Adestra

Whilst we all feel the need to have a forward to a friend (FTAF) link on our email, are we doing enough to get those who are forwarded the email subscribed to our emails? Clearly if someone has taken the time out to think a friend or colleague would be interested in your content then that friend is more than likely going to want to receive your emails.

But have you thought how to get these signed up to receive future emails?

Traditionally links have been placed on the email ‘Have you been forwarded this email? Click here to subscribe.’ But these would have to be placed on the original email sent to those who have already subscribed, using up valuable space. So how about dynamically adding in a link to only those that have been forwarded the email to a subscription page?

This is possible through the Adestra platform (MessageFocus) FTAF feature.

A forward to a friend form would typically ask for your name and email address and your friend’s name, email address and any additional message you would like to add at the top of the email sent on. How about adding in a link here that says ‘Like what you see? Click here to subscribe to further emails like this one’ with a link to your subscription page or a subscription centre setup by Adestra that can automatically trigger out a welcome message and subscribe them to the relevant list(s).

A one off setup that can result in a high amount of new subscribers without using up valuable space in your original email; if you would like to find out more about this feature please contact us.

Andrew Abram, Client Strategy Consultant

Last month I presented at the B2B Marketing Magazines email excellence seminar, and this debate popped up again.  Adestra commented on this very subject in 2008 on the E-consultancy blog but how much has actually changed since then?

It is true that email results for acquisition are still substantially lower than for retention emails, and load and blast isn’t the best method either. There is one obvious reason why retention emails perform better than acquisition and that is because recipient knows who you are and so they read your email.

Now, if we transfer this to email for acquisition, the question is not “Is email for acquisition dead?” it’s “when should you use email for acquisition?” The simple answer is, when they know who you are.

Possible ways to do this:

• Following up your sales teams call list with a newsletter about the service / company.
• Using the data you have collected at an trade show to nurture prospects.
• Your company has spoken at event. See if you can use that data to send out the presentation and start a dialogue with the prospects.
• Competition entries, signups for whitepapers etc etc… use the information you have.

From here, these prospects can be entered into a lead nurturing programme which can include events, letters, email, telesales and face-to-face meetings to ensure they know who you are and you are building a rapport with your leads.

So no, email for acquisition is not dead, but using it to blanket email a bought list just won’t work for you any longer. Email should be a part of the lead nurturing process and cannot be relied on to close the deal for you, but it will help you to build that relationship with your prospects if used with other channels.

Reena Mistry, Group Account Director

Econsultancy and Adestra annual email marketing census has just been launched,  as always it will cover email marketing topics such as  Use of email services, Email marketing budgets,  ROI and effectiveness, Email Integration and Deliverability.

To take part all you will have to do is fill in the Email marketing Census 2010 survey, at the end of the survey you will also get the chance to fill in your details to get your own free copy (worth £150).

Adestra will hold a breakfast briefing in March where we will discuss the latest hot topics and best practice for email marketing for 2010, if you are interesting in taking part of that please feel  free to fill in your details on our contact us page.

Finally we would like to thank the Linus plus the team at Econsultancy and everyone else that has taken part in the 2010 Econsultancy and Adestra email marketing census, if you would like to stay up to date on these hot topics please subscribe to our RSS feed and/or newsletter to make sure that you receive the latest news.

The ability to report, track and respond to your recipients actions makes email a phenomenal and incredibly powerful marketing tool. As technology improves and reporting gets better and better, many people still rely on the “delivered” figure in their ESP to tell them how many people received their email. As important and fairly accurate this is, what if your email is going into the junk folder, or the server is not sending a bounceback?

How can you find out where your email is going?

There are other tools you can bolt on that will tell you this information. ReturnPath’s Mailbox Monitor tool is extremely powerful in telling you exactly what is going on with your email send. Simply by seeding your emails to Mailbox Monitor we at Adestra can monitor “inbox placement” for our clients so we know when their email is going to junk or going missing. Below is an example of one of our clients emails. You can then click on the email itself and find out exactly which email systems are junking or just not receiving your email.

