Upon opening the message, I discovered that the image did not display in my email browser and there were no text tags to give me clues about this fantastic sale. Not even a link to the website. Being a sucker for fish sales, I typed fishstore.com into my browser and came up with nothing. After trying a .net extension and landing on a fish taxidermy site, I Googled said store and discovered that their website was “fishstore.us.” Okay. But here’s the real kicker. Nowhere on their site could I find anything about a Fourth of July Blowout Sale. Slightly disgruntled, I closed the tab and deleted the email.

So what’s the takeaway from this experience? I think there are several things to be learned about what to do and what not to do as you’re developing an email marketing piece.

1. Subject lines aren’t everything. We tend to talk about them like they are the holy grail of email marketing, but a fantastic subject line accomplishes nothing if it’s not supported by the email itself.
2. Always, always, always include alt text tags and links that communicate your message even if your image fails to display.
3. Don’t forget to include a link to your landing page in the body of the email, especially if your website has a weird extension like .us.
4. If you’re going to send an email about a sale, make sure sale information can be easily found on your website.
5. If you’re advertising a blowout sale, it better really be a blowout. If it’s not, people will begin to be skeptical of your email pieces and may skip them altogether.

Creating a stellar email goes beyond dotting all your i’s and crossing your t’s. You need a certain amount of creativity in order to be in touch with what will speak to your target audience. eConnect Email can help you design customized email templates, organize and integrate images, and test your emails before sending to ensure that they display correctly and accomplish the goals you have in mind. Don’t make the mistake of losing customers to a poorly designed email. Take the time to work out the kinks before you send, and you’ll not only increase sales, but also build loyal customers who look forward to your messages.

During the week of Black Friday (and also, incidentally, Thanksgiving) I received nearly 70 promotional messages from dozens of retailers between my two email accounts. One of those retailers sent me six messages during that week—seven, if you count the email I received on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Of those 70 emails, only two acknowledged the holiday that supposedly enjoyed the limelight that week. Call me sentimental, but I enjoyed being wished a Happy Thanksgiving, even by a company with whom I rarely shop.

What’s the point? It’s that customers like to be appreciated and treated as people. Not every email you send has to say thanks, and there is definitely a time for promotional emails that advertise special sales events. But there’s also a time and place for letting your customers know you appreciate them—and not just after they’ve made a purchase. Here are some tips for crafting a thank you message that will keep you on your customers’ nice list this holiday season.

• Personalize

Include the customer’s name and other relevant info such as the last product they purchased. Use eConnect Email’s custom fields/ mail merge features to further personalize email for every customer you contact.

• Invite Feedback

Ask your customers how their purchases worked for them and whether they have any comments about the service they received. Make it easy for them to reply and communicate your desire to hear from them.

• Be Timely

If you’re thanking a customer for his or her purchase, make sure they receive your email within 24-48 hours of the transaction. You can use eConnect Email’s personalized autoresponder/ email trigger capabilities to make sure emails arrive in a timely fashion.

• Include freebies or special discounts

If you really want people to know you appreciate them, give them a little something extra. An additional 10% discount or a free gift with purchase can go a long way toward cementing your relationship with your customers.

Whether you’re responding to a purchase or just checking in with a subscriber you haven’t heard from in a while, a thank you email can boost your company image significantly in the eyes of your customers. Use the personalization and list management tools available from eConnect Email to design a thank you note that will fill your readers with holiday cheer.

“I’ll get a brand-new list of fresh contacts for just a small outlay of cash!”

Sure, you may get a new list of addresses, but how many of those addresses can truly be classified as “fresh contacts?” Most of the addresses in a purchased email list have been gathered by malicious software of automated scripts and haven’t been checked for deliverability. A high percentage of those addresses will be non-existent, expired, or otherwise undeliverable.

“I’ll get 10,000 new viewers”

Average open rates for email lists hover between .01% and .1%. That’s anywhere from one to ten viewers out of a list of 10,000 email addresses. An email list comprised of targeted, high-quality subscribers who opted in specifically to receive your communications, on the other hand, can yield open rates of 50% or more. Was the $300 you shelled out for that list really worth it?

“They opted in to receive third-party offers”

This may be technically true, but most of those opt-ins consist of fine print buried in a user agreement that rarely gets read. For your company, this means that those readers will still hit the spam button when they see your message or worse, your email sending IP’s could be blacklisted.

“The seller promised a well-targeted list and proof of permission”

The reality of email marketing is that it takes a lot of time and effort to build a high-value email list in which subscribers will open and read messages. For this reason, no self-respecting company would ever sell a high-value list because the moment it’s sold they lose customer loyalty and the list loses its effectiveness. No matter how well-targeted the list is, even if it technically has the permission of senders through fine print agreements, people will still consider messages they didn’t know they were signing up for to be spam.

“I don’t know how to build my own email list”

That’s where eConnect Email can help you. We are always working hard to ensure the highest deliverability possible and will closely monitor your account for blacklisting. If you’re ever blacklisted, we’ll work to correct the problem as quickly as possible. Build your list with our built in social sharing feature and monitor user activity with statistics tracking, testing, and suppression lists. With the help of eConnect Email, you can organically build an email list that supports your marketing campaign and increases sales without the negative associations that come with purchased email lists.

Conclusion

Slow and steady wins the race.  There’s no point in sending emails to an uninterested market.  No matter how compelling your text or offers might be, if it’s not in front of the right audience, it’s a waste of your time (and theirs).  There are many creative ways to get opt-in subscribers who are interested in what you have to offer; I would explore some of those options and stick with marketing to individuals who are interested in what you have to say.

