Autoresponders – What You Need to Know

Here at KobeMail, we know a thing or two about autoresponder mailings. For email marketers, the following information should be just a review. However, for those not in-the-know, autoresponders are the most widely used online marketing tool. Autoresponders have many names – mailbots, email responders, and autosenders – but regardless of what you call them, their importance is undeniable.

Once an autoresponder is successfully in place, your business can save time and money. Some autoresponder “systems” lead to abuse, which is why you should look to a full service email provider – such as KobeMail – to handle the sending of your autoresponders for you.

The term autoresponder comes from the idea of an email being sent to a subscriber after an action is taken on their end. The autoresponder should only be used for emails to customers who have signed up at your website to receive communications. Otherwise, you will likely face a lot of issues along the way.

An autoresponder should not be chosen solely based on its cost. Instead, you should look at the included features of the service, the reputation of the provider, and other elements to determine which system is the best for your needs. An autoresponder service is elemental in business success today. The online world is full of missed opportunities and you can't let communication with your customers be one of those issues.

Happy Mailing!

How to Send More Effectively

According to Forrester, by 2014 the average email user will receive over 9,000 marketing email messages per year. If you break that down, it equates to a user receiving 25 marketing emails every single day.

ISPs have a limited threshold for emails, so when the frequency of mailing gets ramped up, marketers have to find a new path into the inbox. Below are a few suggestions for marketers, especially those who still plan on mailing at a high rate, to separate themselves from other mailers and find their messages in the inbox of their readers.

1. Remailing. Based on a certain behavior of the reader, you can remail. If there was no click, no open, or no purchase, you can set up a remail automation. You can also remail to a certain list when you are running a special or a promotion. The biggest piece of advice associated with remailing: don’t abuse it.

2. Automation. Creating automated messages, based off of triggers, will increase your revenue. Automating your messages allows you to set up a specific schedule of mailing for specific actions taken by the reader (abandoned cart, site behavior, etc.)

3. Holidays. Aside from the major holidays that fall during the end of the calendar year, you should be taking advantage of the many other holidays throughout the year. Do you have an international audience? If so, capitalize on their specific holidays. There are extensive lists available online of all holidays – be creative and utilize the day!

4. Segmentation. We have mentioned the concept of segmentation before, but it is too important not to mention again. Segmentation allows you to send more frequently based on specific actions or preferences of your readers.

Sending emails at a high frequency can be a good thing, so long as you do not abuse it. Always remember to mail wisely, use an email marketing agency like KobeMail, and build your email lists organically!

Happy Mailing!

Author: Peter Schirripa

Safeguard and Enhance Deliverability

The entire goal of email marketing is to reach the inbox, and thus the users, as often as possible. At KobeMail, we pride ourselves on our top deliverability rates, but as marketers, you have to take some steps toward safeguarding deliverability yourselves. Here are a handful of tips to do so…

KobeMail offers an extensive reporting package, which we monitor closely on our end daily. In order to up your deliverability rates, consider switching analyzing campaign metrics for yourself before you send out your next mailing, rather than looking at the metrics after the mailing has already gone out. Taking the time to analyze opens, click thru rates, bounces, etc before you continue mailing will allow you to optimize campaigns and strategies to get the best performance possible out of your campaigns. Being proactive with your campaign strategies will help to boost your deliverability rate.

Similarly, if you’re seeing negative changes in your reporting numbers, fix the problem immediately. Avoid sending out another mailing with a template or subject line that isn’t performing because it’s very likely that it will perform poorly again. Figure out the problem and amend it quickly. There’s no need to waste mailings on graphics or text that aren’t working!

If you’re not being upfront about exactly what you will be mailing to your users when they sign up, it’s imperative you become candid quickly. In the same vein, if you are telling users they will receive 1 type of mailing from you and suddenly they begin to receive another type without warning or signing up for it, chances are pretty high that they’ll begin to “junk” your mailings. You can be sure that this will cause your deliverability rate to plummet. As with everything, even in email marketing, honesty is the best policy.

For those users who are clicking “spam” or “junk,” take them off your list the minute they do so. If they “spammed” you once, they’ll do it again. Why rack up unnecessary spam complaints when scrubbing your list is so effortless, particularly with our new product iSuppress, which handles every facet of suppression list management including list scrubbing. The same holds true for bounced emails. If you’re seeing upwards of 5 bounces (whether hard or soft) from the same user, get them off your list! A clean list will definitely improve your deliverability and keep your users happy too.

Just by taking a few extra steps before and after each mailing you send, you’ll notice an improvement in your deliverability rates. It is of course important to be affiliated with an email service provider who has a great relationship with ISPs (like us at KobeMail!), but there are always steps you can take as email marketers to improve your own performance.

Author: Peter Schirripa

Editor: Anthony Lee

Sending B2B Email Marketing Campaigns?

