Articles by: Holly Gross

Transactional email messages are those that are triggered to customers in your email list based off of an action they took. Whether it is a welcome message to someone who is new to your email list or an order confirmation to someone who just purchased from your site, it is important to make sure that this type of email is both informative and engaging. Since the customer expectation is so high, it is even more important that you get this email to them in their inbox in a timely manner.

By their very nature, transactional messages should be short, sweet and to the point. They essentially should be an instantaneous response to an action your customer has just taken. For the most part, it is usually in your best interest to deliver an email response within just a few minutes or seconds. Since your customer is actually expecting this email, you are likely to experience incredibly high open and click rates. In addition, transactional emails are a great opportunity to easily cross-market other products to your customer.

One important factor to consider when sending transactional emails is their delivery. Some messages, such as order confirmations and credit card decline notices, are vital to e-commerce and must be delivered instantly. For this very reason, it is usually recommended that you set up all transactional emails on IP addresses separate from your marketing streams. Since transactional emails are sent as one-offs instead of large batches, they tend to be under the radar of ISPs. This then results in better delivery rates, and are also not affected by the bounces and complaints that may coincide with your email marketing efforts.

Although it may require some tech resources, make sure that your transactional emails are built on a system of well-developed API calls. It is crucial that you time your emails properly according to their type. When customers will be expecting an email immediately, make sure that they are not waiting around for long. For these cases, be sure to design your email response to be as close to real time as possible.

You may also consider having a significant waiting period before an email is triggered. An abandoned cart email, for example, would be best received a couple of days to a week after the event occurred. Sending this type of email any sooner would probably not be well received by the customers in your email list since it may come off as hounding them for not purchasing.

Once you have the timing down on any of the emails you send, be sure to have creative that succinctly conveys the message you intend it to. Transactional emails serve a specific purpose that is usually built on dynamic information that is API-driven. Because of this, nearly every transactional email you send can be unique and might contain data that is different for every user. If you have content management systems designed to handle exactly this, it might be a good idea to leverage this functionality to monetize your transactional emails. Whether your business model is built around e-commerce or page views, use extra space in your transactional emails to make product recommendations or link users to other articles and/or landing pages. Since the engagement in transactional emails is so high, use this space wisely. Don’t bombard the user with too much information or ads that could distract from the email’s original intention.

In addition to having triggered single messages in response to a user’s action, consider developing a series of transactional emails. Welcome emails are a great opportunity for this. If you have a lot of content on your website or program, create an email program that slowly educates your customers. For example, you can have one email that is fired off instantly after the address is added to your email list. Perhaps 24 hours later, your system would send a second email and 24 hours after that, a third. In each of these emails, you could focus on the benefits of being in your email list or of different website features.

One last thing to consider about transactional messages is the users who may take advantage of your strategy. There are many smart customers out there who realize that they can easily get discounts or special offers through transactional emails. Since so many companies are trying to win their customers’ dollars, many will include coupons or promotions simply for signing up or leaving a product in their shopping cart. If you do choose to include a discount, make sure to properly suppress those who have received your emails before.

In the end, transactional emails are a very important means of communicating with your customers in real time. If you make sure that they contain relevant information and are delivered in a timely manner, customers will be highly responsive and you can easily rely on transactional messages to be a solid source of revenue.

Anyone who has ever worked in email marketing knows the value of getting your emails delivered into the inbox. You probably also know just how difficult this can actually be. The hardest part is knowing that your business objectives – open rates, click rates, revenue – all can be affected by poor delivery and for which you have no idea why.

In the internet space today, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail/MSN and AOL dominate the free email account market in the United States. That being said, it’s probably a good idea to familiarize yourself with each of these ISP’s rules so that you can ‘play nice’ and comply with each one. Each ISP has its own rules of what email messages they consider spam and what they don’t. They also are constantly changing their email filters to protect their customers, so where your email lands is a day-to-day task to tackle.

Probably one of the simplest ways to help with your inbox delivery is to make sure that your sending IPs are set up properly. This includes having both the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) records available for all of your IP addresses and domains. Basically, these records are checked by the ISPs to ensure that they mail they are about to deliver is actually from you. Spoofers and spammers set up IPs quickly and don’t usually bother with the SPF or DKIM records, so if either (or both) of these two verifications is missing or broken, it’s likely that your email will not be delivered. Practically every ISP relies heavily on these records for email sender verification, so remember to check them frequently.

