A preview of a Mogul newsletter

Email newsletters are really great. If you don’t believe me, read my earlier blog post about email marketing.

But you need people to sign up to receive them, and it can be really hard to convince someone to sign up for something they can’t preview.

Here are four reasons why an email preview is good…

• The reader will be more likely to sign up if they can see how good your content is.
• A well-presented HTML newsletter is part of your brand and showcases your quality.
• The reader won’t be surprised when your newsletter arrives in their inbox. They might even be looking forward to it.
• If your reader is reading last month’s newsletter, then you’re getting an extra reader for free. They might even buy something or contact you on the strength of the newsletter preview alone.

It’s easy to create a preview of your newsletter. I usually make a screenshot of the current newsletter and upload this image to the newsletter signup page of the website, and I also place a link to the online version of the newsletter on the signup page too.

See our newsletter signup page for an example.

You probably know from experience that when you look at an email, the name and subject line play a huge part in whether or not it you decide to open it.

When you look at the messages in your inbox, or a new notification flashes up, the first thing you see is who sent it. Then you read the subject line and quickly form an opinion about whether it’s spam or a legitimate email.

Do you want it to be from you personally, or from your company?

Sorry – there are no shortcuts here. The answer is… it depends – and you need to test it. Of course, if you’re using good email marketing software, A-B split testing is easy (and fun).

(Actually, here’s a quick bit of advice… Don’t EVER put your name or subject line in ALL CAPS. It’s a dead giveaway for spam).

Example: Michael Carden from performance assessment software company Sonar6, told us at Accelerate 2011 that they test their email marketing extremely rigorously and have found that they have achieved the highest open rate by using the sender name ‘Michael J. Carden’. He’s not sure why ‘Michael J. Carden’ achieves the highest open rate, but it does. Bear in mind that Sonar6′s audience is predominantly American, and maybe Americans tend to see the middle initial as conferring authority on a person -or maybe they associate it with Michael J. Fox. Who knows?

Michael J. Carden from Sonar6

Michael J. Fox from 'The Future'

If you’re in business, those people are called your customers.

And if you want to make enough money to avoid the dole queue, you need to know as much as possible about your customers.

Things like…

• Their name
• Their phone number
• Their email address
• The company they work for
• The company they used to work for
• Their boss’s name
• Their spouse’s name
• Their kids’ names
• Their birthday
• How they like their tea and coffee
• Every order they have ever placed with your company
• When you last spoke to them
• What you talked about
• How much you quoted them for a project 6 months ago
• Every email you’ve ever received from them, and every email you’ve ever sent them
• How many times they have opened your email newsletter
• What they have clicked on when they read your email newsletter
• Whether they like Marmite or Vegemite (OK, maybe that’s a bit weird but you get the idea…)

So how well do you know your customers?

Do you actively manage your customer relationships? Do you use CRM software?

I believe that every organisation needs a CRM, from General Motors all the way down to the local rugby club.

At Mogul, we use WorkflowMax, and we would be stuffed without it. Once you get more than a handful of leads, prospects, and customers, your brain simply cannot juggle all this information effectively. You will forget things, you will let people down, and you will fail.

It’s especially important to integrate CRM with your email marketing and online shop. Amazon.com are experts at this. Their CRM-based marketing is one of the reasons they are so dominant in e-commerce. They send you recommendations based on your previous purchases – and they are uncannily accurate – to the point of seeming telepathic.

I don’t think they know if I prefer Marmite or Vegemite, but with the amount of data mining they do, they could probably have a pretty good guess.

(Actually, I like both)

If you’re serious about marketing your business online, concentrate on email first. Don’t even think about creating a Facebook landing page or a blog unless you’re already collecting email addresses and sending a regular email newsletter (think about it – how is anybody going to know about your Facebook landing page or your blog unless you tell them all about it? and what better, faster, cheaper way than by email?)

So, do we agree that email marketing is an extremely effective way to market your products and services? If you’re not doing it, you’re seriously missing a trick.

(if you’re still in the age of paper, you can read all about the enormous benefits of email marketing here).

Whichever way you look at it, a business’s email list is gold. It is a huge asset. Done properly, an email address represents a mutually beneficial relationship between you and a client, prospect, or brand advocate.

To understand the value of each email address, you need to ask yourself, what would be the long-term cost to my business if I lost my email list? You might have 5,000 email addresses. And if each of those people bought, on average only $10 worth of stuff from you each year on the strength of your newsletters alone, and if you stopped sending regular email newsletters and offers to this list, your business would be $50,000 worse off per year. This is just the business you would lose in referrals and direct sales.

