email marketing

Your email open rates are changing

Posted by Tony Macpherson

Unless you’ve been living on a remote island somewhere you’ll know that on September 20th Apple’s iOS 15 update was launched, containing a feature call Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) which – amongst other things – will eliminate the ability to accurately track email open rates. For the uninitiated, email opens are recorded using a tiny image in the email code. When the email is opened, that image loads, which tells the sender an email was opened, by whom, when, where and on what device. What Apple have done is add a ‘middle man’ into the mix, first routing emails through their own proxy servers to pre-load email content – including the tracking image – before serving the email to the…

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AeSTATic value: 5 ways to turn your info into imagery

Posted by Adrian Young

People like stats. People like numbers. How many points have you earned? What was your total number of steps walked last week? Was your screentime up or down? Personalised, bite-sized snippets of information are well-suited to the transient nature of email. Rambling walls of text (like this article) are not. But you know what’s even better than straight-up figures? Those figures… in graphical form. A picture is more engaging, more instinctively understandable. That picture might be a bar graph or a pie chart or any other visualisation that meets your need. If you can think it, there’s probably a way to do it. Let’s take the theme of loyalty points. If your customer can see their progress – rather than…

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Does marketing to third party email data work?

Posted by Tony Macpherson

The answer is it very much depends on how you do it. Often seen as the dark side of email marketing, sending messages to email addresses who did not sign up directly to your brand is frowned upon by many. It’s easy to see why – my inbox is already a busy place and I can do without even more emails I didn’t ask for thank you very much. As with your email marketing efforts to your first party lists, there are a host of things to get as right and as tight as possible. Data is king Long term success needs good data. Third party lists should be collected fairly and with transparency. People need to understand what to…

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Is your phone listening to you?

Posted by Mike Parry

“I swear my phone is listening to me!” Whom amongst us hasn’t had that conversation with friends? “I just had a conversation with Homer about holidaying in the Maldives and up pops adverts for holidays in the Maldives on my Facebook”. Or “I was talking to Marge about trellis for my garden and the next thing I know Facebook is advertising trellises”. Well, Apple are about to change all that. At their WWDC 2021 conference yesterday (Worldwide Developers Conference), they announced changes to privacy. Which they hope will prevent such tracking and unsolicited targeted ads. How will this impact email? Where these changes may impact us as email marketers is in relation to the new Mail Privacy Protection function in…

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Email Marketing Trends for 2021

Posted by Josh Green

It will be no surprise that customer behaviour has changed over the last year due to the pandemic and this is no different for email marketing. The way in which customers now receive, view and interact with emails has shuffled due to customers having more time at home, and a bigger perspective of what they want to be spending their valuable time on. Companies must therefore play close attention to their customers, analyse their email behaviour and observe their natural buying behaviour for which they can then use email to generate conversions.  The increase in internet traffic over the past year saw a significant increase in email open rates but a fall in click-through rates due to the sensitivity of…

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Planning and implementing your email marketing strategy…part 2

Posted by Mike Parry

Following on from last week’s blog I am taking a look at how you go about implementing some of the ideas mentioned and try and flesh out the opportunities afforded by the medium of email marketing. List Growth How do you go about growing your list? You can do this in many different ways, each one having their own level of effectiveness. The standard tools available are: Newsletter Sign Ups: Have a clear and obvious way of letting people sign up for emails, hiding your newsletter sign up at the bottom of the contact page is almost apologetic. You’ve paid for the eyeballs, now try and capture them. Place the sign up somewhere obvious. Also, look at using downstream popups…

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Planning and implementing your email marketing strategy

Posted by Mike Parry

Email Marketing Strategy Just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should! It’s an old adage and one many email marketers would do well to consider before embarking on their email marketing strategy. If we start from what is possible the prospect of drawing up an email marketing strategy, budget, resource and timelines is daunting. I like to start from the other end, not what is possible but what does the business need. It sounds simple and the oft flippant response is more sales but that doesn’t always hold true. So start with a blank canvas and decide your business’s short, medium and long term goals, they may all turn out to be the same – sales,…

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