Some ISPs are willing and able to work with marketers to get email delivered to the customers who actually want it. This comes in the form of whitelists and feedback loops. Whitelists are available only with a few ISPs – Yahoo, AOL, Verizon, to name a few – but can give you preferential inbox treatment. While whitelisting doesn’t guarantee that your email will always make it to the inbox, it shows that you are willing to comply with the ISP’s policies. Putting forth this effort to send reputable email to the customers in your email list resonates well with ISPs, so this is definitely an email best practice worth acting on.

Feedback loops are another relationship you can create with an ISP to help with your delivery. This process allows you to be notified by the ISP when a customer makes a complaint or reports your email as spam. You can then build services to automatically remove these customers from your email list. This shows the ISPs will see that you are complying with your customers’ wishes and only mailing those that want to receive email from you. In turn, you are likely to have better inbox delivery of your emails. Still, inbox is not guaranteed, but any extra help you can get is beneficial. Again, there are only a limited number of ISPs that offer feedback loops – Comcast, Yahoo, Hotmail/MSN, to name a few – but definitely worth the time spent to set these up.

Another – albeit expensive – option to help you achieve inbox delivery is to pay for email certification. By using this service, you pay a per-message fee and agree to comply with very strict spam complaint regulations in exchange for guaranteed inbox delivery. As simple as this sounds, you can never predict how the customers in your email list will respond to your messages, and your IP addresses can go in and out of certification with a single mailing. So essentially, the ISPs are leaving your certification status up to their customers. To ensure that you comply with the complaint rate standards, optimize your email stream so that the customers that receive your emails are, in fact, the ones that want to.

In addition to implementing all of the above options, you will constantly need to monitor your inbox delivery. If you don’t have the time or resources available, there are a few 3rd party options available to help. Companies such as Return Path and Pivotal Veracity offer several tools that can help you keep your email in the inbox. On a day-to-day basis, you can send emails to their test or seed lists that will determine what percentage of your email list received their emails in the inbox. While these are not actual statistics, they are a solid indicator of how your mail is delivered overall.

These companies usually offer other tools to assist with your email delivery such as screening your email content through spam filter checks, IP reputation monitors, delivery statistics alerts, benchmarking standards, among many others. As an added plus, these companies can help with the whitelisting, feedback loop and certification processes. It’s likely that they may also have established relationships with several ISPs. This can be incredibly beneficial when troubleshooting IP and delivery issues that are not resolved by usual means.

A last – and sometimes obvious – method for battling the inbox war is to simply comply with email best practices. However old school they may seem, they are consistent with what the ISPs want to see from bulk mailings. And as the customers in your email list get more and more advanced, it’s always a good idea to stick with the standards and play it safe.

1. Text-to-Image Ratio – In your email templates, be sure to use a combination of both images and text. Even though it is easy to use all images and allows for better branding, ISPs do take this ratio into account. Simple text additions such as promo codes, product descriptions, personalization, expiration dates and fine print can all help with your email delivery.

2. Reinforcing the Email Relationship – It is usually a good idea to remind the customers on your email list how they got there. A small line of copy in the footer of your email that includes their email address and the site they signed up on is usually sufficient.

3. Links and Images – Make sure that the links and images you use in your email have matching domain names to your own. While using external links isn’t wrong, it can be picked up by some ISP’s filters and can seem like spam. If you must use external links, try masking them by sending them through a tracking server.

4. Check for Spam Words – There are still a number of words, phrases and syntax that indicate spam to ISPs. Such things as the words ‘free’ and ‘guarantee,’ typing words in all capital letters and dollar signs can all get your messages caught in the spam filters, so avoid using them where applicable. Remember both the subject line and email content are ‘read, ’ so apply the best practices to all of your email copy.