In our experience, people typically stay on an email list for at least ten years (top tip: hardly anyone ever unsubscribes).

So over a 10 year period, that 5,000-strong email list would represent $500,000 of business. So each email address has a lifetime value of at least $100.

In this (very conservative) case, if you collect 5 email addresses a day, you’re adding $500 to the value of your business every day. Wow, what a no-brainer!

So what are you doing to collect email addresses?

First of all, you should have a newsletter signup form on your website. And your blog. And your Facebook page.

Before they sign up, tell users what they will get in the newsletter – show them a preview if possible.

Reward them for signing up – you will attract a lot more signups if there is an incentive (e.g. a gift voucher, free consultation, e-book of tips)

If you’re offering a download, ask for their email address. This need not be compulsory, e.g. Apple’s iTunes download page asks for your email address when you download iTunes. You don’t actually need to provide it, but I bet most people would fill it in.

Keep sign-up forms short and simple (another top tip: no-one likes filling in forms)

Should you add everyone who ever contacts you on to your email list? No. You should always ask if someone wants to receive your email newsletter. If you haven’t come across the concept of permission marketing, I suggest you read Seth Godin now.

Give the reader an expectation of what they will receive. Show them a preview of your newsletter (or last month’s copy), show them the benefits they can expect by receiving it.

Offline, you can ask people at:

• trade shows
• networking groups
• point-of-sale

As a rule of thumb, every time someone gives you their business card, ask them if they would like to join your newsletter list (after you’ve told them what a great source of information it is, of course). Put the subscribers in one pocket and the non-subscribers in another pocket, or your bag. Chances are, everyone will say yes, anyway.

Here’s some food for thought… Facebook has 600 million users. That means 600 million email addresses. If they are worth only $10 each, that means Facebook’s email list alone is worth $6 billion. Mwah hahaha…

Now… If you would like to join the Mogul newsletter list to receive our monthly newsletter full of the latest tips and trends from the world of websites, online marketing, and social media strategies, simply visit this page and fill in your details: http://www.mogul.co.nz/contact/newsletter/

One of the big questions for email marketing is ‘Should I send my email in a pretty HTML template? Or is plain text better?’ There are some good arguments for and against each approach – but my advice is “it depends”.

Pros of HTML email

• A well-desiged HTML email looks good and is easy to read
• With your logos and colours, it is consistent with your brand
• A well-structured template makes it easy for your reader to find information that’s important to them
• You’re more in control of how it looks across different email clients
• HTML allows you to use coloured fonts, bold, italics, bullet points, images, tables of data etc.
• You can track the open rate of your email via a remotely hosted image hidden in the template

Cons of HTML email

• An HTML email can look contrived, especially if it has lightweight content in a serious-looking template
• It can seem impersonal, as a template email often carries the impression of being obviously a mass, one-to-many email
• Because email templates must be created with HTML tables, it can be difficult to create or change a template if you don’t know HTML
• If images don’t render, it can look really weird, like a jumble of words on the page floating in space

Pros of plain text email

• A plain text email looks much more basic, so it feels more personal
• It feels more like a one-to-one direct communication, compared to an HTML email
• It’s usually much quicker to write a plain text email – making it suitable for a time-critical news flash

Cons of plain text email

• You cannot track the open rate, since there are no remotely-hosted images in the message
• Without the structure and formatting that HTML gives you, a long message can be difficult to present in an appealing way in plain text (e.g. you cannot use a 2-column layout in plain text)
• You cannot use images, bold, italics, bullet points, tables of data, etc.

So… if you’re sending commercial email, like a monthly newsletter or your latest specials from your online shop, you should use an HTML template. You’ll need to do some planning around it, get some nice images, and format it nicely.

On the other hand, if you just need to tell your 1,000 customers that your office will be closed from 2pm to 4pm tomorrow because the power is going to be off, then a plain text email is perfectly good for this. You can write it and send it in 5 minutes. And because it’s not a marketing exercise, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t know how many people opened it.

Has anyone done any rigorous testing around HTML vs plain-text for email marketing? I would be interested to hear the results.

• Enable you to communicate regularly on an ongoing basis with existing clients, prospective clients, industry associates, centres of influence, etc.

Our system allows you to have multiple databases and easily merge ‘sending lists’, enabling you to tailor the content of each newsletter specifically

• Enable you to upsell your existing clients/customers

–        they have given you permission to sell to them… forever eg. additional services, support or maintenance plans

• Encourage word of mouth – ‘share this with a colleague or friend’
• Enable you to offer time limited offers to specific groups (sending lists). This can help to even out workflow through quieter times in the year, eg. early bird special, spring starter pack, 10% off this month only.

