Below are some marketing personalisation you need to implement ASAP!

Segment Your Email Database and Personalise Messaging

According to a recent study, 14% of marketers said that personalised email marketing campaigns get a better response rate compared to mass market campaigns. If you want to generate a better response rate, you will segment your list by marketing persona then personalise your messages according to language your persona uses and responds to.

Create Targeted Landing Pages Designed for Different Marketing Personas

You may want to create and customise the language and content of landing pages according to their specific needs and interests. If you think your site cannot handle the bandwidth that comes with creating different landing pages for each customer persona, you should at least create targeted landing pages for your various offers.

Use Recipients’ Real Names in Email Messages

“Hi Friend” or “Hi Customer” are not acceptable greetings if you are doing an email marketing campaign. Your prospect’s name is one of the easiest piece of information you can gather. If you are just going to use a generic “Dear Friend” then don’t bother emailing them. Most email marketing tools will allow you to customise your email messages with the recipients first name so make sure you personalise!

How else do you personalise your email marketing campaign?

If you haven’t started working on growing your email list yet, or if you have run out of creative juice and stopped growing your list, here are some clever ways to start rebuilding it again.

1. Host an online webinar and collect email addresses at registration.
    
2. Create a free online tool or an informative e-book and have users sign up with their email address before they can download it.
    
3. Insert a QR code to your marketing materials which people can scan so they can opt-in to your database.
    
4. Run a promotion or partner with one of your affiliates to collect email address.
    
5. Collect email addresses during trade shows and import them into your database. Make sure to send your contacts a welcome email confirming their opt-in.
    
6. Make use of social media buttons to encourage email subscribers to share and forward your emails.
    
7. When you are guest blogging, make sure to include a call-to-action and also a link where your readers can subscribe to your site’s blog.
    
8. Host offline events like meetups, conferences, hackathons etc and collect registrations online using email addresses.
    
9. Promote one of your offers exclusively on Twitter or Facebook and make sure that you require the email address of your followers to redeem.
    
10. Last but definitely not the least, create remarkable email content. Remember that your content needs to be amazing if you want people to continue subscribing or if you want them to forward your content to other people.

How do you grow your email list? What other creative ways did we miss? Share your idea in the comments section please!

Below are the simple steps on how to carry out an email re-engagement campaign.

Identify Your Inactives

People can be inactive for several reasons. If a person has been inactive for 3-6 months, then it’s time to include them on your re-engagement campaign. Unless, you have several years buying cycle, it won’t be advisable to include people on your re-engagement list who have been inactive for years. They will just drive up your spam complaint rates, it’s wiser if you just remove them from your list.

Write and Send Engagement Campaigns

Send a series 0f emails to your re-engagement list over the course of several weeks to try to win them back. This is recommended because your inactives have suffered from what we call communication breakdown along the way that caused the value of your emails to be unrecognised. It may take you more than one campaign to prove the value of your email to them and causes them to change their minds about your business and offer.

Effective Types of re-engagement emails many businesses often send:

• Update Email Preferences
• Email Feedback Survey
• Incentivise Email Activity (Offer freebies or coupons for re-opting in your email list)

Lessen Future Instances of Inactive Subscribers

Just because you have sent out your re-engagement emails, does not mean you are done! The success of your re-engagement campaign is all about keeping your subscribers interested. You may want to communicate with your leads more often. Remember that the more you know about them, the better you will be able to customise your emails that can result in more engaged email subscribers.

What strategies do you use to re-engage your email subscribers?

Though HTML emails may seem scary,  they are attractive and engaging compared to plain text emails. In fact, according to a recent study we read, html emails got a 50% better click through rate compared to plain text emails. If you want to brand your campaign and want to show off your products, HTML can certainly help you make your campaigns more attractive and appealing.

Below are ways on how you can wake up your email campaign and effectively design it.

Incorporate Your Brand On Your Campaigns

HTML enables you to style your campaign and design them according to your brand’s online identity. With HTML, you can add images,company logos, and use backgrounds that match the colors and fonts of your website.

Be Proud of Your Products and Show Them to Your Readers

Images in email are not just for online retails stores. Even photographers, web designers, and artists can display their work of art in their emails. By incorporating an image on your email campaigns, emotions or thoughts that are hard to explain can be easily conveyed.

Incorporate Videos To Your Emails

If images can instantly liven up your email marketing campaign, videos will surely take it to the next level. Until recently you couldn’t embed videos into emails but with a little bit of coding knowledge this can now be achieved.

In essence, videos tend to be more dynamic and engaging compared to images. Videos can also be an excellent selling point for your business.

Try to Keep Your Readers Interested So They will Keep On Reading

A brilliant way to design your campaign is by creating an eye path enticing your customers to read further.

A good way to achieve this is to use a big picture and text that is half on the fold area of the message. Designing your email campaign this way will spark the curiosity of your readers thereby teasing them to read your entire email message. Unlike boring plain text emails, HTML emails can persuade your readers to go through the rest of your message.

In Summary

Understand what your email marketing strategy is and how you will use it to achieve steady traffic to your site is paramount to email marketing. Though some people love the simplicity of plain text emails, many prefer to design their campaigns for a more appealing impact.

For email marketers that means that a number of significant HTML features are gone.

In Outlook 2007 you may have noticed that you can’t use:

• Background images. Not in HTML or Style Sheets (CSS).
• Rowspans to format a table.
• Forms to capture users input.