All in all, ISPs are willing and able to deliver your email to the inbox if they determine that it is what their customers want. If there is any indication that you are sending spam – even if you believe you really aren’t – they will err on the side of caution and send your emails to the junk folder. It is definitely in your best interest to ensure that you have done all you can to comply with each ISP’s standards and take any action that they require. This is probably the best way to get your email delivered to the inbox, which will certainly have an effect on the statistics of the email since all of the intended recipients in the email list actually received it.

One important – and frequently overlooked – aspect of email marketing is the copy, or message that you are trying to get across to your email list. Whatever the message may be email is a quick and easy way to relay it to your customers. There are many opportunities to convey a message in email, so it is important to coordinate all components so that the entire email has a cohesive message.

The first touch points an email has with a customer is the subject line and from name. It is a best practice to keep a consistent from name on all of your email campaigns so that customers instantly recognize the message is from you. A proper subject line should be brief and prepare the subscriber for what is contained in your email body. The recommended length for a subject line is 52 characters, but this can vary according to your brand’s preferences. Just keep in mind that the longer your subject line is, the greater the chance that it gets cut off in the ISP and some of your message can be lost.

Another touch point outside of the email is the super subject line or eyebrow. This is a line of copy you place just inside the body of your email’s HTML. This copy will display in some ISPs immediately after the subject line. Many email marketers do not realize that this copy will show to the subscriber and in most cases you just see the email header copy. Instead, if you use a super subject line, you have the opportunity to provide more information about the email’s contents before the user opens the email.

Once the customer is inside your email, but before they have downloaded the images, the alt tags provide another opportunity for you to convey your message. The alt tags are the text back up to images and will display in the ISP before the customer turns the images on. Here, you should use this text to give additional details as to what the email contains, or explain what content is displayed in the images. Remember that any text in the email will also display, so make sure you are not repeating what is already there.

So now that you have intrigued your customer enough that they want to open the email, make sure that the body appropriately matches the subject line. Tricking your customers into opening will only increase unsubscribes and complaints, so try not to be misleading. If you plan to use mostly images in your email, design it so there is a large headline that is short and to the point. Remember, the intention of an email is to direct traffic back to your website. With this in mind, be sure to write the copy that is both vague and intriguing so that they want to click on the email to learn more.

Inside the body, you should include additional copy that supports your email message. Since emails are usually only around 600 pixels wide, long sentences and paragraphs can translate into many, many lines of copy. Instead of really long copy blocks, use sub headlines and bullet points to get your message across. You can always use images to portray your content as well, so use them to supplement your message.

Additionally, pay close attention to the copy you use in your links. Be sure that the Call to Action (CTA) is strong and tells the user what you want them to do. In the case of hyperlinks, link the appropriate words in the copy so that the customer will know what website they are going to if they click on it. By default, hyperlinks will be underlined and will turn a royal blue color. If you wish to stylize your hyperlinks, make sure that they look clickable – keep the underline, make them a different color than the rest of the copy, italicize, etc. If your message is more of a newsletter style with lead-in copy, try cutting off the copy in the middle of a sentence and have the customers click a link to read more.

For graphical button links, use short, action words that lead customers to the next logical step. Also make sure that these images look clickable. Use shadows, underlines and arrows to make it easy for readers to know that they are supposed to take action.

Remember the entire process of ‘reading’ an email takes only about five seconds. Since this is such a limited amount of time to engage your subscribers, be sure to use all of these text areas to get your message across as directly as you can. Optimize your text and images so that they all coordinate into an email that is cohesive and can be easily engaged with.

If you’ve been in the business of email marketing for a while, it’s likely that you have collected quite a large number of email addresses. You probably have a group that are [hopefully] engaged with you and open and click your emails frequently. Then there is the rest of your list…one group that is unengaged and hasn’t interacted with your emails in quite some time. These might be marked as unmailable due to hard and soft bounces and unsubscribes. Since the inactives and unmailables are probably a majority of your email list, take some steps to clean them up or remove them from your mailing stream. In the end, you may experience an increase in email metrics along with better inbox delivery.

First, take a look at some of your email metrics to determine how customers are reacting to your email campaigns. The failure rate is an important number to watch because it shows how many emails never made it to the customers in your email list. Failures can include hard bounces, soft bounces, connection errors and other technical issues that made your email undeliverable. You should be sure to take action and remove any hard bounces from your email list, since the address is no longer valid and can only further harm your deliverability.

