Tips & Tricks

Create a simple email survey

There is a very quick way to create a simple one question survey within a Mailshot.

Simply ask a multi-choice question and make each of your responses / answers a link to different pages on your website.

Mailshot will track which links were clicked and you will be able to see exactly who click which links / answers.

You’ll probably want to up special landing pages on your website for each answer too.

We recently used this technique as an RSVP tool to gauge how many people are planning to attend our upcoming social media presentation.

EG

Click here if you are:

Definitely coming
Maybe coming
Wont be coming

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How to add personal details to a newsletter (Mail Merge)

We have just added an easy way to personalize your Mailshot’s. It works just like you might expect a publishing program to do a mail-merge.

When you are editing the content of you next mailshot you will see a tab called “Personalize” with a drop down menu in the text editor.

Inserting persoanl data is easy

Inserting persoanl data is easy

From here simply choose the data you want to include in the email. You might like to include the customer’s name so your email reads; Hi George.

You will probably want to include a fall back option too just encase you don’t have that customers name in your database.  Your fall back could be “Hi Happy Customer.

You can include any data that you store about your customers. If you have set up custom fields in any of your subscriber lists you can access these too.

Here is an example where we pull info from a customer record.

Hi [firstname, fallback=Happy Customer]

We noticed your subscription ends soon [SubscribeDate].

We are offering a discount of 20% if you sign on again before next year.

Simply drop in to our store at [LocalStore, fallback=any of our convenient locations] before January and mention this promo code: NY2010 to receive the discount.

The above would look like this when it arrives in the customers inbox:

Hi George

We noticed your subscription ends soon 15/12/2009.

We are offering a discount of 20% if you sign on again before next year.

Simply drop in to our store at 23 Humphreys Drive before January and mention this promo code: NY2010 to receive the discount.

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Writing effective email copy

When you’re elbows-deep in getting your latest newsletter out the door, it’s very easy to forget how important writing quality, punchy copy can be. Tailoring email copy to your audience is not a matter of ensuring your message is readable even with images turned off, but presenting it in a style that your readers will respond to. In this post we’ll highlight some considerations when writing effective email copy, including tone, personality, keeping it concise, offering value to the reader and testing.

Start the conversation

You don’t have to be an expert copywriter to engage audiences, simply someone who understands the objectives of your campaign and can adapt their language to suit. We do this in everyday life – how you talk to a new client will, in most cases, be very different from how you address your partner or friends. And just like real life, being authentic and conversational is key to creating dialogue, regardless of whether you’re selling fashion to teens or life insurance to retirees.

With this in mind, consider the unique voice of your email communications and keep it consistent. Will your campaign convey the personality of a marketing team, senior management, a product user, or a friend? Each of these roles (and many more) will use their language differently and have a different kind relationship with the reader. Flipping from one persona to the next simply doesn’t work.

Get to the point

The Internet has many times over been blamed for turning us into lazy, keyword-seeing readers. Whether or not this is a result of mental shortcutting or backlit screens, keep your copy clear and concise. The majority of readers will not read the entirety of your email, let alone large blocks of text. So, highlight key points in your copy, use visual devices like colour and space and ensure that the message is immediately tangible – after all, you only have a few initial seconds before your reader decides to discard your email… Or read on.

Inspire action

At this point, it’s worth considering the importance of a strong call-to-action – what’s in it for the reader, anyway? Sell with value – outline the benefits of your product and the useful ways in which it can be used. Identify common pain-points and how you can overcome them. As many clients look towards fostering a level of engagement that goes much deeper than simply counting click-throughs to a landing page, compel recipients to explore your site, request more information, try new things and return for more.

Test, learn and improve

Finally, test and refine your email campaigns. Proofread, run your email copy past another set of eyes, ask for opinions. Progressively refine your copy using A/B testing by comparing subject lines, differing calls to action and body content, all while delivering the most attractive email to your subscribers.

The quality of copy is critical to the success of a campaign, yet with the visual attraction of HTML email, often gets simply relegated to a design afterthought. Remember your objectives and ultimately, how you’re going to measure the success of the campaign – you can define your brand’s relationship with the reader, inspire action and learn more about your audience, simply by giving your copy some consideration and seeing it from recipient’s point of view.

Have a tip to add? These are only a few hints as how you can improve your copy and ensure more responsive subscribers, so please add your own tips and suggestions below.

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Add a web-version link to the top of the email

How your email campaigns render in your subscribers’ email clients can be highly variable, especially if you consider the countless email clients and platforms that exist out there (eg. Hotmail, Outlook, Blackberry…). For this reason, it’s best-practice to provide a link to a web-hosted version of your email campaign, just in case it doesn’t display quite right.

