Adestra

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

Emails sent by online marketers can now be automatically updated with the latest offers and news updates posted on any website, saving marketers thousands of pounds in wasted time and effort.

Adestra, a leading email service provider (ESP), has just launched the automated ‘Remote Content Pull’ an on-demand feature for MessageFocus, which streamlines the process of refreshing an email template, so customers can immediately receive relevant information or alerts posted on any website via XML.

The tool improves efficiency and accuracy while reducing the time it takes to produce email copy which includes content already prepared for the web. Content can also be applied conditionally based upon the values in the contact data, allowing powerful up sell and cross sell opportunities.

Some applications of the tool include:

• Newsletters and customer retention emails – pull the latest blog article titles and summaries

• Email Alerts – use your RSS feeds for subject line and interest areas on your site as a quick and easy way to initiate an automated program of email alerts.

• Subscriptions Programme – Automated campaigns which pull in up-to-date product specific and cross sell content

• Recurring Campaigns – ‘birthday’ emails, ‘product of the day’ and other regular email marketing initiatives

For further information please contact:

Hollie Williams – or tel: +44 (0) 1865 24 24 25

I had a meeting recently with a client who were looking to improve their unsubscribe process after feedback recentlyreceived from their customers highlighted the fact that some were receiving communications that were not of interest to them. With a big push in list growth a while back, the need to manage the relevance of their emails was soon seen as a high requirement.

I was actually impressed that the client came to me with the need to evaluate their whole unsubscribe process, too often the unsubscribe process is seen as a negative thing and doesn’t get the attention it requires but it is important; after all, who wants to speak to someone who doesn’t want to listen?

Now when it comes to why people unsubscribe the reasons are never straight forward, there can be numerous factors as to why someone may want to unsubscribe, not just because they don’t want to receive messages from you. This is where the preference centre comes in.  Adestra have seen that when a preference centre option is offered unsubscribe rates drop significantly.

A preference centre is a way for subscribers to pick what titles, what type of communication (events, marketing, newsletters for example) and what 3^rd party emails they want to receive. It overcomes the problem of just offering a global opt-out and also gives them the chance to opt in to titles that they may not have previously been aware off; a method of cross-promoting titles. It can also act as ‘an update your details’ form, a great way to capture updated details, especially useful if you are segmenting data based on demographics or work information.

Adestra’s preference centre functionality can automatically manage all this. When clicking through from an email to update their details, a subscriber can automatically see what they are opted in to receive, as well as what they may be missing out on. Once they have amended their details and submitted, their contact information will automatically be updated, meaning no manual work is required from you. The form can also be hosted elsewhere, on your website for example, so subscribers always have a chance to update their details.

Ultimately a preference centre is a way of keeping your customers engaged and allows them to just receive the emails they want to receive; something that us email marketers keep going on about.

To find out more about  this please contact your account manager or email us

Andrew Abram, Client Strategy Consultant

With the uncertainty around the post at the moment, lots of people are turning to email to make sure their customers received timely communication about any problems, or just to reassure them. Here are a few that I have received recently that caught my eye.

Love film

A really lovely proactive effort to ensure trial customers have a good experience they are offering a 2 week extension.

The Wicked Uncle

The only email I’ve seen that gives the striking postal workers some support and appreciation for what they do. With the subject line “We love the Royal Mail and more cool stuff” I opened the email and may have purchased something too.

Reena Mistry
Group Account Director

Leading email service provider, Adestra, has launched a unique product that enables users to identify the conversion rates of their email marketing campaigns using any web analytics provider they like. The software, designed by Adestra and integrated into the MessageFocus email platform, is the first of its kind that allows its users to gain end-to-end tracking with all providers worldwide.

According to Adestra’s lastest survey on B2B and B2C marketers , identifying the ROI of an email marketing campaign is one of the biggest challenges facing the industry.  However, with the launch of Adestra’s product, accessing complex information on subscribers’ online behaviour has never been easier or cheaper as the process is streamlined.

Integrating web analytics with email marketing allows marketers to look beyond the usual campaign metrics such as open, read and click-through rates.  Marketers can track, for example, the subscribers’ engagement as they navigate through the site, identify landing pages with high exit rates and average times on sites.

This level of tracking will help marketers improve their ROI, as this valuable information is utilised so future campaigns become targeted and relevant. According to Forrester Consulting, integrating web analytics and email can generate nearly four times more revenue and 18 times greater net profits compared to using simple untargeted email campaigns.

Hollie Williams, Marketing Manager

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

Come and see us presenting @ ECMOD 7th Oct @ 14.15 email deliverability with IWOOT – sign up here for FREE email advice http://bit.ly/P629m