and deliverability, due to a higher complaint rate or just plain inactivity. The more relevant your messages are, the higher your open/click rates and your sending reputation will be.

Major ISPs like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail have highly sophisticated mechanisms in place which help them to find out – based on recipient behaviour – if messages are wanted or not. They cannot be tricked – irrelevant emails cannot be successful. How can the relevancy of one’s emails be increased?

• Send a welcome message to newly registered users or, even better, use a ‘double opt-in’. Start your relationship with recipients immediately after their registration. Welcome messages should include the registration details and detailed information on the services you offer (FAQ, privacy policy, other channels, etc). Use this opportunity to collect even more information on your users.
• Send only those messages of which you have informed the subscriber. Your contacts expect to receive what they subscribed to, nothing else.
• Use the behavioural data you have gathered from your users, and target based on user profiles.
• Send personalized messages. A personalized greeting line is the absolute minimum; in general, all content sections should be checked, and if possible, be tailored to individual recipients.

Consistency
Similar to relevancy, consistency is essential, as it prevents users from cancelling your services and keeps your emails recognisable. Users add the sender addresses of wanted newsletters and services to their address book, as this enables the automatic display of images in new emails of the same sender. Changing your ‘From’ address can reduce your open rate drastically, at least for a while, and is not recommended. If you have no choice, we advise you to inform your recipients before you change the sender, and to ask them to add the new sender to their address book.

The content/design and branding of your messages as well as other webservices (website, landing pages, social media, etc.) must be consistent and recognisable. If recipients do not recognise the messages they are receiving as the service to which they have subscribed, this might trigger a negative reaction and, subsequently, have ISPs downgrade your level of reputation.

For more information on deliverability, please contact your emarsys Account Manager.

By: Julie Serriere, Account Executive, emarsys

Have you ever wondered what an ecommerce checkout would look like in real life? Would you keep going to your local shop if you had to answer 15 questions at the till before you can actually leave with your products?

Take a look at this video….

Ecommerce has been in our life for about 15 years, for some of us it’s become a habit. I’m one of those – I buy everything online, from clothes to food. As an online addict, in my twenties and a former e-marketer, checking out is child’s play to me. BAD news is I’m probably not your standard customer (don’t worry I’ll have a good news for you at the end of this post).

One of the first things I’ve learnt in marketing is never to think that your way is the common way. For example I still don’t understand why the heck supermarkets keep sending me flyers saying that this weekend the lamb roast will be 50p cheaper than usual. Honestly, I’ve never rushed to my local store after reading one of those flyers thinking ‘Yay!!! I’m gonna save 50p, this is amazing!’’. And I probably never will. I will keep ignoring these ads, thinking they’ve just wasted a lot of paper and ink.

However it’s a fact that it works, and I might just be one of the small percentage that does not respond in any way to this kind of trigger. My point here is: make sure you’re not losing customers along the way; you might think it’s easy as pie, while your prospects think they require an IT degree before trying to check out on your website. How to do so? Firstly, identify at which stage in your check out process you are losing your prospects. Your website analytics will help you spot the customer leak. Then try to find out why. Ask yourself the following:

• Is there a technical issue? Test the rendering on every possible browser, zoom in and out, try to break it and see how it goes.  
• Is the wording unclear? Carefully check all the wording you use and make sure a 2 year old could understand the meaning. 
• Is the call-to-action obvious? The last thing you want is your prospect to get lost. It’s really frustrating not to know what to do next or to have to scroll for half an hour before finding the ‘next’ button.
• Could my customer be distracted? Make sure your check out process is a tunnel with nothing else that could distract your customer from finalising his/her order.
• Am I scaring my prospect? Buying online is still stressful for a lot of people so reassure them at every single step. A telephone number on your check out pages will undoubtedly help increase your conversion rate.

Following those points should help you to reduce your abandoned transaction rate. Unfortunately nothing will make it disappear but… here comes the GOOD news! Email marketing can help you get your customer back in their buying shoes.

