Adestra

Our 2010 Email Marketing Industry Census found that more than a third of companies (37%) are using email to encourage the sharing of content on social networks, and just under a third of companies (31%) say they are planning to do this. However this just doesn’t have to be a one way relationship; Facebook has a great little tool that allows you to host email signup forms on your fan pages also. Instructions on this can be found below.

Add the Static FBML app to your page

You will need to have access to the Facebook Static FBML app in order to do this; simply type Static FBML into the Facebook search box and choose ‘Static FBML’.

Once you are on the page, on the left hand side of this screen select the link ‘Add to my page’, a pop-up box will ask you which fan page you would like to add this to and select ‘Add to Page’ next to the relevant one.

Adding your Sign Up Form

Now, go to your page and select ‘Edit Page’ from the left hand menu, this will provide you with a number of options; choose the edit link under FBML

You are now presented with a box that you can copy and paste your subscription form HTML code into.

If you currently have a form created by Adestra, contact us here or if you would like to have one setup, you can get in touch with us here. Once you have the code, simply copy and paste into the box and choose Save changes.

Add as a Tab to your Fan Page

Finally, go back to your fan page. If your sign up tab is not already there, choose the “+” symbol next to your tabs and select the form you have just created. People now the option to sign up to your emails direct from Facebook.

Andrew Abram, Client Strategy Consultant

Marketers are using social media to enhance their email marketing campaigns rather than to replace them, according to new research published by Econsultancy and Adestra today.

The fourth annual Email Marketing Industry Census found that more than a third of companies (37%) are using email to encourage the sharing of content on social networks, and just under a third of companies (31%) say they are planning to do this.

A fifth of companies (21%) are using email to promote customer ratings and reviews, while a further 26% have plans to do this. The research also found that 28% of companies are using video content in their emails, as marketers increasingly use email to build customer engagement.

The 2010 research, based on a survey of almost 900 digital marketers carried out in January and February 2010, found that email marketing now accounts for 17% of digital marketing budgets compared to 14% in 2009.

Increased investment can be attributed to the fact that the vast majority of responding companies (75%) rate email as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ for return on investment.

Henry Hyder-Smith, Managing Director at email service provider Adestra, said: “The explosive impact of social media on email marketing and its significance on this year’s census can’t be ignored. We are delighted to see that email is far from dying in the midst of the social media revolution. And instead of cannibalisation, we are witnessing a solid partnership evolving between the two; email and social media working in harmony to fuel one another.”

Despite the fact that many companies are becoming more sophisticated with their email marketing, and integrating this channel with other activities, there remains concern that many marketers are still not following basic best practice, the research has found.

Too many organisations are still not paying sufficient attention to the quality of their lists and the importance of relevant email.
The research, sponsored by Adestra for the fourth year running, found that:

• Only 56% of companies are using opt-in (43%) or confirmed opt-in (13%) data for their acquisition emails, while only 60% are using opt-in (39%) or confirmed opt-in (21%) data for their retention emails.

• The quality of database is deemed to be the biggest barrier to effective email marketing. This is cited as a problem by 61% of marketers, up from 44% in 2009. But only a third (32%) of company respondents say list / data quality is a top-three priority for 2010.

• The proportion of responding companies have problems reaching recipients’ inboxes has increased from 51% last year to 54%. The percentage of companies who say that deliverability is a barrier to success has increased from 13% in 2009 to 24% in 2010.

Linus Gregoriadis, Research Director at Econsultancy, said: “Companies must take care to focus on the relevance of their email in a world where it is becoming increasingly important for brands to demonstrate value, rather than bombarding people with unwanted messages. Sophisticated segmentation and effective list-cleansing are more important than ever. ”
Other key findings include:

• More than half of companies (54%) are now using a hosted email service as the growth of web-based email applications continues. This percentage compares to 47% last year, a third (33%) of respondents in 2008, and only a quarter (27%) in 2007.

• There has been a significant increase (+5%) in the proportion of companies who say that return on investment (ROI) from email is more than 500%.
• But as witnessed in previous years, there are still too few companies who understand their ROI from email. Thirty-nine per cent of companies still don’t know their ROI from email. More encouragingly, looking at those who can quantify their return from email, there has been an increase in companies who say that they get more than 500% ROI from this channel.