As Office 2007 gradually gets rolled out, you are going to have to change the way your emails are built and perhaps designed.

It may be of little consolation, but Microsoft has released a tool that checks to see if your email will work in Outlook 2007. The tool is for users of Microsoft Expression Web, Microsoft Visual Studio or Macromedia Dreamweaver (MX 2004 and Version 8). You can download it here.

It would be a good idea to check your next email marketing piece before you click send!

I believe that one of the major reasons that users treat everything as spam is that they have been educated to not use the unsubscribe link in marketing emails, even they may know and trust the sender. So in order to stop receiving emails they have no alternative but to put you on their spam block list.

Our experience with the eComMetrix® Email Marketing service that we run is that users are using the “spam” button in their email client to effectively unsubscribe from emails that they don’t want to receive any more.

With eComMetrix®, we participate in the Hotmail Junk Mail Reporting service which notifies us when a user has marked one of our clients emails as spam. In 99% of cases the messages that are reported in Hotmail as spam were signed up for. It shows that many users do not discriminate between real spam and emails that they just don’t want anymore.

We support the idea of developing an Email Service Provider Opt Out Standard that could be supported by the developers of email clients (i.e. Microsoft Outlook). Your email client could replace the “report spam” button with two new options that represent the following two separate concepts:

1. I didn’t ask for this (spam / hard response)
2. I don’t want it anymore (opt out / soft response)

Only genuine providers would be able to participate in such a program and such a program could be used to enhance the email system’s reputation with internet and anti-spam service providers. To really succeed a program like this would need to have the backing of Microsoft, who like it or not handle most of the worlds email in some way.

To combat email overload lately I’ve been unsubscribing from lots of email newsletters. I’ve noticed that every email provider seems to have a different way of handing an opt out request. Many of them make it particularly hard to get off the list. I can tell you from experience that a simple one click standardised opt out system is long overdue!

If it was implemented well such a system would be a real positive for email marketers and email users alike.

So how do you protect your business from a looming downturn?

1. Ensure your supply of customers by investing in highly cost effective marketing

Web marketing is about finding people who are in the market now and ready to buy. Getting your website found in Google and driving 24 x 7 traffic to your website is one of the easiest ways to ensure that you have a steady stream of customers whatever the economic climate.

2. Improve your website’s conversion rates

You can boost the number of leads and sales that come from your website by analyzing and improving the performance of your website. There is enormous leverage in your boosting your website’s conversion rates. The payoff for boosting your conversion rates is far higher than the payoff from getting more traffic.

3. Start an email newsletter

An email newsletter that’s rich with content and informative is one of the easiest ways to keep your customers safe from the competition. If you’re not already producing an email newsletter, don’t wait until times are tough. Start now.

Act now

We’ve been warned that trouble is on the horizon. However, your business need not be hit hard by a retracting market. You need to be smarter than the competition and take a greater market and dollar share. And you need to act now…

I’ve been thinking about this topic since I saw Gerard Minack on Lateline last week, however US conversion rate guru Jeffrey Eisenberg at Future Now beat me to writing this article, so this was partly inspired by his post.

Having said that, I’ve put together a gallery of email marketing messages that I have received since we wrote our article on the subject that pass the preview pane test.

Unfortunately, the scales are stacked on the bad side. Below are a few examples.

If it wasn’t for my recent posts on the subject, these emails would not have lasted in my inbox for more than five seconds (With the exception of Paul Kelly’s email, because he is an Australian Music Legend).

Example 1 – Paul Kelly

There are 2 main problems with this email.

1. It’s obvious that without seeing images, there is absolutely nothing to see. No content (as we define it, “useful information“) whatsoever.
2. The descriptions of the images that would usually give us some idea of what we’re missing out on can’t be seen because they are black text on a black background. The reason for this problem is that the HTML Code of the email references an external style sheet. This is blocked along with the images in the preview pane.

Now web programmers often like to be different from the mainstream. So it’s quite likely that they don’t use Outlook for their own email. However if you want to succeed in email marketing you simply can’t ignore the massive market share that Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express hold.

Technical Note: In Outlook 2007 Microsoft has switched to the the Word rendering engine for HTML messages. This has wiped out many of the HTML and CSS techniques that we commonly rely on to produce a good readable email. You’ll be shocked at how poorly it treats HTML emails. It will rank as one of the Microsoft Outlook team’s dumbest moments, but we’ll have to live with it.

Make sure your technical people test your email in Outlook (whether they like it or not!).

Example 2 – Chaos.com

More of the same with the Chaos.com newsletter. Apart from the lame “click here to view this newsletter online” there is nothing at all to see in the preview pane.

Have email marketers given up on high open rates? So much effort has gone into creating a catchy subject line for this email, but it could all have been wasted by not picking up on the subject in the body of the email.

Just like in web marketing, if there’s no scent of the subject line in the content of the email, readers will quickly lose interest.

Example 3 – POW WOW Events

This email presents quite a confronting array of images to the user. Again, there is absolutely no useful information in the preview pane.

There’s no reason that the headline seen in the complete email (left) could not have been text. That would have at least given the reader a cue that they should to download the images to see more.

The first and most simple way that you can boost your email marketing open rate is to check how your email looks in the preview pane in Microsoft Outlook.

If you are marketing consumers, you should also check to see how it looks in Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.

Remember that email is one of the most time sensitive mediums of all marketing. With the barrage of communication that busy people receive every day, you need to make sure that your message is sharp to get through the noise.