• Provide you with trackable results. Unlike newspaper, radio and print newsletters, an email newsletter system will provide you with instantaneous trackable results.

• eg. how many people are reading the newsletter, exactly who is reading the newsletter, what articles or offers each person is clicking on.
• An email newsletter offers tremendous ‘bang for your buck’ when communicating directly with your clients. You save on time, printing and mailing costs.
• Our system quickly identifies emails that have bounced so you can correct them and resend them immediately and it will store any ‘unsubscribes’ so that you do not send to these people the next time.

Matt’s top tips for email marketing:

• Before they sign up, tell users what they will get (what will be in the newsletter – show them a preview if possible)
• Reward them for signing up – there must be an incentive (gift voucher, free consultation, e-book of tips)
• Keep sign-up forms short and simple (no-one likes filling in forms)
• WARNING: If you give into temptation and buy an email list, don’t assume that the people on it have consented to receiving email newsletters from you (see The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007)
• Write an attractive subject line – keep it simple and factual – users are sceptical of sales-y subject lines
• Don’t use spammy words in the subject line like ‘free’ or ‘viagra’ etc.
• Provide useful and well-written content that is relevant to your readers
• Use segmentation as much as possible to make content even more relevant to certain groups of your audience.
• If possible, use a managed newsletter delivery service to maximise deliverability, manage bounces and unsubscribes
• Offer exclusive deals just for your newsletter subscribers (reward them)
• Design the newsletter to suit its purpose, e.g. product launch, catalogue, traditional newsletter
• Make good use of images, colours, and numbers to draw the reader’s attention to important bits
• Choose a layout that suits the content – one or two column? large or small photos?
• Use a strong call to action that leaves the reader in no doubt. E.g. ‘Buy Now’ , ‘Book Now’.
• Use these tools and features – unsubscribe link, view in web browser, change email address, forward to a friend, share on Facebook and Twitter
• Send emails on a consistent timetable (e.g. the first week of every month, every second Wednesday)
• Find a happy medium of sending frequency (weekly, monthly, or more?) and make sure this fits in with your online/digital marketing strategy
• Establish a content strategy and editorial calendar so you have lots of ideas for articles up your sleeve
• Hot tip: the best time for sending is Tuesday or Wednesday 2-3pm (Monday too busy, Thursday and Friday one foot out the door)
• Use the current date in the email to establish a sense of relevance and timeliness
• Check your links. Check them again. Get someone else to check your links. And then check them again.
• Check your discount codes. Check your discount codes. Check your discount codes.
• ALWAYS check your links and discount codes.

Big mistakes to avoid:

Anti-spam legislation – The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007

Follow the steps below to ensure you are not sending spam:

Step 1: Make sure you have the consent of the recipients of the commercial electronic message

3 kinds of consent:

1. express consent – the recipient has filled in a form, ticked a box, etc.

2. inferred consent – you have a relationship with the person such that you can safely assume that they expect to get email messages from you (e.g. friends, family, business associates, suppliers, etc.)

3. deemed consent – the recipient has published their email conspicuously and has not specifically said they don’t want to receive unsolicited commercial email.

Note: Deemed consent doesn’t mean you can send the receipient any offers you want. It must be related to their business.

E.g. if a tyre company publishes its email address on its website, you can send them information related to automotive business, but not life insurance, real estate, or weight-loss, for example.

Step 2: In the email message, you must clearly identify the business responsible for sending the commercial electronic message and how they can be contacted.

Step 3: In the email message, you must include a functional unsubscribe facility in all commercial electronic messages.

What else?

1. Human resources. What staff members can help with email marketing?

2. How will we know if we are successful? Goals, outcomes, and measurement (newsletter signups, open rates, clickthroughs)

3. Next steps – plan your strategy!

There are some great reasons to use email marketing:

1. an email newsletter offers tremendous ‘bang for your buck’ when communicating directly with your clients. You save on time, printing and mailing costs
2. an email newsletter enhances your company’s reputation and increases lead generation
3. unlike offline advertising methods, an email newsletter system provides instantaneous trackable results
4. an email newsletter allows your visitors to easily and immediately interact with you and for you to promote dialogue with your clients
5. our system quickly identifies undeliverables so you can correct them and resend them immediately
6. an email newsletter campaign increases the lifetime value of your clients

So, if you haven’t got an email newsletter campaign underway, what can you do today to get the ball rolling?

Well, you could start by getting in touch with us. We’ll help you set up an e-marketing campaign that fits with your needs and your budget, and delivers real results.