From there, Adestra work with our clients to find out why their emails are not being delivered and advise on improving their deliverability.

To find out more about the deliverability tools we offer, please email us

Reena Mistry, Group Account Director

Email marketing excellence 27th Jan – Maximise email marketing effectiveness & ROI – Special offer – CLICK HERE

Come and see Reena Mistry, Group Account Director, presenting one of our award winning case studies.

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You don’t need to be a whiz at HTML code to create emails nowadays. Like in our platform MessageFocus there are editors that you can use to create nice looking campaigns without the hassle of learning how to bold text or change text to a specific branded colour.

But have you ever thought about learning some basic code to make your emails more enticing for your readers to open, click, reply to and convert?

Here are some easy tips to move your emails forward:-

• Do you send long or lots of infromation/offers in one email campaign?

Why not try adding anchor links so readers can click on the story they want to see.

• Are you creating the same campaign for different data segments?

Use dynamic content to create targetted messages at a click of a button. This will send the correct information from your database to the recipient.

• Who is Mr  ?

Why not add some personalisation code so if a field is blank within your data show a default or another field.

• Want to personalise your subject line?

Adding a recipient’s first name or company name within a subject line could intrigue to open to find out more.

Want to know how to do these tricks? Contact our support team on how add these onto your campaign or email our training department and learn how to do it yourself.

Joanne Taylor, Trainer

Spam filters are the bain of any email marketers life; I am constantly getting asked, ‘why is my email getting considered as junk’.

It is harder than ever to get legitimate email messages successfully delivered, this is hardly surprising when according to Symantec 87% of emails sent in October 2009 were spam. Therefore filters are increasingly becoming more sophisticated against spam emails. It’s not just one filter the email needs to get through, there are several, gateway filters, server filters, as well as desktop client filters.

Spammers are changing their tactics constantly to get around these filters, therefore ISP’s need to change how they monitor email in order to keep their customers inboxes clean. The results being that an email may sail into the inbox one week, the same email the following week could be filtered or blocked.

The key to ensuring your email passes all spam filters is to test, set up a number of test inboxes, and test your campaign to these.  An email may pass the spam filter in one email client but not in another, due to different spam rules.

Encourage your recipients to add your from address/domain to their safe senders list, to guarantee entry into their inboxes, it will also mean that images will be automatically downloaded too.

Make it easy for your recipient to unsubscribe from your emails, as it is far better they unsubscribe from your mailings rather than marking the email as spam.

Ensure all unsubscribe requests are adhered to as quickly as possible, if not instantly, also don’t repeatedly send to bounced email addresses, if ISP’s see you constantly trying to deliver to dead email address, this is going to have a negative effect on your deliverability.

99% of the time when I get asked ‘why is my email getting considered as junk’ the reason is content based. Be this the subject line, from name, main body content, link reputation, image to text ratio etc etc.

Tools such as ReturnPaths Campaign Preview and Mailbox Monitor make it easier in distinguishing if and why your email has been marked as spam.

Things to avoid when creating your email campaign are:-

• Subject Line – avoiding using CAPS, quotations marks, exclamation marks, dollar signs, plus spammy words such as discount.

• Main Body – consider the image to text ratio, using 100% images is a common spamming technique to get past content filters. Some words on their own or in conjunction with others can cause spam implications, try to avoid words such as, no obligations, no risk, money back guarantee, free offer / trail / application / access. In addition consider where you links are going, if you have a link in your email linking to a website which has been blacklisted this could cause your email to be classed as spam.

If you are having problems getting your email into the inbox, please contact us on moreinfo@adestra.com or speak to your Strategy Consultant.