Let me introduce you to the ‘abandoned shopping cart’ module from emarsys. One of my favourite transactional emails. When the system notices your customer has left your website without finalising the transaction, it will automatically send a personalised email to your customer. Think about it, maybe your customer just momentarily forgot about you – maybe the phone rang in the middle of checking out, or the food on the stove started to burn, or the baby started crying, or the neighbour knocked on the door… so many things could’ve happened.

Don’t miss an opportunity to remind your customer how much they wanted to buy your product and what a shame it is they didn’t make it to the finishing line. Fix that leak, get in touch with your emarsys account manager to set it up today!

06.02.2012   London – emarsys launched version 6.1 of eMarketing Suite, the professional customer engagement and automation solution for emarketers worldwide

The current version is not only more powerful in terms of performance, but also includes a number of new and exciting features. Based on user feedback and growing demands of the industry, emarsys has developed some new advanced tools to help users achieve even better results with their email marketing.

Among the highlights of the new features are the Launch Time Advisor and Mobile Reporting.

The Launch Time Advisor is the first of several business intelligence features planned for emarsys eMarketing Suite. Based on statistical analytics, it determines at what time of the day and what day of the week recipients who have opened an email and are most likely to click; thus giving email marketers a basis for determining the best time to send their campaigns.

With the Mobile Reporting feature emarsys reacts to the latest smartphone trend. Worldwide the use of smart phones is growing in double digits. What does this mean for email marketers? How many people actually read their emails on their mobile phones? The emarsys Mobile Reporting feature helps users establish how many recipients open their email first on a mobile device and thereby helps them to improve the delivery strategies.

In addition, other features such as Abandoned Shopping Cart campaigns, implementing a mailing Frequency Cap and CC email list have been optimized.

For further information please contact:
Sarah Dyer
Marketing Manager

14.12.2011   London – emarsys, a leading global provider of email marketing and customer engagement solutions has expanded its global operation to a new office in Beijing, China which further bolsters emarsys’ presence in the Asia-Pacific region.

With 9 global offices currently, the expansion into China allows emarsys to build on the existing APAC business with its best-of-breed email marketing automation tools.

“The ecommerce industry in China is set triple in the next few years and become one of the world’s largest ecommerce markets by 2015,” said Ohad Hecht, Managing Director Asia-Pacific. “Since our incorporation in the region, we have experienced a very fast paced growth in the number of clients we are serving in China. Opening the operations in Beijing shows our commitment to our clients and our ability in localising our services and offers”.

emarsys APAC already work with organisations in China, such as 58.com and Didatuan and have built key integration partnerships with the likes of Sina Weibo.

CEO and co-founder of emarsys Hagai Hartman remarked, “Following our successful launch of our Hong Kong office last year, the opening of the Beijing office strengthens our presence in the Asia-Pacific region. We’re pleased with our positive growth and look forward to future success in the region.”

emarsys Beijing can be contacted at:
emarsys Beijing Ltd
Blue Castle International
Xi Da Wang Road, ChaoYang District
Beijing, P.R.China 100026
T: 010-85999878

For further information please contact:
Sarah Dyer
Marketing Manager

Internet World
2012

When: 24-26 April 2012

Where: Earl’s Court, London

Event Website

Internet World is one of Europe’s largest and longest-running events for digital marketing and online business.

Join the emarsys team on stand e7085 at Earl’s Court from the 24 – 26 April 2012 to discuss your email marketing and customer engagement solutions.

Register in advance for free entry.

By: Jelena Rumianceva, Account Manager, emarsys

As I opened my inbox earlier today and saw 367 emails, I once again thought about what made me open certain emails before others, and why there were some I deleted straight away.

I know that I always look at the subject line first as a habit, before I even see who or where the email comes from.

