Want to reduce your unsubscribe rates?  Why not create a landing page that gives the reader options for receiving mail.

Chances are your subscriber just has an overwhelming inbox, or feels like they hear from you more than they would like to.    Let them choose the frequency of their newsletters or re-subscribe to a specific mailing list.  It’s worth a try.

Do me a favor… for the sake of all respectable email marketers don’t use the word ‘blast’ when referencing email marketing.  It sounds so dirty.

The word just makes me cringe inside when someone talks about ‘e-blasing’ or ‘we’re going to blast out our email this week’.  Sure email marketing makes it convenient to get your message across to your subscribed list but where did this word come from?

Saying ‘e-blast’ to me is like saying ‘let’s have spam for dinner instead of steak’.  Unpleasant thoughts come to mind and leave me with a bad taste (excuse the pun).

Some of the various definitions of ‘blast’ include:

- A forcible stream of air, gas, or steam from an opening, especially one in a blast furnace to aid combustion.

- A violent explosion, as of dynamite or a bomb.

- A destructive or damaging influence.

- A violent verbal assault or outburst.

That said, let’s give email marketing a little respect and not talk about it like a bomb! A forcible stream of air! A violent verbal assault!  Not good.

Of course I’m jesting about this in a sense but all jokes aside, there is something about the connotation that completely undermines what email marketing is supposed to be.

Whether you are sending one-off emails or your monthly newsletter to your subscribers you are communicating to them through email, not blasting them haphazardly.

Email marketing needs a little more respect and choosing the right vocabulary can mean all the difference.  So, next time you would like to send a campaign let’s refer to it as a ‘deployment’ or even ‘we’re going to email our subscriber list this week’.

So as long as we play by the rules, keep our emails informative and not use the word ‘blast’ we can change the image of email marketing for those that think it’s still in the dark ages.

Eliminate ‘blast’ from your vocabulary!

Here’s the rundown: you are like one of the many companies out there with a facebook fanpage…as you should, especially if you have a product or service that lends itself to the world of social media, which is pretty much anyone these days.   You also have an email marketing database that you would like to grow and you have an idea of  “how can I get my Facebook fans to join my email list”.

Lucky for you, this process is easy and soon your facebook fan page and eConnect Email database will have a complimentary relationship.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Navigate to your fan page and select Edit Page (under your main image on the left hand side).
• Scroll down to Static FMBL under Applications. Click ‘Add To My Page’ when the pop-up window appears.
• Go back to your page, hit ‘Edit Page’ again and look for FMBL. Click the editing icon at right and click ‘Edit’.
• Cut and paste the code from your Subscription form which you’ve already created in your eConnect Email account.
• You’re good to go. Just like that. Simply rearrange everything how you’d like and you’re off to growing your mailing list.

Now when your boss complains about your Facebook usage, let em’ know you’re working. The crew @eConnectEmail will vouch for you!

I wish there was more we could do to get email marketers to use the tools available to them to help increase reader response. So much effort is put into making campaigns look beautiful but often the technology to help increase reader statistics are never used. So, on your next campaign, please consider the following tools to help make your emails a success.

1. Split Testing

This one is a no-brainer.  How awesome would it be to be able to test which headlines or titles would be most successful before sending a newspaper or book to print?  I guarantee if an author could do this he would because more purchases equal dollars in his pocket.  With email marking, this is easy and it’s called split testing. With split-testing, any reputable email platform will allow you stage a few options, hit send and let the system pick the winner based on the criteria you choose (opens and click-thru’s) and then delivers the remainder of your campaign to the winner. We’ve seen open rates at 20% spike to 45% and click-thru rates jump from 4% to over 10%, just by trying two different subject lines.

Benefit? Find out quickly what works and get a better response rate.

