So, you’ve built up a substantial mailing list from newsletter signups or customers, and you regularly send out your emails to them. Job done? Not even close. The next step is to evaluate if you are maximising the full potential of your database, and if not, consider factoring this into your future email marketing strategies. Ensure your database is clean There are a few things to consider in ensuring your data is clean, and you’ll want to whip your database into shape before setting your sights on any further marketing escapades. One place to start is that people can make mistakes when manually entering email addresses, so you can run a process on the data to clean up any typos.…
Data
The Rise of the Spam Bots
Email marketers know the best distribution lists you can have are the ones grown organically, with a huge source being via sign up forms on your website. This means you can be certain that that person really wants to sign up…right? You might also have forms to capture such things as contact or blog comments to help you communicate with your users better. But just how safe are your forms really? If you haven’t added any protection to them against spam bots and malicious phishers, then sadly, not safe at all. The implications of this can often be dire for your success as an email marketer. Feedback from your users is a helpful way to know if you are collecting…
Get back to the top of the pile
Emails come in thick and fast these days, with companies competing fiercely for people’s attention. It’s so easy to slip down to the bottom of the pile under a deluge of emails if yours isn’t spotted right away, but there is no reason to leave it there. Why not have a second bite of the cherry and simply resend to anyone that hasn’t opened the email? As the old adage goes, if at first you don’t succeed… Aren’t I just doubling the work? With so many email platforms geared towards automation these days, it should actually require very little work on your end to set up a resend. A duplicate of your template with a shiny new subject line and…
Easily track the rise and fall of your top customers
Ever wonder who the movers and shakers of your database are? Finding out who your top customers are and then showing them your gratitude can help build longer lasting and more prosperous relationships with them. Equally, rooting out those that have become less interested over time is another avenue to explore to find ways to bring them back into the fold. To illustrate the point, we developed the “Top Customers Chart” (updated on a monthly basis) which would highlight the risers and fallers in your database and from which you can easily pick out the customers that need special consideration as your follow their journeys over the months. Top 100 Customers of All Time To get started we need to…
Trend analysis for insights into your email marketing
Analysing all your data, whilst massively rewarding with the insights you gain, can be a painful exercise and may leave you feeling like you’re drowning. Spotting trends is a great way to see what is going on with your email marketing – are your opens, clicks and conversions rising / falling, how is your deliverability, which are your best performing campaigns? This can end up being a huge task with potentially gigabytes of data to trawl through, and with platform limitations restricting how far back you can go, your insight may be limited to platform specific timeframes. Since we love to go the extra mile, we developed our own system agnostic reporting suite (hosted online) which pulls data month by…
Profile your data for smarter marketing
We’re in an age where knowing as much as possible about your target audience is essential if you want to get the most out of your direct marketing as possible. Personalising your email marketing will likely increase opens, click-throughs, sales and revenue. This is where making a profile database can come in handy – collecting as much information about each of your users as possible to assist in sending relevant content at the best times. So, what are the nooks and crannies you can delve in to procure this valuable insight into your data? Profile: Sign-up One easy area where you can gather useful information is during the sign-up process for such things as creating a customer account. Here, without…
Counting domains the easy way
If you ever want to know the breakdown of domains for a list of emails without the rigmarole of having to import them into a database first, then here is a simple but handy JavaScript tool to do just that (which means you don’t need any special software to use it – any web browser should do the trick). Step 1: Create your input form First create your form which will have a textarea to input the list of emails, an input for the number of domains you want to output, a run button and a reset button. <form name=”form1″> <table> <tr> <td><h3>Input Emails:</h3> <fieldset> <textarea rows=”30″ cols=”40″ name = “TextAreaInput”></textarea> </fieldset> <fieldset> <strong>No. Domains to Count:</strong> <input type…