Jenna Lovell, Client Strategy Executive

Adestra and its client RM were presented the top award in the ‘Best use of data’ category and runner-up for the ‘Best limited budget campaign’ at this year’s B2B Marketing Awards, which took place at the Honourable Artillery Company in London last night.

The email service provider received the top accolades for the outstanding results achieved with education company, RM. The brief was to ultimately boost sales revenues for the UK’s leading provider of educational software, computers and services to schools, colleges, and universities.

The campaign intelligently utilised data and response behaviour by adopting upfront analytics to track, segment and target groups accordingly. With a limited budget of only £6,300, the campaign delivered phenomenal results, outstripping the ROI target of 12:1 by over 80%, and delivering over £1.25 million in revenue.

Julie Dixon, Senior Marketing Executive at RM, comments: “This has been the most complex and data driven online campaign we have ever run. Discovering and responding to customers’ individual needs across our 400,000 UK B2B contact database has been a huge undertaking. The customer data was used judiciously to create both the initial strategy and then drive the successful campaign. The level of tracking and data analysis was unprecedented. As a result, the outcome has been astonishing with ROI far exceeding our expectations.”

- Notes to editors -

For further information please contact:

Hollie Williams, Marketing Manager – hw@adestra.com or tel: +44 (0) 1865 24 24 25

About Adestra

Adestra is an industry leading, email marketing company operating in the B2B and B2C markets. The company is industry leading because it provides its clients with their best opportunity for strong sales results. Adestra achieves this through the combination of today’s most effective email marketing tool, MessageFocus, successful strategies to boost deliverability, and the best, most experienced brains in the business to help you turn large numbers of prospects into customers. Our own customers include Tiscali, Dennis Publishing, BBC Worldwide, LloydsTSB and British Red Cross.

About RM

RM is an education company. It works closely with its customers to find the next best thing to help teachers in their teaching and learners in their learning. Founded in Oxford in 1973, RM pioneered the use of technology in education. Since then its range of products and services has continued to expand to meet the needs of schools, colleges and universities. Through the acquisition of a number of companies across the education field RM’s expertise is now much wider than ICT and includes furniture, games and resources. And, if you factor in its offices in the US, India, Dubai and Australia, it has a growing international flavour too.

The Email Marketing Statistics document is a comprehensive compilation of internet statistics and online market research with data, facts, charts and figures that are ideal for presentations, business cases or client pitches, RFPs and understanding the marketplace as a whole.

Read more here – http://econsultancy.com/reports/email-marketing-statistics

Hollie Williams, Marketing Manager

@econsultancy have just posted an interesting article http://bit.ly/4Qz9H1 on a recent Which? report on poor customer experiences relating to product delivery. I expect that we have all, at some point in our lives had issues with delivery companies leaving things on show, damaging items in transit or having completely inflexible delivery processes.

Personally when this has happened to me I haven’t necessarily blamed the website I have used to make the purchase but ultimately they choose who to use for delivery so 9 times out of 10 the end result is that I go elsewhere next time. With so many possible suppliers for products in the modern online age any differentiator, however minor can be enough to sway me.

Brand, price and service are all equally important in gaining me as a customer initially but these standards must be maintained to keep me. Brand and price can be measured as can service post sale but do you do it? You can…

As a self confessed DIY geek I recently purchased a few items from Screwfix. I was attracted by their price, range of products and the promise of fast delivery. They delivered on all fronts but not resting on their laurels they emailed me a few days after delivery to check that I was happy with the product and the delivery service. I was also invited to review the product to share my experiences. Excellent!

Screwfix get to hear all about my delivery experience good or bad and can act accordingly, managing poor experiences or maximising the value of good experiences by enabling happy customers to become brand advocates.

As it transpired they good full marks all round and a glowing review for the product. Job done!

The same process can apply for any fulfilment be it a physical product delivery, event or service and with data fed into MessageFocus automatically the follow up campaigns need not take up resource. Speak with your commercial manager to discuss options for managing your customer experience

Rob Hunter, Group Account Director