What’s the Right Question?

A better way to consider the effectiveness of email marketing is to ask “How have the habits of my target market changed with regard to email and can email still help me accomplish my marketing goals with that market?” Of course, any great question opens up the field to follow-up questions. Some that you should consider include:

• How and where does my audience check email? (mobile phones, work, home)
• What type of email will my audience most likely open and read? (promotional, newsletter, educational)
• How can I build trust with my audience so they will be more likely to interact meaningfully with my emails?

How Does Today’s Market use Email?

I have two separate email accounts. One I use primarily for business-related communication and personal communication. The other I use for promotional emails and newsletters. However, if there’s a particular company whose emails I think I’ll read more than the average e-mail ad, then I’ll switch them over to my personal account. The majority of your target market probably thinks the same way. The goal for your business, then, should be to move from the “check once a month” account to the “daily” account. eConnect Email can help you do this in several ways:

• Build Trust—Send informational, carefully timed emails that offer genuine value to the user in order to avoid the spam list. Also, eConnect Email deals only with permission-based email campaigns rather than purchased or rented lists in order to protect the privacy of recipients.

• Provide Value—Go heavy on education and light on promotion in order to keep people reading. Most newsletters have seen success with an 80/20 ratio, more or less.

• Respect Unsubscribe Requests—Don’t earn a reputation for spamming people who have unsubscribed from your list. eConnect Email provides easy mailing list management and automates unsubscribe requests immediately.

By understanding the email habits of your target market and by building an email campaign that respects their privacy while providing value, you can achieve success with email marketing.

Unfortunately, the email was too good to be true. After reading the first paragraph it was pretty clear that this email was not recently updated as it referenced Shrek The Third, which came out in 2007 and Dreamgirls, which was released in late 2006. Rush Hour 3 which is pictured in the movie poster was also released in 2007.

It appears that this email was set up as an autoresponder but was later abandoned by Entertainment Weekly. Do they still offer advanced movie screenings to their subscribers? Do they even realize that their subscribers are still receiving these emails? Surely, if they realized that the emails were still being sent they would take the time to update them every few months with more recent movies. It’s just good advertising.

If you have autoresponders and triggers set up, think about their content. Will any of it become dated? How quickly will your autoresponders become irrelevant? How often should you update them? Do you need to set up a system to remind you to update that information frequently to keep everything in your triggers fresh?

Updating your triggers and autoresponders won’t take much time and it will keep your content from looking as dated as last summer’s top ten list.

So, before you go correcting the mistake and resending the email or send another email apologizing for the duplicate, just realize that your readers may or may not have noticed the mistake and have already moved on.  An extra email would just seem annoying, after the fact.

If you are constantly flooding inboxes with typos or other mistakes, then you have a problem.  Otherwise just chalk it up as a mistake and move on.  We tend to over think and worry for our customers too much sometimes.  They’ve probably made mistakes in life too.

So just be careful and proofread your emails before sending and check all your links.  If mistakes happen every once in a while it’s no big deal, don’t beat yourself up over it.

First of all, let me be very clear here.  eConnect Email is a permission-based email marketing system.  We have checks in place to ensure eConnect Email does not fall prey to spammers who send out spam emails, or as some call them in a less negative way, “unsolicited emails”, although we still prefer to call them spam anyhow – a rose is a rose is a rose.

We tell all our customers that all batch imports of subscriber lists will be manually approved by our delivery team, and we really walk the talk.  We have real humans looking through the lists to spot out any tell-tale signs of unacceptable lists and perform checks on their email practices.  Admittedly, this is a very tedious (and at times inconvenient) process but is a necessary evil in order to ensure that the system is not being abused and that those marketers using eConnect Email who practice permissible email marketing are protected.  This is a very important aspect for us to be able to maintain a high reputation of our service.

That said, we have also encountered users who tried different methods to circumvent the checking process that we have in place.  One prime example is signing up as paid customers and demanding that we approve the lists regardless of the sources, simply on the mere basis that they have already paid up.  Guess what?  That’s not the way we function.  We clearly state in our Terms of Use and our Anti-Spam Policy that we will monitor and stop any suspicious spamming activities.  So it’s just wishful thinking that we will let your lists through as long as you have paid.  Sure, signing up as a paid customer does in itself show a certain level of commitment on the part of the customer that his/her email marketing practices are acceptable by eConnect Email, but there are still many factors in our approval process that will look at the overall picture, rather than just the fact that he/she has paid up.

Now, some would-be customers might start to worry that if their lists do not get approved after they have signed up for our paid plans, they stand to lose their subscription fees.  To these customers, we would like to assure that as long as you have proof that you have obtained your list under acceptable conditions as stated in our policies, chances are your list will get approved.  In any case, we always advise that you test drive eConnect Email first by signing up for a Trial account, importing your lists, and testing out the functions before making the jump.  That way, not only can you be certain that your list has been approved, but you also get to check out the rest of eConnect Email to see if we are a good fit to your email marketing needs.

I’m going to end this post off with an actual case we had with a paid customer whom we found to have uploaded a subscriber list that showed characteristics of a bought, rented or “scraped” list. Instead of offering information on the source of the list, he counter-questioned “But you are not a US-based company, why should you be worried about spam?”

Our reply to this is that regardless of where you may be based, we believe permission-based email marketing is the only really healthy way to run your email marketing campaigns.  This may come across as being a handicap rather than a feature for many marketers who are still clueless about why respect for their subscribers is of utmost importance, but this is one aspect of eConnect Email that we are proud of and will not budge; we would rather have fewer customers than have too many spammers abusing the system.