Some other important email campaign statistics are the unsubscribe and complaint rates. These rates indicate how your customers are responding to your email. If subscribers don’t see value in receiving your emails, they are going to take an action of either unsubscribing or complaining (marking your email as spam). While neither of these actions are desirable, it is better to have customers unsubscribe since this action goes under the radar of ISPs. A complaint will notify the ISP that a subscriber believes your message is spam. If too many people complain about your email, it’s likely that all of your incoming mail will be blocked or immediately sent to the spam folder. If you have feedback loops in place, you will be notified of which subscribers are complaining and you can immediately remove them from your email list. According to CAN-SPAM regulations, you legally have 10 days to remove an email address from your database. However, it’s in your best interest to remove any addresses that unsubscribe or complain immediately to avoid any extra harmful behavior.

The churn rate is another metric you should be monitoring. Depending on how often you mail, you might report on this metric differently, but calculate it by month to see how you trend throughout the year. You simply need to add the total number of unsubscribes, complaints and unmailable addresses and divide by how many total email addresses you have at a certain point in time. This will give you a percentage that indicates how many email addresses you lose each month. If you have email acquisition efforts running, this number is important since you pay for every email address you acquire and should have an idea of how many you will lose due to churn.

Next, take a look at the composition of engaged and unengaged users in your email list. Instead of continually emailing to everyone in your list, find those that are most engaged and target them for your campaigns. To find these customers, run counts of users in your list that have recently taken an action on your email. Depending on how often you send email campaigns, try running counts of those that have opened or clicked on an email in the past three, six, nine or twelve months. And depending how quickly you acquire new subscribers to your email list, run counts of users who have recently been added to your list in the past week, month or quarter.

Then you will need to put together a testing strategy where you mail these groups separately and track how each responds to your email campaign. From here you can create separate lists of the most engaged users that will optimize your email campaigns. Not only will you experience better email statistics – ex. open and click rates – but you are likely to have lower unsubscribe rates and fewer delivery issues. If you do experience deliverability issues, it might be a good idea to separate your database into separate engagement lists. First deploy your email campaigns to actively engaged users, then roll it out to the moderately engaged (and possibly then unengaged). This strategy will allow your email to be immediately opened and clicked and will indicate to the ISPs that it is a message of value and should be delivered to the remainder of users.

For those in your email list that are dormant engagers or completely unengaged, you may choose to either mail them less often or not at all. Put together a separate email strategy for these users that gives them the opportunity to re-engage with your brand or to opt out of receiving emails. Since these subscribers haven’t engaged with you recently (or ever), it’s likely that they won’t respond and you’ll have to decide what action to take for them. If this is the case, your best bet would be to put them on the back burner and email them quarterly with the options above.

If you have a large email list, you’ve probably collected a very large amount of invalid email addresses. This group could hold a trove of valuable customers, but for some reason, they are not able to get your email due to typos, fat-fingering, their mailbox was full, etc. Whatever the reason is that they were marked as invalid, there are some options available for recovering these email addresses. There are several third party companies in the market that can help with your recovery efforts. Many will provide free or reduced-fee trials to help you decide which of their services will best hygiene your list.

One service that is offered is an email syntax check. They will take your entire list of invalid email addresses and check each one for common mistakes and errors that would cause your email to be unmailable. Such things as misspelling a Yahoo address as ‘@yahho’ or missing the shift button and typing a 2 instead of an @ sign could cause an otherwise correct email to bounce. You would then be returned a list of corrected email addresses that you can now try to re-mail. Be careful when mailing these recovered email addresses though. Remember they have probably never gotten an email from you and it may have been awhile since they signed up for your email list, so the first message you send them should be some form of welcome email.

Another service offered by third party hygiene companies is a validation tool. This software is designed to catch syntax and spelling errors up front, and ensure that the hard bounce never happens. This service happens at the time when the user enters their email address. Once they hit submit, the service will verify that the email address is both properly formatted, as well as checking it for common errors and typos. If it detects an issue, it will provide several options of what it ‘thought’ the user was trying to enter and force the user to choose the correct address. Although pricey, this service can do wonders in preventing bad email addresses from entering your database.

