Three 'quick wins' for your email marketing

At the recent E-Commerce Expo event, Sean Duffy of Emailcenter presented some timely reminders* about how attention to detail can make all the difference in email marketing. For example:

Using a personal 'from' name rather than the generic company name. When Toptable changed the 'from' name on their campaign from 'Toptable' to Alex - Toptable', opens increased by 5%. And when Corporate Direct inserted the individual client account manager's name into the 'from' field, it brought a massive 70% increase.

That particular statistic does sound quite exceptional, nevertheless this is something I'm taking on board and will be suggesting to some of my clients.

Reporting by domain. If you're experiencing deliverability issues it's worth checking to see whether it's ISP specific. Emailcenter gave the example where, thanks to a client's domain name being mistaken for a spammer, the bounce rate to Yahoo addresses was found to be 98%! But after a dialogue with Yahoo the problem was resolved.

This is one of the reasons it's worth working with a reputable UK email service provider - our own lovely partners at Sign-up.to, for example!

Taking a long term view, not per-email. I know I've said this before, but it's as true as ever. ResponsibleTravel.com identified the 45% of their list who hadn't opened an email in 6 months. See also Mark Brownlow on this topic.) They targeted just that group with a different subject line, and managed to re-engage 8% of them.

Getting permission to email people is a precious gift, so until they say they don't want to hear from you any more, surely it's worth trying to hang on to them?

* 10 quick wins for your email marketing (powerpoint slides) from Emailcenter UK.