Archive for the 'Guest Bloggers' Category
February 22nd, 2010
ALT text is not something to ignore when putting together your email creative. Not all email clients will display your images’ ALT tags, but they’re still worth using. In the likely event that a recipient will have images blocked upon viewing your email content, the ALT text is what they will see first; if the text is visible and enticing, more recipients will open and click through your mailings.
It’s best to make your ALT text concise and clear, but try to use enough text to convey the content of the image. If you have a shiny orange image button covered with text and photos of packages, set it’s ALT attribute with just the text needed to convey the value – i.e. “50% Off Shipping – Click Here” (assuming you were, unfortunately, unable to use a bulletproof button in the first place).
Read more of “Don’t forget ALT text in your emails”…
February 10th, 2010
I attended a local bridal tradeshow with a friend of mine who is getting married soon. When we arrived we signed in with our contact information. I was asked to give my e-mail address. I threw caution to the wind and gave them my e-mail address. My e-mail address was then given to all the exhibitors. Lucky me and wow has my inbox (and junk folder) been flooded!!
I have been on the other side of that tradeshow booth. In my previous job, I helped manage, attend and follow up with booth attendees for a few tradeshows. They did about 15 tradeshows a year and we came back from those shows thinking we hit the jackpot with all of these e-mail addresses. So, I am guilty of this too.
Read more of “Tradeshow…Rules of Engagement”…
February 4th, 2010
Have you ever heard the mantra, “Your data is only as good as the database behind it”? With today’s technologies like email marketing and CRM, organizations have a wealth of data in which to use in managing their business and communications. We’ve talked previously about the data you bring into your Delivra account. How it can be used as a CRM. How you can personalize messaging from the data. How you can segment and target your audience with various mailings. The opportunities are endless really…if you can think it, your data can support it with Delivra!
With email, you often need a set criteria of data for a mailing like First Name, Last Name, Full Name and Email Address. However, did you know that you can bring in additional data (also known as User-Defined Fields) either from your CRM, your day-to-day administration system, or simply from an Excel file? By bringing in additional data, you are able to further customize and target your mailings. Here are just a few quick examples:
January 27th, 2010
We have over 50 columns of demographic data for each email address that our clients enter into our database. That is what is so nice about our business process; clients can enter as much or as little information as they want.
Our system is built so that our clients can upload any kind of data they want: letters, numbers, dates; if they can think of data they want to track, we can put it in our database. We have enough customizable columns in our members database that we can enter information tracking any kind of demographic data.
Read more of “Have data, will segment”…
January 22nd, 2010
Most of you probably know about scheduled and triggered e-mails. However, when talking with potential clients, I’m finding a lot of people still aren’t aware of the value. I was on a call with such a client and we were discussing the ways they use e-mail. They send out a monthly newsletter, updates on special events and membership renewal notices. I asked which task was the most frustrating. Hands down it was membership renewal reminder e-mails.
Read more of “Efficiency with E-mail: Are you making your email marketing work for you?”…
January 20th, 2010
Let’s say you’re just about done putting together your email content. It’s approved to send out and you’re proud of how great it looks. You send yourself a test email for one final check… and it’s completely blown apart! What do you do? Before you light your computer on fire and throw it at the nearest intern, check to see if it’s one of these top 4 issues.
January 7th, 2010
A Top 5 List to keep in mind when preparing your database for upload to the Delivra system.
Read more of “Import Your Members with Ease”…
January 6th, 2010
Every now and again, I have a client ask me if it’s possible to animate their email. Since it’s a bad idea to try to use Flash or embedded video, we can’t use animations either, right? Wrong—you can! Animated GIF images can definitely be used in your email campaigns, and if done right, can work to improve your results.
Read more of “Design Basics: Animation”…
December 29th, 2009
Often customers will ask me the following question.
Some of my recipients tell me they are receiving their mail in their Spam folder. What can I do to assist delivery to their in-boxes?
There are numerous SPAM firewalls being used by incoming mail servers today, many having much different scoring algorithms. The same content scored as legitimate by SPAM firewall brand X may be scored by SPAM firewall brand Y as SPAM. Moreover, the same SPAM firewall brand X can often be configured by the IT Admin to score incoming content with more sensitivity.
Here are a few things you, as the customer, can do to influence receiving mail servers to deliver your mail to your recipients’ in-boxes.
- First and foremost, make sure you are sending to a clean list. Delivery reputation follows a customer like credit history follows all of us.
- Publish an SPF record. Publishing an SPF record is easy to do and will tell receiving servers you are a reputable and trusted sender.
- Make your content less “SPAMMY” by removing words that are known to trigger SPAM firewalls. Run your Delivra mailing through our SPAM Analysis tool (we use Spam Assassin). It may not catch every phrase that will trigger every SPAM firewall out there but it will catch the obvious ones.
- Authenticate your sending domain using Domain Keys and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM). Authenticating your domain will help especially with delivery to Yahoo in-boxes.
You’ve contracted Delivra to help you create a good looking mailing and get that mailing delivered to your recipients’ servers. We promise to do our part. Follow the above advice and you will see increased delivery to your recipients’ in-boxes.
Todd Weymouth | Customer Support
December 17th, 2009
One of my clients wanted to know if her readers were making their way all the way to the bottom of their newsletter. She obviously wants everyone to read all the articles and she wasn’t seeing the click rates she wanted to the links in the last few articles. So we did a little test on the next mailing and tried two new things. The first was to include anchors that link to articles in the e-mail and the second thing we did was include a few landing pages instead of the whole article for some of the content.
The anchors were set as a table of contents for the readers. The reader can choose the article that is relevant to them and my client can see specific statistics of what articles are getting read the most and who is reading the article. What valuable information to have to help develop content for newsletters to come and to find out who is really engaged in your e-mail campaign.
Adding a few landing pages for extra content made the newsletter feel more concise and clean yet still informative. For her most important articles we included all of the text, but for the others we had “Click here to read more” that linked to a page for the full article. I helped her set up the pages using Delivra’s Email Editor. The landing pages are hosted by Delivra and (woohoo!) this service is included with our base price.
So what happened with the client? She saw her unique clickthrough rate double, granted she added about twice as many links to click on compared to her previous mailings. However, the lesson learned here is, the more opportunities you have to interact with your customers (i.e. the more links you have for people to click, download or share on social media) the better you are going to know your audience’s preferences for content and what gets them moving. How do you get your customers moving? Need some ideas? Call me at 317-269-7442 or Email me at rrewerts@delivra.com.
Rachel Rewerts | Sales & Business Development