In all, there are many different ways to hygiene your database. It is important to constantly keep a clean mailing stream as ISPs get stricter and stricter with delivery standards. Whatever budget and resources you have available, it can only benefit you and your bottom line to ensure that you are only mailing those in your email list that want to be mailed.

Now that you’ve gone through the Request For Proposal (RFP) process with a few different Email Service Providers (ESP), you should have lots of information regarding the features of each. The next step is to examine the features of each and determine which one most meets your business needs. Each will obviously have its own strengths and weaknesses, so perform due diligence to find the one that caters your email marketing goals. Below are just a few of the features you will want to research with any ESP.

Dynamic Content

Since email marketing is growing more and more difficult, one popular trend is to personalize the email through dynamic content. If you plan to incorporate dynamic content into your email marketing stream, it is very important to have an Email Service Provider that can easily handle it. Be sure that you are comfortable with the process of uploading, implementing and reporting on any email campaigns you plan on sending.

Segmentation

Another common functionality that you will likely use on a daily basis segmentation. Since targeting emails by specific audience is another popular trend in email marketing, you should be sure that your ESP could easily segment your email list by any criteria you deem necessary. The process of segmenting your email list via the Email Service Provider should be user-friendly and able to be completed quickly.

Randomization

Anyone who uses segmentation in their email marketing strategy understands that there is a strong need to have control groups of customers. If this is the case for you, it would be worth your while to see if your new Email Service Provider has the ability to create random segments from the subscribers in your email list. If so, this feature can greatly reduce the amount of work you require from your database team, as well as improve your overall testing functionality.

Permissions

If you work in a business where there are multiple brands under a single organization, you might need your ESP to provide a way to separate each one. It’s also possible that you will have different team members working on different parts of your email marketing stream, so you’ll need a system that can handle a number of logins for separate users.

Reporting

The need for instant and accurate reports is crucial to email marketing. Since some testing decisions are made on the fly, you should research each ESP’s ability to timely report email statistics. Also take a look at the pre-fabrication reports available in the system. Most reports will include total and unique counts of sent, delivered, failed, opens and clicks as well as the corresponding rates. You might also find trending reports, email statistics by ISP or other engagement reports. If you are in need of something other than what is offered out-of-the-box, make sure you negotiate any custom report creation into the contract.

Data Tables & Your Email List

In addition to analyzing all of the features of your new Email Service Provider, you will have to decide how to handle the transfer of your data. As with any business, the information contained in your email list is sensitive and confidential. So it is important to make sure that your new ESP is compliant with your policies and can has the proper systems to handle your data.

You may choose from a number of different methods of making your data available to an Email Service Provider for mailing. Some ESPs can create a database of your information in their own system while others can simply dial in and connect to an external data source. Look into your unique business needs and determine which option(s) are most suitable to you. Be sure to consider such things as system speeds, internal resources and around-the-clock support. If you are not sure how to set up your data tables, you should be able to manually import data lists into the system.

Depending on your business type, it is also likely that you have numerous rows of data, with many fields of data available for every row, so it is important to make sure that your ESP is able to accommodate data tables of any size. They should have functionality available to quickly and easily query these tables and return data sets that may be used in your mailing campaigns. In addition, you should be sure that the processing time for mailings is not affected by the size of your email campaign. Multiple fields of data, dynamic content and segmentation in a mailing can significantly increase processing time, so choose an Email Service Provider that has systems and resources available to handle them.

Switching to a New IP(s)

If you switch your email marketing to a new Email Service Provider, you will most likely need to start using a new set of IP addresses. This can be a major interruption in your email marketing stream if are currently using an ESP since usually they are ‘rented’ from the ESP and are not owned by you. This means you cannot take them with you to the new ESP and will have to start fresh. The good news is that you now have the opportunity to set up your new email stream with as many IP addresses as your business needs.

It is normal to have several different mailing IPs to service your different email streams. Since different types of messages have different goals and delivery rates, set up as many as you need to get your most important messages delivered properly.

Welcome/Sign Up Message

– It is recommended to put your Welcome email on its own IP address since it is usually the first email received by your customers. This IP is likely to not have poor delivery rates because it receives all of the hard bounces from new customers inputting their email addresses incorrectly.