If you are an email marketer, you are used to sending campaigns either B2C or B2B. In today’s article, we want to shed some light on how to successfully send a B2B email marketing campaign. To successfully sell B2B, you should be focusing on the long-term relationship built between your company and other companies. Here are some suggestions on how to strengthen B2B relationships:

1. Be personal. If you are used to sending email campaigns B2C, you are probably used to sending mass emails with very general subject lines. However, in order to gain the loyalty of another business, you need to prove to them that they are more than just a number on your email list. Try to make the emails sent to other businesses as personal as possible – include any information you may have: names, past purchases, dates, etc. Make it known that their business is important to you.

2. Develop solid groundwork. Trust is key when trying to establish a B2B relationship. Businesses will always choose to get their products from a company they know and trust over a company that they do not. Trust leads to relationships, and relationships lead to sales.

3. Go beyond the sale. Once you make the sale, your job is not finished. You want to continually follow up with the new client to ensure that their experience is ideal. Sending them regular emails with how-to instructions or just follow up questionnaires show them that you are concerned with their well-being. The more you can offer your customer, the more they will value your service.

Continue reading the KobeMail blog for insight in the email marketing industry.

Happy mailing!

Author: Peter Schirripa

Editor: Courtney Dillsworth

Revamping Your Current Email Marketing Strategy

The most successful email marketers will tell you that you must constantly update your email marketing strategy in order to stay relevant to your subscribers and up to date with the most recent technologies. Here at KobeMail, we have seen all different types of approaches. While different strategies work for different companies, we have listed a few suggestions below that apply to any company who uses email marketing:

1. Hire an email service provider. KobeMail helps make it easier for companies to email successfully. Some companies still use in-house mailing departments to handle their email marketing, but we would highly recommend outsourcing. The statistical research that ESP’s can offer cannot be matched by an in-house department.

2. Set up a regular schedule for your mailings. You want to send emails on a consistent basis so your users will anticipate an email from you. If you take a month off from mailing anything, your readers are going to forget about you. If you decide to send five emails in a week when you normally send only one, your readers are going to get annoyed, fast. Consistency builds trust and anticipation; two things that will boost your open and click through rates.

3. Build a custom template to use. In order to be noticed by your subscribers, you want to make sure that your emails are unique. Remain consistent with your mailings by using the same or a similar template for all mailings. Be sure not to use too generic of a template- be unique!

4. Focus on Reporting. Extensive reporting is available if you are using an ESP. However, many companies make the mistake of not really delving into their reports. Open rates, click-through rates, and A/B splits are just three of the many units of measure that every successful email marketer looks into deeply. Taking the time to analyze your reporting will allow you to optimize your campaigns and improve performance.

Continue reading the KobeMail blog for more insight on how to successfully manage your email campaigns.

Happy mailing!

Author: Peter Schirripa

Editor: Courtney Dillsworth

How to Run a Successful Contest via Email

Many of our clients here at KobeMail run contests via email. This is a great way to build lists, keep your readers engaged, and promote your business. However, just like any email marketing tactic, having a successful email contest takes proper planning and execution. Here are some steps that we have found to be imperative to take in order to run a successful contest campaign:

1. Define a specific goal. This step is important to keeping your campaign on target. You do not want to try to do too many different things with your contest. Your goal should be apparent throughout all of the mailings.

2. Define success metrics. Similar to the step above, you need to be specific about what you want to achieve from running the contest. Do you want to create a buzz on your social media accounts? Do you want to grow your email list? Do you want to add to sales?

3. Offer clear directions. While a successful contest can do great things for your email marketing strategy, a poorly managed campaign can be devastating. The rules for the contest need to be clearly defined and easy to understand for your subscribers. Once the rules are established, you should not change them at all. It is advised to run the proposed rules past your legal department to ensure compliance.

4. Promotion! Like any successful marketing campaign, promotion is a huge factor. Who is your audience? Once that is defined you can target your promotion. Do you use facebook and twitter? Do you take out ad space on similar sites?

5. Follow through. Once the winner(s) are determined, make sure to share the news with all contestants/readers. Be sure to follow up with the winner(s) with a personalized email congratulating them.

Good luck, and Happy Mailing!

Affiliate Marketing: How it Works

What exactly is affiliate marketing? What are the pros and cons and how does it affect you as email marketers? Allow this passage to help clarify the details of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. Reward sites or contest sites would be a good example of this.

The industry of affiliate marketing has four main aspects: the merchant (better known as the retailer or brand), the network, the publisher (better known as the affiliate), and the customer.

Affiliate marketing can overlap different forms of advertising, including SEO, display advertising, and of course, email marketing.

The main goal of affiliate marketing is to drive traffic from one website to another. This being said, affiliates play a significant role in email marketers’ strategies.

Affiliate marketing refers prospective clients to a specific service provider when the client is most interested in the provider’s service. This online marketing channel is of great advantage to advertiser service providers because they are only asked to pay after the prospective client is introduced to them. For firms looking to stay consistently profitable and in front of the shifting client base, connecting with the right consumers through an affiliate network is a low-risk investment worth considering.

