We all know that image blocking by ISPs and email clients can wreak havoc with your HTML emails and affect click-throughs and conversions.

This is particularly a critical issue with image-based call-to-action (CTA) buttons. But all hope is not lost.

In our recent Webinar, "Using Innovations in Email Creative to Drive Increased Engagement," Aaron Smith and Lisa Harmon of the email creative agency Smith-Harmon outlined a great technique that enables email marketers to use image-based buttons but still convey the CTA if images are blocked.

Here is Smith-Harmon's "bullet-proof" button approach:

Continue reading "The "Bulletproof" Button " »

Posted by Loren McDonald at 7:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marketers who can reach their email subscribers when they're actively in their inboxes will gain a competitive advantage. Quite simply, having your message at the top of the inbox makes it much more likely to be seen and acted on.

However, finding that "magic moment" has been a major challenge for email marketers.

It's impractical, given your list demographics, time variables and mindshare, which I discuss in my recent Email Insider column. The key is being able to use recipient time-of-day open and click data.

Send Time Optimization Calculates Ideal Email Delivery Time

Silverpop recently unveiled Send Time Optimization (STO), which automatically calculates the optimal time to send to each recipient, based on a recipient's past mailing behavior. Your message is then distributed at the ideal day and time without requiring multiple segments or scheduled mailings.

Send Time Optimization (STO) analyzes when individual recipients interact with your messages over a rolling period of time and calculates the ideal email delivery time for each recipient on your list, no matter the time zone.

Clients See Measurable Lift

A number of Silverpop clients who have been using Send Time Optimization have reported phenomenal results. Across a sample of just a few clients, we've seen these results:

• 20 percent to 46 percent increase in open rates
• 30 percent to 50 percent increase in click rates
• 52 percent to 75 percent increase in total revenue
• 40 percent increase in net revenue (Encyclopedia Britannica)
• 30 percent increase in total number of orders per campaign
• 35 percent to 47 percent increase in value per order

These numbers are exciting, and not just because of improved performance. Like trigger and drip campaigns, Send Time Optimization leverages the power of marketing automation. In this era of tightening budgets, reduced resources and overflowing inboxes, email marketers need all the advantages they can muster.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bell Canada recently changed its residential Internet service provider division name from Sympatico to Bell Internet. Customers will be able to keep their existing @sympatico.ca address, get a new @bell.net address, or do both. Our information doesn't indicate a timeline for these changes to take effect.

If you have Sympatico subscribers on your email marketing list, we recommend that you contact them as soon as possible and ask them to update or reaffirm their email address contact information. Not only will this ensure you don't lose touch with valued subscribers, it will protect email deliverability by preventing you from sending messages to outdated email addresses of recipients who have changed email addresses.

Posted by Robert Consoli at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The title of Silverpop's most recent Webinar says it all: "Transactional Emails: Loved by Recipients, Neglected by Marketers."

In this Webinar (view below), Silverpop Product Marketing Manager Whit Lanier and I showed how transactional messages, which are highly relevant to recipients, can drive engagement when you add carefully chosen marketing content to a branded design consistent with your promotional emails and newsletters.

For many marketers, though, these are an overlooked opportunity, often because the responsibility for transactional emails belongs in another department.

In my latest Email Insider column, "Transactional Emails: Make Your First Impression Count," I review the reasons why moving transactional emails into the marketing department makes sense, not just because you can create more useful and attractive messages but also because you can more easily monitor recipient actions and deliverability, as you do with your other branded email.

The following question on using HTML in transactional emails was the most asked question during and after the Webinar:

Q: There's the perception that transactional messages are text messages, and recipients have been trained for that. If you move to a more visual approach with images and HTML, doesn't that make them more suspicious-looking? Will it increase deliverability challenges?

A: Not necessarily, if you do them correctly. If you design transactional messages with the right brand, with HTML text that renders with images blocked, and if you test the message template first with a tool such as Pivotal Veracity to check for spam-filter triggers in content or design, you should minimize any deliverability issues and avoid raising trust issues.

Four tips:

• The subject line must be crystal-clear: "Confirming your purchase from XYZ Online," for example, instead of "Order Confirmation."
• Use a friendly "from" address that names the company or department that generated the transaction: "XYZ Online" instead of a vague email address.
• Always place the details of the transaction front and center in the message to comply with CAN-SPAM requirements. Place promotional content below or to the side of the transactional content.
• Always check with your legal counsel if you have any concerns.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

RoadRunner announced on March 16, 2009, that its new feedback loop offering is now in place. ReturnPath, which powers the feedback loops for other major ISPs such as Comcast and Cox, announced that it will be running the new RoadRunner feedback loop service for RoadRunner. Silverpop is now set up with this service on all RoadRunner domains for all our clients' IP addresses.

For engagement marketers, feedback loops provide valuable information about email sends. What's a feedback loop? As the name suggests, it's feedback from an ISP, which forwards complaints originating from its users—usually in the form of them hitting the spam button. For marketers, there are two primary benefits: They can remove subscribers that don't want to receive similar messages, and they can analyze the complaint rate and tweak their campaigns accordingly.

The RoadRunner feedback loop service change was requested and implemented on March 16, 2009. It should not have any effect on Silverpop clients, nor did we see a disruption in service.

Posted by Robert Consoli at 5:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)