If you’ve done any research on email best practices, you’ve read about a lot of rules and guidelines.  For any beginning email marketer this is a must.  After getting to know your recipients, learning the basics, and knowing which rules can and which rules cannot be bent, it may be time to start experimenting.  Track your data closely along the way and make notes on what works for you and what doesn’t.  Good designers experiment in breaking the rules; great designers have the experience to know which rules to break.

An example: a client of ours sends out a weekly e-newsletter.  Due to a very design-heavy format, we created it using only images above-the-fold excluding the ‘view as webpage’ link.  We knew this was breaking a general best practice, but decided it was worth testing out in that format as the design (with images on) was so strong.  Interestingly enough, this newsletter scored one of the highest CTRs I’ve seen in my years at Delivra. Combined with their responsive recipient base (who were already used to image/HTML emails) and highly timely and relevant content, this format proved a success for this client and continues to today.

Am I saying you should redesign your mailings to be all images?  No.  But I am saying it’s always worth testing.  Your recipient base may respond to your content in ways that could surprise you.

It’s interesting to think how email design may change in the next 5 years because of marketers/designers that decide to bend the rules.

Celeste Odell | Design Services

I receive the daily Seth Godin blog posting via email. Most days it’s just entertainment but today’s topic got me thinking.

He commented, “Every 18 months for the last decade, the world has doubled the data it pushes to you. Twice as much email, twice as many friend requests, twice as many sites to check, twice as many devices. When does your mind lose the ability to keep up? Then what happens? Is it already happening?”

YES. IT’S ALREADY HAPPENING! At least for me it is…

Here’s an example. I signed up for a local restaurant’s email newsletter. The first issue arrived yesterday. It contained 60 lines of text and a logo. Do they really think I’m going to read it? Wouldn’t a mouth-watering image of their famous beef sandwich be more enticing? How about a bar-coded coupon that automatically tracks redemptions?

I also noted that they were using an email service provider with prices starting a $10/month.

Take away: With the plethora of data we all unavoidably are required to process, your organization needs to treat customer communications with the utmost care. If you’re a restaurant, don’t budget $10/month and ask the cashier to come up with something to say.

If you don’t have the internal resources to get the job done right, hire it out. Many Delivra clients do just that and the results are truly amazing.

Looking to find out how you can concentrate on your core business and leave email marketing to the experts? Contact us at 866-915-9465.

Neil Berman | President & CEO

I have the exciting opportunity to partner with a client who is literally starting from scratch. No e-mail content to send and no e-mail addresses to e-mail the content to. What a fantastic situation to be in!! First, it answers the age old question “How many e-mail addresses do I need to have in my database to sign up for Delivra services?” Apparently you do not need any. Second, starting from scratch gives them the opportunity to start with best practices from day one, think through and determine their long term goals with e-mail marketing, establish what is going to be the most effective way to grow their list, design a branded HTML template to mirror the website, and set benchmarks for success.

I believe that anyone can theoretically start from scratch.  What would you do differently if you had a blank slate? What process would you change? Template would you redesign? Benchmarks you would set? The good news isthat you can start over one change at a time. The new client and I are not making all these decisions all at once and you don’t have to either.  Just change one thing.

• Ask for a quote on a personalized custom template (or make some changes to one of our new templates).
• Set up an automated Welcome Message.
• Talk to your account manager about determining benchmarks for success.
• Brainstorm with your team about opportunities to capture new e-mail addresses and demographic information (ask us about a profile form if you do not have one).

Little changes can make a big impact. Need help figuring out what to change first? Call us. That’s what we are here for.

Rachel Rewerts | Account Management

Sometimes I feel like I have beat this social media trend into the ground, but just when I take a break, I see some genius marketing execution out there on some update or post.

For example, here is what I just received:

Which led me to this…..

Starburst has not only used social media to build their brand and fanbase, but now it seems they are integrating backwards and using it as a tool to build their email database.  Now I love Starburst and I am thrilled that I can simply buy a package with my favorite flavor in it, so of course I signed up for the coupon and was immediately able to print it out.  I’m curious to see what comes next……

The reason being, as integrated and seamless as their campaign felt in the beginning and the excitement I felt as a marketer seeing social media combined with email opt-in or list generation, I was deflated to see that there is no true “opt-in” language.  If they are planning to use this list to send email communications, they could very well be flagged as spam or ignored by the very people they were trying to reach.

What could they have done?  I would recommend that they add a checkbox with permission giving Starburst the authority to send me email communications.  Then, I might even take it a step further with elements from a profile form and ask them what types of communications do they want to receive?  Things like….

• Coupons
• Monthly News
• New Product Updates

I do have to say that Starburst has come really close though at full integration with their social media & online marketing.  If they take the steps for permission, they will have quite the database to continue building that following they seem to already have!

Carissa Newton | Marketing

Photo by flickr user mattcyp88

Now that our user interface has had its recent facelift, it’s time that our online help pages were revised as well, for all the same reasons. For too long, we have relied on help content provided by our main technology partner, but that content no longer makes enough sense to our users since we’ve added new technology partners and made so many improvements of our own to the Delivra platform.