• From a range of email marketing practices, companies are most likely to be carrying out basic segmentation (80%) and regular list-cleansing (58%). The practices respondents are most likely to be planning to carry out are advanced segmentation (42%), content personalisation beyond name (37%) and behavioural targeting based on web activity (34%).

• The integration of email marketing with other sales and marketing activities is an on-going challenge, and there isn’t much evidence of significant improvement in this area since the first Email Census in 2007. Only 17% say that their email marketing is “fully integrated”, the same proportion as last year.

Report URL – Email Marketing Census 2010

Journalists, Please contact Hollie Williams for more info

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

Recently I attended the Webtrends Engage conference and one of the most interesting questions that came up was should you let your customers opt in to relevance?

With today’s technology you can easily integrate any ESP with analytics vendors, most free vendors like Google Analytics will not let you track PII but when you are at a level to start harnessing the power of your data and are ready to take the step to an enterprise analytics vendor like Webtrends and Omniture you really can track everything.

But before you do this with automatic retargeting campaigns  should you let your customers opt in for these higly relevant emails or campaigns?

I am not talking about opting in for email marketing as I am sure that before you get here you have already fined tuned your confirmed opt in experience for email marketing.

My question is more… should you let your users opt in for relevance?

All comments and feedback are welcome here.

Fred Wahlqvist, Partnerships and solutions

If yes, you’re among a growing trend of people who are logging on and downloading their email via a mobile phone. A study conducted by MarketingSherpa indicates 64% of key decision makers access their emails on a mobile platform. This trend is further supported by the fact that 36.4 million smart phones were sold in Q1 of 2009 worldwide (Gartner.com), principally indicating a large user base capable and willing to make use of mobile email access.

At present the majority of marketers are not fully optimising their emails for cross platform devices and as a result performance is hampered. With the increase of mobile usage, content creators will increasingly need to be aware of current and future device’s limitations, namely the lack of screen real estate and resolution.

The latest Smartphone’s are getting better at handling HTML, and showing images however there are a large proportion that are still unable to do so. The rendering of such emails may mean the difference between a client reading and interacting with the email or merely deleting the email, consequently losing any chance of an interaction.

To overcome the issues discussed above, there is a function within MessageFocus allowing you to create a mobile friendly version of your email. The main benefits of which; allow key messages to be delivered without unnecessary information leading to increased levels of performance.

If you require any further advice please contact your strategy consultant or email us moreinfo@adestra.com

With the recent announcement of Adestras partnership with ReturnPath, the world’s leading email deliverability provider, I thought now would be a good time to discuss the tools we have available to you to really go the extra step to ensure your emails are getting into the inbox (and how they look once they get there).

Do you know what percentage of your emails get into the inbox?

You probably have an idea using the campaign reports available you but would it shock you if I said a recent ReturnPath study has found that 20% of legitimate email never reaches the inbox? That’s a pretty big chunk by anyone’s standards and a statistic that I don’t think you can ignore.

So, with this in mind, what can be done to ensure your data does not fall into this statistic?

By taking advantage of our Return Path tool you have the ability to fully analyse your sender reputation, check how an email displays in the inbox, run copy against the most popular SPAM filters and a whole lot more! Below are a couple of examples of the tools available to you.

Mailbox Monitor

A quick yet powerful way of checking across the board if emails are reaching the inbox, bulk folder or simply ‘going missing’. By sending to a seed list of 137 different ISPs around the globe (with multiple addresses for each ISP) you can easily see what percentage reaches the inbox. As these are real addresses this is an accurate reflection of what is happening each time you send to your list and the best thing is, if you see a problem you can get in touch with us straight away so we can start to improve things.

Campaign Preview

You probably know that email displays differently in different email clients. You’d probably like to see just how they display in each of these but certainly don’t have the time and considering the different variables involved (images on/images off, viewing in the preview pane both vertical and horizontal) this is certainly understandable. But how your email is rendering across the various clients is key to the success of your email strategy.