In these times of busy inboxes, high spam rates and fraud alerts, it is getting challenging to keep high levels of engagement across your recipient base. If you’ve followed all the deliverability rules and made it into the inbox of the recipient, it’s a shame if your email goes unopened because of a dull or irrelevant subject line.

Writing a winning subject line is not easy however and is very specific to your brand and recipient demographic. Having said that there are always basics which should never be forgotten:

1. Keep it short and to the point
Very often subject lines are considered to be a short summary of an email and tend to feature the most interesting information or best-selling products in them. This could be the wrong strategy as most of the information will never be read by your recepient. For the benefit of your brand in the eyes of your valued customer and the ISPs – keep your subject lines under the limit of 60 characters. And if you are ever looking at how long your subject lines should not be, have a look in your junk folder!

2. Be adventurous and enthusiastic
Experiment with different structures of subject lines. Do remember however that before you reach the inbox of the recipient you will need to pass all the spam filters of the ISPs. Therefore be deliverability friendly and anti-spam compliant

3. Be consistent, but not boring
Remember that your subject line should always reflect the content of your email. If your brand is consistent with its offerings, you will not have a problem with delivering what is expected from you. You may however see your open rates decline if you become tedious with using similar subject lines and get easily ignored by your recipients

4. Test your subject line
A/B tests are too easy and quick not to be used. Using the same campaign and simply changing the subject line to test 2, 3, 5 or more combinations will give you a good insight on what is working for your database – in combination with your brand offering during specific times. I am firm believer that subject lines should be tested at all times, as with rapidly growing and changing consumer interest and market development, there always will be a slight element of change.

5. Monitor the performance
I often see different companies tracking the performance of subject lines on a campaign by campaign basis, without comparing the results post-campaign – and I believe that this is where valuable insight is being lost. Constantly log and monitor the performance of all your subject lines; this will give you the understanding of what subject lines perform the best at different times of year, in conjunction with different creatives and messaging.

By: Justis Saayman, Creative Engineer, emarsys

In this day and age where all we do is move forward, it’s hard to believe that the HTML code used in email is still in the dark-ages. As a designer or developer of HTML emails it’s hard to comprehend that it’s important to often take a step back to create something which will work correctly every time.

When we look at HTML based emails as a whole we will see that we are essentially still using old technology with some new tricks incorporated to keep the masses happy. To explain this I will need to first discuss some of the best practices in email coding:

Tables

• Yes to some this word is their bane of existence, but to others it’s a well-known time-honoured way of making sure things display in their right full order. For any new agers or even junior (fresh) designers this is a very difficult concept to grasp as the control is a lot more involved and does not allow for a ‘one-change-fits-all’ approach as CSS offers in standard web coding. 
• This is however the only way to make sure that your emails render correctly every time, no matter what the email client is (Lotus Notes excluded). Nested tables, or the method of using tables in tables (sometimes to the 10th degree) is still a very tricky method of placing content and is relatively high risk due to its complexity and the amount of areas needed to be changed should you need to edit one section. 
   

No CSS

• Whilst the world is slowly starting to accept and change over to HTML5 and CSS3, and to a degree starting to ignore the horror which is Internet Explorer 6, email has in many ways not progressed to these features; due to technical limitations of email clients as well as the fact that emails cannot really call on external files and commands to display content. The use of very few CSS tags has purely been implemented into best practice guides as some email clients need them to render emails correctly. 
• A good example of this would be Gmail’s ability to strip thetag of its attributes and thus a simple thing like an email’s background colour or image would be removed. So to circumvent this we would use carefully selected CSS attributes in the HTML itself.
   
   

No Background Image

• One of the most frequent queries/complaints I get from clients is that they are restricted in their design due to the fact that best practice does not recommend the use of background images. This is purely because some email clients such as Outlook 2007 and 2010 do not allow background images on sections or tables. A restriction of this magnitude forces some clients to either use an image with the text on it or tone down on the creativity. 
• Designers and Developers need to be aware of this before starting work on email creative – to find aesthetically pleasing solutions which work across all email clients and thus gives all the third party viewers the same experience. Knowing and planning for this will also allow you to plan your text to image in more detail as this can affect deliverability. 

