1. Only send emails to people who have requested them. Rule number one of becoming an intelligent email marketer is to never send unsolicited email.  Unsolicited email is, of course, called spam. Sending spam will ruin any legitimate organization’s reputation and brand value very quickly.

2. Include only relevant content as it relates to your segmented group and what they requested. As long as you provide value –whether by providing content on a topic a recipient is interested in or a discount or special offer on a relevant product—-people will allow you to continue to contact them.

3. Timing is key with B2B Communications. In most cases it is best to send B2B emails after 9am and before 3pm Tuesday through Thursday. 

4. Be consistent with your frequency. Pick a schedule and stick to it.  Decide what frequency is right for your customer base, whether it’s weekly or monthly and stick to it. This way, your customers will come to expect and anticipate your company’s communications.

5. Familiarity Encourages Opens. Make sure you include your company name within the “From” name. Once you decide on a From name, keep it consistent. During the seconds it takes for subscribers to make the decision whether or not to open your email, the most important factor is whether the From Name is familiar to them.

6. Include both Plain Text and HTML. Be sure to include both a plain text and an HTML version of your email message. Most web-based email automation tools will automatically detect which subscribers can view the HTML message and which can only see the plain text message. If you don’t include a plain text message, around 5% of your recipients will see a message with nothing in it.

7. Add a Message about Deliverability. To improve email deliverability, add a message at the top of your emails that says something like: “To ensure receipt of our emails, please add something@yourcompany.com to your Address Book.”

8. Avoid Excess Punctuation or Capitalization.  Don’t use ALL CAPS or multiple exclamation marks within your subject line or body. Doing so will trigger spam filters.

9. Build Your List at Every Opportunity. Build your list at every point of contact. At conferences or events, ask everyone you speak with if you may add them to your list after you exchange business cards. When speaking with a prospect on the phone or face2face, ask if you can add them to your inhouse list to receive updates and/or promotions. And of course, add your newsletter sign-up form to “every page” on your web site. 

Have more tips to share? Please comment below >>

Marketing is critical to business growth.  Unless a business focuses on and aligns their offerings with specific needs targeted towards a specific market segment, a business will not succeed. 

With that, marketing is the process of “maneuvering” an organization towards the success of selling a product or service that people need or want and are willing to pay for.  From anticipating customers’ future needs and wants (market research), to providing a product roadmap (product marketing) to then communicating, promoting, distributing and selling – marketing spans many areas of business.

In an attempt to guide customers towards a specific offering, effective marketing must be entirely clear on defining and communicating its’ value proposition (or set of benefits) to a set of targeted end users – then actually delivering on that value through the offerings presented.  In creating awareness, it’s essential those top value points are communicated through the various marketing channels of communication.

What is Direct Marketing? 

Direct marketing is a channel of marketing primarily focused on “lead generation” and emphasizes trackable and measurable results per campaign.  There are two main characteristics that distinguish it from other types of marketing.  

1. Direct marketing attempts to send its messages directly to a highly targeted group of consumers, without the use of intervening “mass media” such as radio or TV.  This always involves direct communication with consumers or businesses (many times unsolicited) including; email marketing, direct mail, telemarketing, fax campaigns, door hangers, and more.  

2. Direct marketing is focused on driving sales directly attributed to a specific “call-to-action.”  Whatever medium is used, “direct response advertising” asks the prospect to take a specific action usually within a specified timeframe (i.e. call by end of week and receive 25% discount). 

In turn, direct marketing usually offers a clearer picture on ROI then other marketing channels thus providing marketers a much needed tactical approach which can provide results both sales and management teams can easily relate to and understand - so that in your next meeting when they ask “what have you done for me lately” your reports will justify all activities and expenses. And what a thrill that is.

In today’s business marketing mix, email marketing is a key component; however, with all the great ideas also comes various challenges to achieving desired results – one of which includes deliverability (i.e. avoiding spam filters). 

Spam filters score each and every email, deciding which will “pass” and which will be “filtered”, in turn not being delivered.  All emails are scored for spam on a point-based system (a 5-level scale between 0 to 13+).  The more points you get the less likely your email will pass the spam filters.  Below are a few ideas on how to improve deliverability. 

1. Use quality HTML.  Don’t use web files that have been created in Microsoft Word and other non-HTML tools as they are usually filled with “garbage code”.  Unbalanced, invalid or empty tags will be sure to set off those spam flags.  Also, it’s a good idea to validate your HTML through a free HTML validator (just search google, there’s plenty to choose from). 

2. Keep your subject lines clean.  Avoid spacing out words, using strong characters and don’t use a lot of capital letters (some are OK).  Also, beware of quotations, dollar signs and exclamation points.  Don’t start your subject line using words like “Free”, “As Seen” or “Offer” and don’t put toll-free numbers in – all are bad ideas. 

3. Text should be EZ to read.  All of the text in your email should be easy to read. Don’t use invisible text, teeny font sizes or overly large font sizes, as these can trigger spam filters as well. 

4. Be careful how many images you use.  Thinking about sending your email as one or a few big image files to control fonts and layout.  If yes, then don’t do it.  Little text and a lot of image files in your email will cause spam flags to go off.  Use images where needed, however, for text areas use actual text.  An added bonus, when recipients block images in their preview pane – they can still at least see part of your message to decide if they want to open or not. 

5. Include text-only email.  When sending HTML email, always include a text-only version as back-up, for those who don’t accept HTML emails.  Make sure to keep it as close to the original HTML copy as possible; the closer the copy, the less likely your email will be blocked. 