Campaign Preview is a way of checking all the above different options at the touch of a button (well, a selection from a list) and can quickly highlight such things as:

• Is your message getting across in the preview pane?
• Is there no message at all if images are off?
• What happens if someone’s outlook preview is horizontal yet another’s is vertical?
• What is your blackberry readership seeing?

These are just a couple of examples of what you can do with Adestra’s new deliverability tools. If you would like to find out more speak to your Strategy Consultant or Account manager to see how Adestra can help improve and maintain your reputation.

If you are not a client of Adestra please contact our sales team on 01865  24 24 25 or email us moreinfo@adestra.com

The age of load and blast is officially over, and reporting on open rates and click throughs just aren’t enough. So, how can you use what is available to you to find out more about the people who have taken action on your email?

1. Who has converted? Whether a conversion for you is a purchase, subscribing to a free trial or downloading a PDF, analysing your conversions is important. With Adestra’s conversion tracking (see case study), not only can you see the “conversions”, you will also see who has abandoned the conversion process allowing you to follow up these warm prospects. If you are finding lots of people are abandoning the process, it may be time to refresh the process or the page that people are getting stuck at.
2. Where are they going after your email? Using your web analytics package, you can track and see where people have gone after your email. Compare the number of pages visited and the average order value of your email recipients versus other site visitors. Also see if email-driven visitors are steering clear of certain navigational paths popular with other visitors; perhaps you should then incorporate those pages into a future email. Using Adestra’s web analytics integration, you can do this quickly and easily.

To find out more about conversion tracking and web analytics integration and how we can help you to get more out of your email marketing, please email strategy@adestra.com

Reena Mistry, Group Account Director

In the current financial climate it’s no surprise that clients are asking me how they can extract extra value from their online marketing activity. “I want to generate extra sales/bookings/visitors but I don’t have the resource available right now to put together additional content. How can I squeeze extra value out of what I have already?”

This need not be as difficult as it might sound!

With email marketing you have access to information that is all too often overlooked – visibility of how recipients interact with your communications. Of course, we all use open and click information to generate stats but do you know you can drill down to see which individuals clicked and which didn’t?
Might not sound that interesting but consider the opportunities to:

• Resend to non-openers, perhaps with a different subject line, or at a different time
• Resend to those that open but don’t click, perhaps with revised content
• Resend to those that click but don’t convert. Maybe with a greater incentive or offer

All of the above and more is possible using MessageFocus – now, using the new filter tool, available within your MessageFocus account. The filter tool can be used to segment a list by pretty much any combination you can think of using data in your list and interaction with previous email campaigns.

Speak to your Strategy Consultant or Account Manager to discuss how filters can help you improve your campaign performance.

Rob Hunter, Client Strategy Consultant

A question that often comes up is “how to code an email for a “blackberry”, “iPhone”,  “windows mobile”  etc…

Before you start you should probably ask your clients if they prefer to receive TEXT or HTML emails, a good time for that would be at the signup process.

Ok now let’s have a look at some of the current popular models:

BlackBerry

They have several different models, Storm, Bold, Curve is to name a few.  At the moment most models don’t have HTML switched on as default and they will display the TEXT version in a multipart message or even worse, the HTML email non formatted. The screen resolution is everything from 240×260 to 480×320 pixels.

 iPhone

The iPhone is a mobile from Apple. The iPhone has native HTML email support but you also have the option to download different applications via its app store, the screen resolution of an iPhone is 320×480 pixels, unfortunately Apple also removed the preview pane before the release of the iPhone.

Windows Mobile

Windows mobile is currently in version 6.1 and an update is scheduled for 2010, its market share for smart phones is about 13%. With Windows mobile you can get HTML emails via outlook mobile but they do not support CSS.

Android

Android is like Windows Mobile an OS, however it has only been around for a couple of months, one big factor with Android is that it’s an open platform, so anyone can develop applications that can render HTML emails.

Symbian

Symbian is the largest OS for smart phones, with a market share of 46.6% (Q3 2008) according to Canalys. As Symbian is an OS there are several different screen resolutions, ranging from 240×320 pixels to 800×352 pixels. When it comes to email clients there are many options.

Ok great, the variations are endless.  Well as on desktop email clients the variations are endless, so let’s be a bit restrictive.