By: Sarah Dyer, Marketing Manager, emarsys

As our American friends are sitting down to their Thanksgiving turkey dinners today, I started thinking about the past and present of email marketing and what email marketers should be thankful for this year….

• CMS
  Using a content management system in your email software will drastically reduce your campaign production time – as well as reducing the reliance on technical skills with no HTML expertise needed. There’s no need to replicate content from your website as it can be pulled automatically from a number of external sources.
   

• Automation
  You can make your subscriber data work harder with minimal effort, using triggered messages sent out automatically based on your recipients information. You can use your email software to trigger a specific message to welcome a new customer, cross/up sell to an existing customer, reactivate dormant customers, target those who’ve abandoned their shopping cart – or simply wish them a happy birthday….or Thanksgiving.
   

• Social media
  Integrating social media sharing into your email campaigns allows email and social to work hand in hand. Email marketers can leverage the benefit of their recipients social media networks by adding social sharing links into their emails – then track the extended reach of their content and identify their influencers and brand advocates. Using social sign up forms within your Facebook pages gives you another shop front for growing your subscriber database, with seamless integration into your email database for future engagement.
   

• Inbox monitoring tools
  Seeing into the future before you launch a campaign using the deliverability tools at your disposal. You’re able to see how an email renders in the inbox before you click send – plus ensure that your emails aren’t blocked as spam across a multitude of ISPs.
   

• Behavioural targeting
  Send less email in a more targeted way. Rather than just using the basic segmentation methods of gender or geography, go one step further using link category functionality. You’re able to see which recipients have responded to specific content types to target with more precision. Automating your content based on these behavioural categories means your recipients are receiving the most relevant content, whilst you’re sending less of the ‘one size fits all’ campaigns. Much more bang for your buck!

By: Sarah Dyer, Marketing Manager, emarsys

Following our consumer shopping research and the trends we’re seeing from consumers, we’ve outlined some practical tips and advice for email marketers on the run up to the festive season.

Leveraging knowledge from the industry and your own organisation, you will be able to make 2011 the best festive period yet.

Lessons from Christmas Past

To get the most from your 2011 programmes, reviewing all aspects of last year’s activity will stand you in good stead for a more successful year.

• Look at all aspects of your online and email strategy to see what worked and didn’t work last year, make the negatives into this year’s success; incorporate learning’s into this year’s strategy and tactics.

• How were customers behaving on your website this time last year? And how were they interacting with your email programmes?

• Which promotional offers worked the best, which product lines performed better than others?

• Are you aware of what online strategies/programmes your competitors are implementing?

Strategy for Christmas Present

• Key dates: Ensure you’re aware and fully utilise the key dates for your business and for your customers – plan out your messaging and email strategy in a calendar

• Testing: Send variations of your emails to different customer groups/demographics to test results. Are you achieving cut through in busy Christmas inboxes? Try to be creative and watch out for overuse of spammy words

• Creative: Look at refreshing the content, design and messaging of your regular newsletter and promotional templates. Don’t forget your transactional email templates too, they’re going to be used a lot during the festive shopping season! Try to be creative and fresh to achieve stand out in the inbox – be careful with HTML coding and image/text ratio.

• Segmentation & Targeting: Leverage your customer data to produce the highest response rates, using data driven content in email campaigns. Who are your customers buying for – themselves, family, friends? Use this behavioural data collected in behavioural link categories to target recipients more specifically

• Automation: Utilise your email marketing software tools to plan and link campaigns, to become fully automated in responding to all possible recipient behaviours – deliver targeted product recommendations, shape the timings of your campaigns and leverage abandoned shopping cart data to implement re-marketing messaging and targeting.