Mailshot automatically creates a web-version of your email campaign. You can link to it by simply adding the <webversion> content tag to your mailshot or have us add it to your template. Here is an example:

Having trouble viewing this email? <webversion>View it in your browser.</webversion>.

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Personalizing an email with a subscriber’s name

Say we’d like to add a personal touch to our email campaigns – greeting our subscribers in the email copy by first name. If your existing subscriber list already contains subscriber names, then we can add a greeting like, “Hi Jerry”. If a name doesn’t exist for your subscriber, then you can set a fallback greeting – “Hi customer”, “Hi widget fan” – or the like.
The good news is, that we can achieve this with one simple tag:

[firstname,fallback=widget fan]

Once this is inserted into our template’s HTML code, it will look something like this:

Hi [firstname,fallback=widget fan]! Welcome to this month’s ABC Widgets newsletter...

When you send your campaign, it will look something like this:

{title}

Once you get the hang of this, then adding other content tags is pretty self-explanatory.

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Getting the best out of Mailshot

Used wisely mailshots can improve customer loyalty, brand awareness and sales as well as directing traffic back to your website. However, it is not just a matter of tapping out an email, or cobbling together a newsletter or special offer. Not only do people receive more email marketing material than previously they are wary of spam, viruses and other nasties. The good news is Mailshot provides you with everything you need to create professional looking, cost effective e-marketing material that puts you, and your business, right in front of the very people that want to hear from you.

Create

  • Get professional – it’s all about creating a sharp, attractive and professional mailshot that is consistent with your existing branding and logos. Included within your set-up fee is one custom designed template. Further templates can be designed for your business for an additional fee which will depend upon your particular needs. We have clients who have different templates for different purposes, for example one template for newsletters and one for one-off promotions.
  • Put your best bit forward – place your most valuable information in the top portion of your email. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and really assess the value of the information or offer you are making to them.
  • Be brief – if all the nitty gritty information is already on your website do not repeat it in the email; simply provide a link back to your site.
  • Give value – only send valuable and interesting information. People will respond best if you impart useful knowledge, interesting material or make them a good offer. These customers have been good enough to give you permission to contact them; it’s up to you to use that permission wisely.

Deliver

  • Get personal  - so your client knows who the email is from. Send your mailshots from an email address that makes them think “I know who sent this email”. Knowing and trusting the sender is the primary reason for opening an email.
  • Get them interested early – many people decide if an email is worth opening simply from the subject line, so be sure to make it interesting. Subject lines that contain your company name or briefly tell your customers what is inside are more likely to be opened. Be careful using subject lines that contain words or styles that are popular on spam messages, such as “free” or “money”. Do not write subject lines with CAPS LOCK ON.
  • Manage your customer information carefully – ensure you have a good, accurate database of customer details and utilise Mailshot’s system for reviewing bouncebacks. The last thing you want to do is fail to make contact with a valued customer because of a simple spelling error in an email address.
  • Spam compliance – We do everything we can to keep you on the right side of Spam laws; every email you send with Mailshot includes a single click unsubscribe function. We can also run your campaign through popular spam filters at the desktop, server and firewall level before you send it.
  • Check, check, check – the appearance of your material before sending so you know what it will look like in all email browsers. You can send free tests to any address you like, or for a small fee (and a single click) see your email as it appears in over 20 different email clients (hotmail/gmail/outlook etc).
  • Be optimistic – include a “tell a friend” link in your mailshot. Afterall you have just put together a slick and professional email packed with interesting information and offers which showcases your business and products – who wouldn’t want to share that with a friend?
  • Talk to us and we’ll place a single click “sign up” function on your existing website so your database can grow on its own.

Analyse

  • When, where, what and who – what days of the week and times of day are most your customers most likely to open your email? How many people clicked the links in your email? Did they click on product link or research links? Did the demographics of your customer base show an interest in different links? This information will help you create better and more relevant contact in the future.
  • Segment – if you identify clear trends or patterns in your data you should consider segmenting your customer base into groups and sending more focused emails to those groups. It’s all about being relevant to your customers and meeting their individual needs. Take every opportunity you can to get to know more about your client base and store relevant information (for free) in your database.
  • What is your read-rate – 20-30% is fairly average but a lot depends on where and how you have built your customer base as well as how frequently you contact them. A well updated and maintained database is more likely to want to know what you’re up to.
  • What is your unsubscribe rate – If you send very infrequently or it is your first campaign it will likely be higher than usual. If it spikes after certain campaigns you may need to revisit your content. A good, fresh list of interested, existing customers will have a lower unsubscribe rate.

As long as you can point and click, cut and paste Mailshot can do the rest to help you craft highly targeted and relevant marketing material. When done well mailshots should become one of your most effective and low cost marketing tools.

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