6. Check your unsubscribe language.  It’s law to include a way for recipients to manage their email subscriptions; however, many spammers include this and either don’t do anything about it or worse, use it as a way to verify your address. In turn, spam filters have started to negatively score the following phrases: ”to be removed” and “to unsubscribe”; instead try other phrases like “Manage your subscription” or “If you no longer wish to receive…”

7. Include privacy policy.  Include a link to your privacy policy in your email footer. No real spammer would ever do that (at least not with a working link) and the spam filters know that. 

8.  Don’t mention anti-spam laws:  You can loose big time points for mentioning anything about spam laws.  Many spammers claim they are compliant with spam laws, which they aren’t.  This practice will now cause spam filters to go off.  

Hopefully above guidelines will assist you with your future email marketing efforts.  With that, if you have additional ideas on avoiding spam filters, please share.  We’d love to hear from you!

Email is a great tool and can be used effectively for direct marketing programs if done properly; however, there can be low rates of return, you can risk annoying would-be customers, and have to understand spam guidelines to avoid a negative impact. 

With that said, email marketing is a powerful medium if you carefully craft an effective campaign.  Here are 9 ideas to help you succeed: 

1.     Don’t rent email lists.  Don’t learn the hard way.  At first, it may seem like a good idea – paying a low price for thousands of names and emails.   However, most of the time the quality isn’t there (i.e. the demographics aren’t highly targeted, many emails are outdated, etc…) and there’s the risk of being accused of spamming, which quickly diminishes credibility.  You never really know what you’re getting.  So don’t do it! 

2.     Build your own list.  There are many good ways to build an email marketing list.  On your web site have visitors opt-in (whether for a newsletter, at check-out or when completing an online form).  In your retail establishment, ask customers whether they’d like to receive email communications from your business when they are paying for their purchase.  With that, don’t make it a simple request - be specific about what’s in it for them (i.e. get a bonus, receive discounts, learn about special sales and events, and more).  Sell them on the value of the communications and guide them into signing up. 

3.     Be clear about your value.  Make sure your emails are exciting and full of substance.  The communications should be informative and useful.  Offer tips, ideas, suggestions… things of value to your customer.  Use the email’s subject line to announce the offer upfront. 

4.     Be consistent.  You should view your email marketing communications as ongoing dialogue between you and your customers and prospects.  Consistency is key.  Schedule your emails weekly or monthly based on the communication needs of your business.  Also, be consistent with formatting and type of content you provide.  Work towards having customers anticipate your next communication. 

5.     Keep it simple.  From layout and design to the amount of content you include, make sure your communications are easy to read and pleasing to the eye.  Limit the content to only “pure value”.  Bring in a marketing writer to at least review your content.  The best way to fine tune this creation cycle is to collect samples of emails that work and emulate their structure, design and basic content blocks.  Always proof your work many times over. 

6.     Be aware of spam triggers.  Many people use spam filters.  While they are helpful for the end consumer, they make your job more challenging.  They keep you from reaching your customers and prospects.  Arm yourself by understanding what types of words are likely to set off spam filters (i.e. FREE, Special Offer, etc…).  Many email marketing tools have “spam checkers” built in as part of their service.  If not, you can easily find one.  It’s important to educate yourself to be effective. 

7.     Effective campaign management.  Another challenge to email marketing is actually managing your campaigns.  Once you have the customer data, you need to be able to segment and target them, manage the data sets, the campaigns and the communications within those campaigns.   There are many great companies offering effective and affordable services – from the basic (www.icontact.com) to the more elaborate and more expensive (www.Eloqua.com).   These are just 2 of many, so do your research to be sure you find the right one. 

8.     Make it easy.  Make sure it’s easy to sign-up; from a quick form in retail to 1-click opt-in on web sites - make it painless to join. Also, make it easy for readers to pass along your communications.  By nature, email is viral – so encourage people to pass it on.  Lastly, make it easy to opt-out.  The ability to unsubscribe is key to following spam guidelines and keep your would-be customers happy. 

9.     Test for effectiveness.  From testing your campaigns before you send them to reviewing metrics of specific campaigns after sending them, make sure you understand what’s working and what’s not.  Take corrective action based on those results.    

Summary:  Email marketing is an effective marketing tool once you understand the limitations and empower yourself with the knowledge on how to create, optimize and deliver successful campaigns.  Do your research to ensure success.

Please post your ideas and suggestions below for further dialogue. 

Landing pages are often confused with splash pages, bridge pages, jump pages and microsites. 

• Splash pages are graphic introductions - often full screen - to web content, mostly upon entry to a web site.  Usually, splash pages are made in flash and allow the user to skip them, which almost all visitors will.  In general, splash pages are an extremely bad idea.  Visitors usually dislike them and your site traffic will generally plummet as a result of having placed this barrier in front of it.

• Bridge pages (a.k.a. doorway, portal, and gateway pages) are designed to be particularly enticing for search engines, not visitors.

• Jump pages attract attention to a particular offer or event.  They must be navigated through to get to the desired content.

• Microsites are a cross between a landing page and a regular web site.  They often have their own domain names, and even brands separate from the organization’s brand.  They are used when a marketer wants to offer a user an extended experience for branding or educational purposes.  Many times a visitor might even return to a specified microsite as a destination.

• Although landing pages can have several linked pages, they generally don’t allow many navigational options.  You can move forward through the conversion process, or you can leave.  On the other hand, microsites invite you to explore and look around within the experience.