Pixels

As the smallest resolution among these system is 240×320 pixels I would recommend that you have your call to action in the top 240 pixels and not wider than 320 pixels.

Images

Images are not downloaded by default on most clients so having an alt tag is a must (the image label which will show prior to image download) Also don’t rely on images to display important information!

Links

As most mobile devices will display the raw url instead of the masked it is always good to have a short url and human readable if possible.

Size

As a lot of end users pay for what they download the size of your emails will matter to them, so avoid big file sizes and make sure that your images are not too memory draining.  Some devices have a size cut-off point.

Layout

Try to stick to a single column layout as some handhelds will display the first column and then the second – very user unfriendly.

Coding

Makes sure that your codes is XHTML compliant and test it against a validator before doing live tests and sends.

Fredrik Wahlqvist
Territory Manager, North America

What a horrid, wet and cold bank holiday that was. It probably gave you the same problem I faced; what were we going to do?

Let’s face it; most of us plan something for our bank holidays. But when bad weather comes along, you have to find something else to do, indoors.

I was reading E-consultancy’s Email Marketing Census the other day and noticed an interesting fact: More than half of company email marketers (57%) said their organisations were using less than 50% of their email systems’ functionality.

This surprised me. Most of the email marketers I have spoken to in the last month plan to use a number of advanced techniques to ensure their messages are as relevant as possible, yet through the survey it looks like some form of unpredictable ‘bad weather’ has come along and ruined these best laid plans.

Like other ESPs, we invest in our platform functionality as we work with our customers to produce tools to improve their marketing performance. At Adestra, our product road map is driven by our clients and market trends. Reacting to market needs means that every piece of functionality is developed to allow UK email marketers to be more effective. This consultation process ensures our messages are relevant and useful.

So why aren’t they using the features?

Not everyone needs every bit of functionality out there. B2B companies with no forms/e-commerce capabilities do not need to integrate with their website. Companies with no demographic information about their contacts cannot adopt demographic targeting as the basis of their segmentation model. Marketers sending irregular newsletters may not perform real time synchronisation and integration of their email marketing database with their CRM system.

However, according to the survey, the biggest barriers to effective email use (according to company email marketers) are as follows:

1. Lack of Skills & Training (42% viewed this as a problem)
2. Lack of Budget / Finances (39%)
3. Lack of Strategy (36%)
4. Lack of Segmentation (35%)
5. Quality of Email Database (35%)

Working in the industry for a great number of years, I believe the root cause of this problem is simply not having enough time, particularly when you’re in a 4 day week after a bank holiday!

If you don’t have time, then you find yourself rushing the email out instead of taking time to look at what you’re doing, trying to use the features provided by your ESP, and understand how they can improve the results.

Something as simple as ensuring that all records are de-duped so that you can build a history of a contact’s behaviour over time means that targeting all those people that respond in a certain way is possible.

Setting up order tracking by including some tracking code on your web site to get an idea of ROI allows you to understand and build testing plans to improve your email marketing.

Spending some time to set up some small things mean that when you do have time, at least you have things set up to take your marketing to the next stage when you’re ready

What about getting some training?

With the majority of contacts believing that a skills deficit is a problem. There are a number of good courses out there including those offered by E-consultancy itself.

There is nothing better for networking with your peers than attending a big industry conference. The DMA is organising a series of events on email marketing, the next one of which is “Sophisticated Email Marketing” on the 14th June.

My top tip though would be to ensure that any staff you do your best to retain any staff whom have with a genuine interest in email marketing. It’s a thought echoed by this very site:

“If you have staff that specialise in email marketing, retain them! With 42% of people citing skill shortages as a barrier to effective email marketing, keeping the experts and training your other staff should be a priority for every marketing director.” *

I think one thing that is often overlooked is the shared knowledge that the email marketing companies can provide. Speak to your email marketing partner and ask them what else you could be doing. Getting this two way dialogue will allow you to see the quick wins and allow you to understand how the advanced functionality can help you in your role.

A final thought would be for those people looking to appoint a new email marketing partner. Having the functionality that you can use today and tomorrow is often better than having every piece of functionality available. Conducting an in depth and internal review of your requirements will enable you to identify the best partner for your email marketing requirements.

Henry Hyder-Smith, MD