Transactional Messages

– It is very important to have all transactional messages such as order confirmations and shipping notices delivered to your customers. Since the number of this type of email sent is fewer than most of your other email streams, it can be helpful to create a separate IP for them. The delivery rates should remain high since you will experience very few or no bounces or complaints from these emails.

Marketing Messages

– These emails should also be sent from their own IP. Depending on your email marketing practices, you could generate lots of complaints that could affect how your emails are delivered.

When switching to new mailing IPs, another process to take into account is the warm up period. To ensure you have good delivery of your emails, you must make sure that your IP addresses have a reputation to send the amount of email you intend through them. This means that you will have to warm up your IP addresses and prove to the different Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that you are not spammers.

During the warm up period, you should plan to send emails that aren’t necessarily important to your email stream. They should be fairly generic and not marketing in nature, since it is likely that your initial email sends will not have high delivery rates. Examples could be surveys, change of address emails and general communications. You’ll first start off sending emails in smaller quantities, then gradually increasing them until your IP is warmed up enough to send your usual volume of emails.

By the time you’ve completed all of these steps, you should have a new Email Service Provider that is fully prepared to send your email. Hopefully you’ve chosen wisely and now have a new partner that is dynamic, advanced and able to move your email marketing to the next level.

So the time has come in your business where you’ve collected email addresses through your site, and want to communicate with them. The problem is you’re not sure how to actually send the mail to them. Or maybe the reverse situation is true. You’ve had an email list that you’ve been mailing for years, but now need a system that can handle larger, more complex campaigns. Or maybe you just need another email stream set up that has different functionalities from your current email provider. Either way, it sounds like you’re in need of a new Email Service Provider (ESP).

Email Service Provider – Defined

By definition an ESP is a solution to send, receive and store email for organizations and can even help you streamline your email strategy. There are so many different providers out there, be sure to take the time to properly investigate them to find the solution that fits your business’ unique needs. If you have the time and budget available, it might be a good idea to attend an email marketing conference and peruse the exhibit hall. Just about every major and minor ESP will have a booth, and it is a good opportunity to familiarize yourself with each brand and what they have to offer.

Full or Self Service?

To get started on the path to choosing your new ESP, you will need to decide whether you have (or don’t have) the internal resources to send all of this mail. If you’re just starting out with email marketing, the amount of set up work can be daunting. Unless you’re a jack of all trades, you will probably need help from a graphic designer, email marketer, network engineer and software developer…to name a few. Or maybe you just have aggressive email marketing goals and don’t have a dedicated team to work on achieving them. Whatever your situation, you will need to consider whether you want your account with an ESP to be full- or self-service. A self-service account means you will handle all of the email set up, launching and reporting yourself. Basically you will only be using the Email Service Provider as a means to send all of your email. A full-service account will have a team of account managers assigned to you that will assist you in – or completely perform – your email marketing efforts. ESPs will likely have a hybrid solution available as well to accommodate those in unique situations.

Email List Size

Once you have determined who will be sending your mail, you’ll have to outline a few quantitative goals for your email marketing strategy (if you haven’t already). You will need to be familiar with the size of your current email list and how much you expect it to grow in the next year. Then take this number and estimate how often you will be sending email to get a total count of how many emails you plan to send in a year. Remember to take any marketing initiatives such as segmentation, list rental or acquisition efforts into account. This number will be very important later when discussing pricing, so make sure that it is realistic and takes into account any up or down swings that could be caused by seasonality, website downtime, etc.

Budget

The next step in choosing your new Email Service Provider would be to decide on a budget. ESPs will likely charge a monthly base fee, with the amount based on whether you decide to have a full or self service account. In addition, you will pay for how many emails you send based on a cost per thousand (CPM) model. You will probably be quoted a tiered CPM amount according to the number of emails you plan to send in a given month with additional fees for under and overages. The tiers will also most likely decrease in cost if you commit to sending a certain number of emails each month.

