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Over
the last few months we have worked with our clients to find
some easy tweaks to their email campaigns that have a big
boost on performance of the email campaigns. Here are our
favourites:
1)
Use a personal 'From' name
We have talked about this one in Maxenews a lot recently.
Numerous clients have found that by using a real person's
name and not simply the company name this has had a huge boost
on open rates. Results are also sustained over time.
2)
Check that bounce list
Over time most of you would have collected a list of addresses
that have bounced a certain number of times and you therefore
exclude these. A new client came Emailcenter and upon examining
why some people in our office had stopped receiving the newsletter
from them, we found it was because the old supplier had added
the addresses to the bounce suppression list.
Why
this had happened was unclear but presumably because the system
was blacklisted or perhaps unable to distinguish between hard
and soft bounces. We then discovered from this bounce list
of 120,000 addresses 45,000 were valid increasing their list
by around 20% overnight. This was achieved using a special
email validation tool and then subsequently looking at the
bounces.
3)
A/B Testing
Very rarely do we see marketers testing elements of their
email campaigns such as subject lines. With Maxemail it is
extremely simple to do - just enter how many you want each
version to go to and Maxemail will ensure no-one gets multiple
copies of the email.
Our
favourite split test was run by JML who looked at what would
happen if they removed the top menu linking to various parts
of their website from an email. Removing this reduced the
click-thru rate but they found the conversion rate was much
lower as people were clicking on this and drifting around
the website rather than following the defined landing pages.
Again
this is a simple 5 minute task to implement but results can
be huge.
4)
Checking the major spam filters
Clearly if your email gets blocked by an ISP or put into the
junk folder this is going to have a huge impact on open rates.
As an example a client was only achieving 3% open rates at
Yahoo which accounts for 14% of their list in total. Upon
analysing the Inbox Seeding tool in Maxemail they discovered
every email to Yahoo was being classified as junk.
Upon
further testing it was the URL where they stored their images
that triggered this. A quick email to Yahoo removed this in
24 hours enabling them to boost their open rates to nearer
20% at Yahoo.
While
you should always use a spam content checker this does not
tell you what will happen to your email at the likes of Yahoo,
Hotmail and AOL as they use different filters. You could of
course also send to some test accounts but this takes a long
time and is fiddly. This is why Inbox Seeding is the best
tool as it covers all the major ISP's and takes 5 minutes
to generate the results for you. The only issue is it does
not tell you why an email is classified as junk but that is
where the Emailcenter support team come in.
5) What does your email look
like?
We
have seen all sorts of email disasters and many of them are
in how the email is displayed in the inbox. This has included:
-
Black
text on a black background
-
The
entire email being displayed as a grey image when image
blocking is enabled
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Call-to-actions
are hidden when background images are not being displayed
Don't
expect your recipients to see the email in the same way you
do. Check your email using a preview tool such as Inbox Preview
in Maxemail as it is usually only small tweaks that will correct
the look of the email.
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