So we recently hired a technical writer to create an online help file that would be unique and proprietary to Delivra. Our writer was new to email marketing, so had some research to do before he could start authoring help content. One day, after he read about our clickstream- and purchase-tracking capabilities, he told me something like this:

“I had no idea that senders could see information about what pages I visited on their web site, or what I purchased from them after reading their email. That’s huge! I wish these companies I buy my climbing gear from would use something like this. Then they could send me information I want about their climbing gear, and quit sending me generic ads for things like jogging strollers that I’ve never bought and never will.”

He seemed genuinely irked to learn that such technology was available, but not being used by the companies that have him on their mailing lists. If they could detect what his interests are, and target him with emails relevant to those interests, they would have a much better chance of selling to him—he would welcome those mailings! Instead, those companies persist in using the “batch-and-blast” method of sending the same generic message to everyone who has ever opted into their list.

Often, when we talk about relevance in email, we in the email delivery business tend to focus on the deliverability benefits of engaged recipients. And it’s definitely true that more people opening, clicking, or forwarding your email means that ISPs are less likely to see your email as spam. But there’s another reason you want to be relevant: because your customers will appreciate it!

Figure out what your recipients do and don’t want, then give them more of what they want, and less of what they don’t. Accomplish that, and the engagement metrics affecting deliverability will take care of themselves.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

P.S. Delivra users will notice that the first segment of our new online help is live as of today. Covering the Members section of our application, it includes help pages for the new CSV import, which is now enabled for all of our clients who haven’t already been using it.

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:

• You want to designate frequent customers in your database-HINT:  Use a Comment or Text field to add this data, then create a segment for that group of customers.)
• You want to communicate with members that were at a specific event-HINT:  Again, user a Comment or Text field to add this data, then create a segment for that group.)
• You track customers by the amount of business they have done, or maybe you track donors by the amount they have donated-HINT:  Use a Number field to bring in that data.  Then once the data is there, you can personalize a mailing with that data point or segment, so each communication is targeted to what fits them.)
• Want to send Birthday or Anniversary Reminders? Renewal notices?-HINT:  Use a Date field, then customize, personalize or segment your lists by those dates.)

You may be scratching your head thinking, “all of these best practices seem great, but where is the how-to to get me started?”  The answer is just a click away. Go to this page see a list of ALL fields in the Members database table. Datatypes and allowed value length limits for all fields are stated here as well.

But all fields aren’t created equal. Some database fields are reserved by the system, and cannot be imported into. The various user-defined fields you can use to store user-defined data are listed and separated by commas below.

Additional_, AddressAltPhone_, AddressCity_, AddressPhone_, AddressState_, AddressZip_, Comment_, Comment2_, Comment3_, Comment4_, Comment5_, Comment6_, Comment7_, Company_, FirstName_, LastName_, Number1_, Number2_, Number3_, Number4_, Number5_, ProfileCompanySize_, ProfileDept_, ProfileIndustry_, ProfileTitle_, Text1_, Text2_, Text3_, Text4_, Text5_, Text6_, Text7_, Text8_, Text9_, Text10_, Text11_, UserDate_, UserDate1_, UserDate2_, UserDate3_, UserDate4, UserDate5_, UserID_

With our new import tool, you can bring in your data in the same way you do when you are adding a member or multiple members.  Then when you import your data, the wizard will walk your through mapping the fields of your data to the fields in your Delivra account. Just think, now with all this rich data, you will be able to personalize, segment, and target to your heart’s content.  Need help?  Don’t hesitate to contact us at 866-915-9465 or at support@delivra.com.

Todd Weymouth | Customer Support

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.

But one of the data columns that I’m surprised isn’t utilized by nearly everyone is the zip code data. One of our secondary processes in the database involves downloading a list of all active zip codes utilized by the United States Postal Service every quarter. With a little analysis, clients who have this information uploaded can target mailings to customers who live only in a specific region of the country, a specific state, even a specific zip code.

Clients don’t even have to know the specific zip code of the area they are sending to. You can expand the geographic scope of your mailing to encompass increasingly large sizes.  With our Geographic search feature, customers are able to select an area, then expand the scope of the mailing to send to any email address found in any zip codes within a 50, 100, or 200  miles (for example) radius! This makes the process much easier than, for example, finding all the zip codes that encompass ‘Central California’ or finding all zip codes in the state of Wisconsin.

Brent Dragoo | Database Administrator

I attended a fund raising dinner last week for the Bonner Center, an inner city community organization, supported by our accounting firm Simons Bitzer.  My host commented on the challenges some of his clients were experiencing as a result of lack of financial controls and compounded by the weak economy.

“Delivra’s success is an excellent example of what good financial data can do,” he commented.

I replied, “We are a data driven organization. Every possible activity is quantified, not just the income statement.”

In good times or bad, measuring performance or lack thereof, is a mission critical business function.

Neil Berman | President & CEO