RFP Process

Once you’ve determined your email list size, budget and service level, you should take a look at your proposed email strategy and understand what functionality is needed in order to execute your plan. From here, create an RFP (Request for Proposal) document that outlines all requirements you need – in the present or future. This document will be given to the ESPs and is their chance to demonstrate how their email product is the perfect solution for you. Be very specific and include ideas and details that can help ESPs understand your background and the goals you want to accomplish.

Next, begin contacting Email Service Providers to set up information sessions. This is also your opportunity to learn about each ESP’s functionality and to get some of your questions answered. Again, be specific and ask questions that apply to your email marketing goals such as sending capacity, throttle levels, system down time, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and how long email history data is saved for. If applicable, request demonstrations of their system(s), so you can easily determine if their user interfaces will fit in with your work flow. Now is also the time to start discussing their costs, how many emails you plan on sending and the budget you have available for email marketing.

Since there are so many Email Service Providers in the market today, take the time to meet with as many as you need to so that you are assured you are moving forward with those that have the best possible solutions. Since you might be sharing sensitive or confidential information with the ESPs, it’s also important to remember to have them sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

Now that you have interviewed several Email Service Providers, you probably have a good idea of which ones are more suited to handle your email marketing. From these, choose your top 3-5 ESPs and invite them to participate in your RFP process. If you are already using an ESP, it is a proper procedure to invite them to participate as well. Basically, this should be their opportunity to keep your business. In this process, you will send your RFP document to each of the ESPs and allow them to respond to each of your questions. They should provide responses that are very descriptive and complete, so that anyone can read them and know what their solution is all about. You will then need to thoroughly review the RFP responses with all key decision makers in your company in order to move forward.

After meeting with the Email Service Providers and reviewing their RFP responses, you will most likely have an inclination as to which provider will be the right solution for your business needs. If so, invite them to perform another demonstration for you and any another key decision makers for your business. This final effort will help solidify your selection for your new ESP.

So as you can see, choosing a new Email Service Provider can be a lengthy and intense process. It’s likely you will invest quite a bit of time selecting the service provider that best suits your needs. You will experience many different ESPs along the way, and some will stand out as definite yeses while others will be definite nos. Take your time and choose wisely, since the ESP will be responsible for delivering all of your email. And if all goes well, the ESP you select will likely become one of your most-trusted business partners.

As an email marketing professional, I’m always on the look out or trying to think of new ideas on how to engage my email list. We all know that the more times customers open or click an email; the more likely they are to make a purchase. In a world where customers are email savvy and almost immune to marketing, it’s more difficult than ever to get them to take the actions we want them to.

Just the other day I received an email from my alumni association that was, in my opinion, just short of genius. Whoever designed this campaign connected a few small details from the subject line to the content that were so simple, but really worked in capturing my attention. It made me start thinking about the origins of email and how simplicity of a message could really drive the engagement of the customers in your email list.

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The subject line first struck me when I read the letters FWD. Even though I wasn’t sure who the sender was, I instantly recognized this email as something that someone thought they should send to me personally. So of course I opened the email to see what the subject line was all about.

Inside I was met with a message that looked as if it was written just to me. There were no pictures or attachments, and the font was a simple black Arial on a white background – otherwise know as plain text. The greeting first captured my attention because it used my first name only and was properly capitalized. The conversational tone of the next few lines intrigued me and really made it sound as if the sender knew me.

The copy of the email actually contained two messages: 1) a follow up to my inactivity 2) the original email invitation. The forwarded email copy really connects the body to the subject line and seemed to be the real tipping point of getting someone to engage with the email. There was a call to action in the email to click on the link to RSVP, however I found myself hitting Reply instead. As soon as I tried to reply to the ‘person’ who sent me this email, I realized that this was a mass communication email. The reply-to address was noreply@xxxx.edu, which was a dead giveaway that this was not a personal email.

Once I realized I couldn’t reply to the email, I went back to the link, clicked it and RSVP’d – or did exactly what they wanted me to do. Now, I’ve worked in email marketing for around six years and have never ‘fallen’ for an email to this magnitude. I’m still perplexed as to whether this was a cleverly designed marketing campaign or if it was just simply someone who wanted to send the email through an ESP to reduce the work involved. Either way, there would be no reporting statistics available since there were no images to download to register or an open and no click tags on the link in the email. One thing is for sure though, all they wanted the recipients in the email list to do was RSVP – and that I did.