2 . List Segmenting

OK- another no brainer: Targeted emails are obviously more well received so let’s stop batching and blasting those emails to the entire mailing list and take a minute to segment that list.  By importing contacts into a single list with relevant fields of data for your market you can then search for specific criteria within that one list.  For instance if you would like to send an email to everyone on your list with a 92009 zip code you can, or even what products or services a group purchased previously and so on.

Benefit? Cleaner management of data, more targeted mailings, greater response rates.

3. Triggered Mailings/Auto-responders

Let your email marketing go to work for you…and forget about it.  It just takes a little time to set up a series of timed emails but once it’s done you can put your feet up and know that your customers are being informed or reminded of your services automatically.  Scenario: Someone visits your web site and requests a white paper or a trial of your software or perhaps they made a purchase.  Connect that information to your platform and stage mailings to “auto” deploy based on the criteria you set.

Benefit? Let technology go to work for you and keep the right (timed) communication in front of your audience.  Multiple touches and BAM!  They take action!

4. Personalization

This is email marketing 101, but do it in a creative fashion.  Think outside the box and work with the data you know about your subscribers.  Why not personalize an email with some details you know that wouldn’t be what you’d typically store in an email database.  Here’s one, “Hi Brett – we feel horrible.  Your birthday was yesterday and we were late.”  How clever.  Now, I may know intuitively you automated this somehow, but you cleverly spin it to sound human (we made an error!).  Have a purchase history on your customers stored somewhere?  Why not use that to merge the last product purchased or the last interaction with you.

Benefit? Email is all about relevancy.  You must know who your prospects and customers are, right?  Why not demonstrate that?  You’ll keep them engaged MUCH longer.

5. Social Follow & Social Sharing

At this point, if you are not working your email marketing and social networking together, you’re probably living under a rock.  You have to go where the eyeballs are and email/social is a powerful one-two punch.  If you have a Twitter feed or a Facebook fan page like us, you need icons in your emails to not only prompt your customers to follow you, but also to share the content inside your emails with their networks.  Forward to a friend is still a standard and many subscribers will use this, but the NEW forward is really the share feature.  It allows folks to connect this with their personal and professional networks quickly and easily and may garner you some new subscribers.

Benefit? Everyone knows hundreds, sometimes thousands of people you or I don’t. Why not tap that? Let them remarket on your behalf.

So there you have it.  These things are within your grasp today, and as always, the eConnect Email marketing platform lets you set these things up quite easily.  If you need help setting any of these things up in your account, as always, you can reach out to us at anytime.

Breaking news: Twitter is going out of business.

Just kidding.

In case you’ve had your head buried in paperwork, social media is only getting more popular.   In an effort to foster the growing relationship between email marketing and the world of status updates, eConnect Email has integrated Social Sharing into our application and now it can easily be added into your emails with the addition of a tiny little tag, Welcome to Social Email 1.0.

Any emails sent through eConnect Email that include the social sharing tag can now be shared with the following social networks with ease:

Email (of course)
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Google Buzz

Our system simply grabs your email’s subject line and creates a tiny URL using bit.ly to share a copy of your email to your social media world.  We have also integrated the Forward-To-A-Friend functionality in the Social Sharing center, making it easier to send your email to another inbox, although that is so last year.

So now that you’ve done the work to create your campaign you can leverage it to another audience with the click of a button.  Easy right?

Awesome. How easy is it?

Super, duper easy. If you are coding your emails by hand, you’ll simply include the following tags where you want a share prompt.  If your using the editor, simply click Custom Fields and you can insert either a text link or share  image automatically.

%%socialshare-icon%% will give you this:

%%socialshare-link%% will give you this: Share this

Below you will find a screen shot of what the Social Sharing landing page looks like once the “Share This” link or image is clicked.

So, can I tell how often it was shared?

Of course! When you log into your Reports area, you will see a Share Statistics tab.  Every time someone shares with a specific network, that number will be displayed in the reports, broken down by network.

What else should I know?

We started with the most popular social networks to share to, but may add more down the road depending on user feedback (so send us your feedback!).