10 Essential Numbers

As email marketers we’re all responsible for knowing what seems like hundreds of figures. At KobeMail, we’d like to make it easy for you. Here are the 10 most important numbers you should know.

1. The Percentage of NEW site visitors who sign up for your newsletter
According to Jeanne Jennings of Marketing Sherpa, new site visitors can increase conversion rates up to 25%.
2. Abandon rate for new user sign up
This number will show you at exactly what point users are abandoning your sign up page and will allow you to optimize it for more conversions.
3. List size
It’s important to know how many users you’re reaching out to each time you send a campaign.
4. Monthly list growth rate
This will give you an idea of your overall campaign performance. Are users signing up or unsubscribing?
5. Bounce rate
This will show you how clean your lists are and how your creatives are scoring spam-wise.
6. Open rate
This will show you how effective your subject lines and from names are
7. Click through rate
This will tell you if your link placement is good and if your content is engaging and relevant
8. Conversion rate
You should know the conversion rate for the bottom line of your campaigns, which is the overall number.
9. Return on investment
This is the revenue generated for each dollar spent.
10. Dollar value of an email address
You can get this figure by dividing the revenue from all of your email efforts by the average number of people on your lists. Knowing how much 1 email is worth allows you to realistically know how much to spend on list acquisition.

Our KobeMail application puts all of these figures into one place in easy to read charts. For more information, please feel free to contact us.

Author: Courtney Dillsworth

Editor: Peter Schirripa, Yasifur Rahman

Customer Testimonials Build Better Email Campaigns

Let’s be honest- if you offer a great product or service, you will most likely have a successful time selling it. The goal is always to accelerate sales. Including customer testimonials in your email marketing campaigns is a great way of improving sales. The perspective of peers is very valuable information to prospective customers. It provides them with a view of your products or services they can trust.

It helps prospective customers to learn from others’ experiences, particularly their peers. Testimonials give them a better sense of the level and quality of results they can expect to see. As a marketer, testimonials are generally free pieces of sales collateral you can get from your clients or consumers. When incorporating testimonials into your email, here are a few things to consider:

1. Define a clear objective. What demographic of prospective clients are you trying to reach? What action do you want them to take after reading the testimonial? What will they need to hear from the testimonial in order to take action?

2. Ask every customer for a testimonial. This suggestion might sound bold, but when you truly think about it, it’s risk free. Aside from using their testimonials in your favor to promote your products or services, they’re also are a free way to gauge what your existing clientele finds the most appealing about your company.

3. Make it clear to your customers how you are going to use their testimonials. To get the most out of customer testimonials, they need to be effective. Tell your customers what you are trying to accomplish. Aside from having a testimonial shaped the way you want, it also gives your clients a feeling of comfort. It will make it easier for them to write how they truly feel.

4. Make it specific and short. The most effective testimonials are very precise. They should document specific experiences and services. People tend to be unaffected by general testimonials. The more focused, the better the results will be.

Customers turn to testimonials in order to learn from others’ experiences. You want to make sure that you have a lot of testimonials so you can insert them on a rotating basis. Testimonials should be featured in an obvious location within your creatives so they’re effective.

Help your clients help you! KobeMail has a few clients who currently feature client testimonials within their email campaigns. Feel free to reach out to us to see how they can influence your email marketing!

Author: Peter Schirripa

Editor: Anthony Lee

Spam Filters- Avoid Them at All Costs!

Landing in the junk folder is something that all email marketers should fear. You can spend a lot of time and effort on designing a great creative and cleaning your list, but if you break even one of the cardinal sins, you might be bound for the Spam box.

When sending an email, you actually have to get past two spam filters, each of which has a mind of its own. The ISP has a spam filter as well as the email application. Often times your email, which of course is not spam, will fall into the spam folder.

In order to avoid landing in the spam box, make sure that your subject line is not too “spammy.” This is actually the easiest way to call into the spam box. The subject line has to be relevant- even if the message gets past the spam filter, the reader still wants to see an enticing subject line. Make sure not to include spammy words such as “free” or “click now.”Also, keep punctuation to a minimum. Too many (!) can lead you into the spam box.

You must also take necessary precautions when developing the content of your email message. Make sure that the content is also barren of spammy words. Your creative must not just be a graphic- our rule of thumb is 60/40, with 60% being text. Every HTML creative should have a subsequent plain-text version as well. In addition to the wording, make sure that the content is coded correctly!

The IP address where the email is sent from must not be “blacklisted.” When using an ESP, make sure that the chosen provider does a superb job of filtering out any users that may cause the IP to get blacklisted. If one client emails are reported as spam and results in getting the IP blacklisted, every additional client that sends out through that IP is also most likely will experience blocks.

Choosing an ESP such as KobeMail is a wise investment. KobeMail is a responsible email service provider that assures its clientele that the IP is away from a blacklist and that the sending domains are whitelisted.

When sending an email campaign, make sure to follow all of the fore mentioned steps. Creating a great campaign and sending it to a clean list is just half of the battle- staying out of the spam box and making it to the reader’s inbox is the ultimate goal. Do not let a rule break prevent you from being successful.

Author: Courtney Dillsworth

Editor: Peter Schirripa, Yasifur Rahman

Black Friday-Cyber Monday: The busiest days for ISP’s

In the week leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year, our research showed a decrease in deliverability. There was a decline of as much as 15% email communication received for false positives. Deliverability was also affected via junk/spam box placement. Here at KobeMail, we have seen more and more of our clients flourish during the season, as a result of being proactive and strategizing ahead of time and planning for the Holiday season.

The rush before the holidays affects everyone and is not just limited to consumers- it also includes ISPs. Simply following best practices is not always the key to deliverability success. Email marketers are wise to send incentivized emails to subscribers. The major influx of emails sent during this period from companies causes ISP’s to get flooded. In obvious reaction, the floodgates come down to protect themselves. In order to deal with that digital mess, ISPs are forced to queue messages. When queued for a long time, some of these emails time-out and receives a false positive i.e. the ISP silently eats away the email without taking action of delivery.

ISPs deal with backlog and continue mitigating the millions of pieces of spam that are also inbound for the same inboxes that your email campaign is sent to. ISPs receive larger amounts of volume so they are forced to set their threshold lower. Spam thresholds also are lowered at this time and ISPs have a lower tolerance on how many spam complaints they will accept from a specific entity. More words are flagged as SPAM and overall deliverability becomes more challenging. This makes it even more difficult for email marketers to successfully send large quantities of emails in a short period of time. Throttling is one of the best options and planning a strategy to distribute out the send is wise to do – especially if you have a large list.

The ability to reach the inbox during these high traffic days is almost completely out of your control. KobeMail clients have an upper hand because of their whitelist status and the reputation they have built in the past months. As always, there are certain things you can do to better your chances of getting into the inbox. While utilizing tactics such as segmentation and subject line work, the real key to success lies in preparation. We will be doing an article soon on to do’s for the holiday season soon.

You need to take advantage of the days between Black Friday and Cyber Monday as you know for a fact your subscribers are most likely actively shopping. Stay tuned for tips on how to better your chances of making turkey day make you a lot of green.

Author: Peter Schirripa

Editor: Yasifur Rahman