To find out more about affiliate marketing, or to learn where you can connect with an affiliate, reach out to us through the comment section below or shoot us an email at support@kobemail.com

Happy mailing!

Self Built Lists

We’ve said it before – having a strong email list is more than half of the battle with email marketing. Even if you have the most captivating and creative content, having a reliable recipient list is what is going to lead to higher open and click-through rates.

The question for all email marketers remains: is it worth buying a purchased list? Purchased lists are a physical copy of email addresses. There is no maximum amount of times that you are allowed to mail to the same list. It seems like this is a smart idea, but after years of research, here are some issues that you may face from working with a purchased list.

1. Exhaustion. The value of a self built list is that people have to subscribe to your newsletter which obviously means they want to read what you’re sending. Using a self-built list will allow you to gain quality and active readers. Sending too much commercial email to a purchased list will lead to people unsubscribing, which is obviously something all email marketers want to avoid.

2. Poor quality. No right-minded company would willingly sell their personal email lists, which take years of patience to build and perfect. The different lists that are available for purchase are probably not as strong as advertised. Usually there is no guarantee that the email addresses are relevant to the associated names, or vice versa.

3. Flagging. Sure, a one-of email sent to a large list of purchased addresses might have its benefits, but the more those users flag you for spam, the more trouble you are going to find yourself in. These addresses have not given you formal permission to mail to them, therefore probably won’t be too happy if they feel they’re overwhelmed with emails from unknown sources.

If your end goal is to have a successful long-term email marketing campaign, you should focus on building your own lists. A strong list won’t come fast or easy, so you will need to refer back to some of our suggestions from the KobeMail blog on how to do so. Patience is key.

Happy mailing!

Author: Courtney Dillsworth

Editor: Peter Schirripa

Test! Test! Test Again!

There are so many variables that affect the success of an email marketing campaign. If you rely on an ESP, like KobeMail, you can be assured that your emails will be tested thoroughly before they are deployed. However, for those of you out there who are using your own in-house mailing system, it is imperative that you spend more than enough time testing your emails.

Optimizing your email efforts relies solely on testing. First, you must make sure the HTML email renders well across all ISP’s. You should have a test account set up for all of the major ISP’s, including, but not limited to: Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail. If the HTML email does not render properly, there is little to no chance that it will be effective.

Using a third party application like Litmusapp will help test your emails if you are not using a trusted ESP. Another important aspect you should test is the ‘from name.’ Make sure the name is recognizable to the recipient. Also, make sure to check the subject line. Is it relevant? Is it personalized to the recipient list? Test, track results, then make appropriate changes.

We encourage everyone who handles email marketing to test and optimize frequently, small changes can make a big impact in your campaigns if implemented correctly.

Happy Mailing!

Author: Courtney Dillsworth

Editor: Peter Schirripa

Gmail Unveils ‘Smart Labels’

As noted from our previous blog about Gmail’s Priority Inbox, Gmail has been aggressively coming up with ways to fight email overload for its users. Since its implementation, Priority Inbox has led to a 15% reduction in the amount of time people spend staring at their inboxes.

Gmail has launched a new feature to battle the email overload: Smart Labels. The new feature automatically tags inbound messages as “bulk”, “notifications”, or “forums” then handles them accordingly.

Notifications include any updates from social networking sites, shipping confirmations, and other messages that may not be from someone you know but include important information. Forums include messages from any online message board that you take part in. Bulk includes any messages that appear to be sent as part of a mass mail list.

By default any “bulk” messages will skip the inbox, while messages landing in either the forums folder or the notifications folder will be kept in your inbox.

You can personally tweak the settings to route the messages how you want them to be. To enable the new feature, you’ll have to go to Gmail’s Labs section, where it’s listed as ‘SmartLabels’. Unlike Priority Inbox, which Gmail prompted everyone to try out, Smart Labels will be tucked away under Labs for the time being.

Happy Mailing!

Author: Courtney Dillsworth

Editor: Peter Schirripa

Horizontal Emails – The new thing?

Creativity and innovation are the leading tools to a successful email marketing campaign. Supplying your readers with new and fun material is bound to lead to a high level of retention.

Strong, relevant content paired with a unique design leads to an effective campaign. A new design concept that has been getting a lot of praise in the email marketing world is the horizontal email.

Due to this concept being fairly new, there is limited statistical research behind it. Most of the designs resemble a wide postcard, where products are listed left to right giving the viewer the ability to scroll side to side.

As one designer put it, “With traditional vertical emails, you must concentrate on the 420 pixel ‘above the fold’ area. But for horizontals, you stress the total viewable width of 720 pixels.”

A sample of what a horizontal email may look like is listed below:

Here at KobeMail we are always looking for ways to stay ahead of the curve. We do our best to supply you with information regarding new trends in email marketing. If there is something that interests you that you would like us to look into further, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us via email or the comment box below.

Happy mailing!

Author: Courtney Dillsworth

Editor: Peter Schirripa