Business Mailing List Marketing News

Time to go back to basics

By: Lee-Ann Vermaak, Issued by: Acceleration

13 Jun 2005 - Marketing professionals should not forget the basics of online marketing in their haste to implement advanced eMarketing tools and strategies. Marketers today have a host of advanced eMarketing tools at their disposal and many are looking to automate, integrate and implement behavioural life-cycle strategies in their online marketing environments.

However, if they are to make the best of these tools, technologies and strategies, marketers need to ensure that they have the basics covered. Let's take a step backwards and look at some basic rules that many email marketers have forgotten about.

Databases/Mailing Lists

Make sure all of the recipients on your mailing list have opted in. This is basic best practice, even if the ECT Act doesn't insist on it.

How old are your mailing lists?

Have you been emailing the same list for months and months, or even years, without performing data updates? If you send email to invalid email addresses frequently, you will be blacklisted. Email addresses go stale much quicker than telephone numbers or postal/physical addresses. If you have this type of customer information, make use of it. Relevant incentives are always a good way to motivate customers to update their details.

Best practice would be to use a web form to allow your customers to update personal information and preferences 24X7. Even if you have web forms where customers can update their details, you will still be receiving incorrect email addresses if you do not have data validation on the web form.

Do you know what your bounce rates are?

You could have a mailing list of 100,000 with only 65,000 mailable addresses and 35,000 that have bounced. To avoid your bounce numbers increasing to that level, perform bounce recovery frequently. Each email address is important. Your mailing list is probably your most important marketing asset.

Are you aware what the industry standard is for bounce rates?

Best practice would be to find out what the industry standard is for your sector and be sure your bounce rates are less or on par. View DoubleClick's latest report on email metrics. http:///www.doubleclick.com

Email Communication

Do you quality control the email copy and subject lines?

Bear in mind that many recipients will see your copy through a preview first and then decide whether to open or delete the message. Make the top of the copy as interesting as possible and try to place a link in this window that will guide the user to the correct destination.

The subject line should be no longer than 40 characters or "folding" problems may occur. Avoid using punctuation in your subject lines. It is easier for somebody else to pick up mistakes in your copy so read your copy yourself and ask someone else to look at it, too. This way you are more certain of avoiding mistakes.

Do you include the basic best practice requirements?

An unsubscribe mechanism must be included

A link to your Privacy Policy must be included

Your Physical postal address must be included

Do you stick to best practices when coding HTML?

Designers love to create impressive and flash graphics. This is not always best practice when it comes to email deliverability. Use graphics sparingly and keep them small.

Avoid using style sheets and JavaScript. They can be rendered differently in many browsers and using straight HTML coding will ensure the greatest number of HTML recipients will see the best version of your email.

Avoid using tools that create code for you. Often strange characters that are rendered differently are added to the code.

Do you stick to best practices when creating Text Emails?
We tend to focus a great deal of time on making sure our HTML emails are correct - what about the text version?

The text content should be created in Notepad, EditPad or WordPad. If the content is created in these applications, you will not have to worry about font size or type, special formatting, and unique characters. If the text is created in Word or email, there may be hidden or unsuitable characters in the content and your service providers may bill you for additional work on the content to fix these problems.

Use a font size of 10 or 12 points (the most common font size used to display text in popular email clients).

Keep the width of the message to 70 characters or less. Use hard returns to format to this maximum length.

Make sure to insert a complete URL so that the URL is live within the message.

Do you proof both Text and HTML version of the emails in various email clients?
Why go to all the effort of creating a strategy, copy and creative if you do not test the results? Testing in-house and testing on various email clients is of critical importance.

You need to check the copy, subject lines and if the email arrives in your inbox or junk mail folder. Send the email communication to an internal list for proofing. Once all recipients on the internal list have approved the email, send a proof to a seed list that contains email addresses from various email clients. View the emails in the various email clients to see if the emails are delivered into the inbox and what the email looks like. Many email tools provide a feature to check the content of your emails and seed lists. Even if your email tool does not provide this feature, do not skip this step as it is most important. Only once you have completed this checklist should you send your message out.

Basics are where marketing began. Don't forget to get them right if you want to use email marketing as an effective channel.

Shanghai gets a response from direct mail

Issued by: The Old Shanghai Firecracker Factory

21 Jun 2005 - Anyone in the marketing industry will agree that the usual response rate from a direct mail campaign is around 2% and even less for a business to business campaign, so when someone increases that to as much as 25% you have to sit up and take notice. That's exactly what RentWorks and The Old Shanghai Firecracker Factory are aiming to do with the technology rental company's new campaign to change perceptions of the rental market.

RentWorks is South Africa's largest independent technology rental company. As owners of the technology, there is no upfront capital outlay, no risk of obsolescence, no rapidly depreciating assets on the register and best of all, it allows an organisation to procure almost three times the amount of equipment they would have been able to by paying cash.

Gary Donian, business director for The Old Shanghai Firecracker Factory, says there were two key challenges for the agency: "Many technology rental companies out there have not effectively established the virtues of rental as a viable financial option. This has resulted in rental not being seriously considered by many local companies, some even perceiving it to be cheap and nasty.

"We needed to dispel these myths while growing RentWorks' business."

Billboards were used to kick off the campaign with both rational and emotional elements, showing, for example, the fictional IT or finance director 'dunce' stuck with outdated equipment. This laid the foundation for the campaign, with a unique contact number running on the billboards linked to a call centre for leads to be taken.

A direct mail campaign was launched alongside the outdoor ads, where an acquisition database was mailed a simple and effective message with a unique URL for further information to track responses and measure the success of the campaign.

"The URL was a special creation. We compiled information that we thought a new client would most likely need to know and made it easy to navigate, with links to the main site. A competition was set up to encourage responses for a data profile," Donian explains.

"About 250 mailers were sent each week and we set up "power hours" for the sales team when they would split the database and use the mailer as a reason to call the prospect. A small packet of smarties (be a smarty and rent) were attached to the mailer to assist recall and encourage assistance.

Using the database, key clients were identified - the top 50 prospects RentWorks wanted to do business with - and these potential clients were presented with a "door opener": A blank book, inviting the prospect to join the Rentworks library of great thinkers, was hand-delivered. On acceptance, they would be presented with one of four non-fiction best-sellers by an account manager who would visit the client within 48 hours.

"The RentWorks sales team was very happy to have a hook - something to call potential clients about - and found this increased response rates to above 20%

"The key is taking the database, splitting distribution over a few weeks and providing the sales team with a reason to call the client. Do this and the response rate soars," Donian says.

"This way the sales team can also give you better feedback about negative responses, the number of calls, requests, etc and you start to understand your clients more effectively."

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