• Deliverability: Over 90% of emails sent are spam and ISP’s block millions of emails every day – ensure you know which ISPs you need to be aware of from your list, and keep up-to-date with any changes they’ve made. Using a delivery tool can help you monitor your deliverability and keep on top of any issues

Ideas for Christmas Future

Christmas 2011 will be over before you know it, and it’s important to make sure you’re prepared for both the year ahead and fourth quarter 2012 – taking lessons learned over these next few months.

• Reporting:  Measure everything! Using professional email marketing software will allow you to analyse a full set of campaign results post-Christmas. Tracking and analysing your open rates, click rates, open to click ratios, conversion and deliverability rates against your sales figures will enable you to present a positive set of ROI reports back to the business.

• Multiple Devices:   With the huge growth in the smartphone and tablet market, and consumers using multiple devices for accessing the internet, it’s important that all areas of your communications are geared up for this shift in technology. Ensure you’ve got your mobile audience in mind when looking at creative, design and messaging.

• Social Media:   Integrating social media fully into your marketing mix will become continually important, with Facebook alone accounting for more than 53% of internet visits so far in 2011 (Hitwise). Include a sign up link in all your external communications – emails, email signatures, offline marketing material to continually build your following AND make sure your email contains something worth sharing and ensure that each content area is linked separately, to maximise your social sharing response rates

For the full practical guide, download your free copy of the ‘Practical Guide to Christmas Email Marketing‘ whitepaper today.

By: Sarah Dyer, Marketing Manager, emarsys

As Christmas 2011 fast approaches, how and when are consumers shopping this festive season?

The clocks have changed, the high street window displays are bursting with red and gold…and my inbox is filling up with promotional offers – it’s that time of year again, Christmas is just around the corner! With every festive season especially in recent years, I’ve become increasingly savvy with my Christmas shopping; where to get the best deals, how to avoid the Oxford Street crowds and who can save me time & money – how about you?

We’ve recently conducted some consumer shopping research to help us put together some best practice advice for email marketers over the festive period. The consumer trends we found are highlighted below and make for some interesting reading. For more information, download the full whitepaper ‘Christmas Email Marketing, A Practical Guide’.

Christmas shopping: when & where?

• This Christmas whilst consumers aren’t abandoning the high street, they’re increasing their activity on ecommerce shopping sites – a 29% jump from 2010 in the number of shoppers on high street retail websites to pure ecommerce shopping site.

• The rise of mobile shopping is also apparent with 15% of respondents citing they will shop on a mobile device or app this Christmas.

• With timing and frequency of shopping sessions on the run-up to Christmas, the good news for retailers is that a large amount of consumers only start their Christmas shopping a month before the big day.

• There’s also a growing amount of people who shop on or after Christmas day, with just over 20% buying their Christmas gifts in the post-Christmas sales.

Christmas Spending

• Christmas 2011 will see nearly half (49%) of respondents spending the same amount as Christmas 2010, and only 21% will decrease their spending.

• Nearly a third of respondents will spend more this Christmas, a great plus for the retail industry and especially etailers.

• Consumers are spending online rather than the high street for varied reasons – the most prevalent especially at Christmas is to avoid crowds – with over two-thirds of respondents citing this. In close second, both ease and lower prices encourage people to shop online.

• Consumers get their hands on vouchers and discount codes in a number of ways – the most popular being online methods; through emails (44%) both directly from retailers themselves, voucher portals and group buying sites, and secondly from websites (30%).

Christmas Surfing

• Once the checkouts stop ringing on Christmas eve, the internet doesn’t sleep – a staggering 88% of recipients said they will be online over the Christmas period.

• Most recipients use multiple devices for using the internet, with smart phone and tablet use a growing for online shopping, but most notable for using social networks

• 65% of respondents using Smartphones and 44% using tablets for accessing social networks.

In line with the trends we’re seeing from consumers, we’ve put together practical tips for email marketers during the festive season – coming soon in Part Two!