The takeaway from this email was an appreciation of how email has evolved over its many years of existence. What used to be a quick, easy and personal way to communicate with people all over the world has transformed into a major marketing stream. There are so many complexities that email marketers have to deal with – from delivery issues to engagement to segmentation to dynamic content – it seems as if we have lost its original intent. When you throw social media and mobile into the mix, it almost seems like we have forgotten how to truly email. That being said, you can bet that I am going to try testing out a message exactly like this one to see if it can generate the same response as I had!

Using any form of dynamic content in your email campaigns is sure to drive interest – and most likely more revenue. Using what you know about your customers and their behavior, you can create an email that is unique to each person in your email list.

Dynamic content starts with the pieces of information you have on each of customers, then incorporating that into different parts of your email. Depending on your business model, you may have anything from zip codes to birthdays to detailed purchase histories available. But even the simplest information will set the groundwork for developing a strong, personalized email campaign.

Personalized Subject Lines

One of the easiest ways to personalize your emails is by integrating the customer’s name or other identifying factor into the subject line. Doing this can be considered spammy from both the customer and ISP’s viewpoint, so take the time to design your strategy properly. Using a customer’s name in the subject line is best applied when the email is meant to be directly for them, instead of a mass marketing communication. Order confirmations, abandoned carts and welcome emails are all examples where the personalization in the subject line is acceptable and even quite welcomed. The personalization in these cases can really provide the customer with what they think is a unique interaction with your company and enhances their experience with your brand.

One important thing to keep in mind if you are using personalization in your subject line is to assign a default value should the dynamic information be unavailable or missing. If you don’t require some fields – such as first name – at the time of sign up, you might have some null fields in your database that can affect personalization. At the time of sending the email, your ESP will read the dynamic code and insert the required field. If nothing is there, then you will be left with a subject line with that is missing a word and doesn’t make sense. The default value will populate the dynamic portion should the field be null, thus saving the day.

Another aspect to keep in mind is the formatting of the dynamic field. Customers will fill out your form using any number of upper and lowercase letters. This can result in the personalized field being inserted in all capital letters or all lowercase letters, making your email template look odd and unprofessional. Although it can be time consuming and requires IT resources, have your database normalize the information the fields you will be using. In the case of a first name, you might choose to normalize all data to have a capitalized first letter and all others lowercase. In another case, you might like an order number to be all capitals. Whatever you choose, the end result will make your emails look much more professional, so a normalization project is definitely worth the investment.

Dynamic Content

Once you’ve mastered using personalization in the subject line of your email, expand the dynamic content into your email template. Take what you know about your customers and translate it into a portion of your email that can be made to specifically target individuals. Just about any portion of your email can be dynamic – from pictures to copy to headers and footers.

If you experience deliverability issues, one quick and easy way to use dynamic content to help with this is having whitelist instructions in a message header. Start by creating a block of text for each of the ISPs that compose your email list. In each, explain how to add your email address to their contacts in the ISP. Then, dynamically insert the instructions into your email – the header space above the content is pretty common – based on the domain of the email address. This should give your customers specific instructions that are targeted to them, that they’ll hopefully follow. As always, remember to have default instructions set up in the case that an ISP isn’t recognized.

If your business model revolves around sales or orders, use your customers’ purchase histories to focus or feature items that they have purchased in the past. Choose a portion of your email that you want to dynamically insert – perhaps the main image – and create a few different images that you can rotate into that space. Then, segment your email list into groups that would qualify for each version.

It’s possible that not everyone in your email list will qualify for the segments you’ve chosen to target for the dynamic content. In this case, you can either: 1) choose not to send the remaining customers an email, 2) send the remaining customers a generic version of the email with no dynamic content or 3) send the remaining customers the most popular version of the email with dynamic content. To help you decide, you might try creating a correlated selling report. In this report, graph on one axis the products that your customers have last purchased. Then, on the other axis, graph what products the customers had purchased in the transaction prior to the last. Having a chart such as this can be incredibly helpful in determining what dynamic content will work best with your email list.

Purchase history doesn’t have to be the only thing that your dynamic content is based on. Be creative with what information you have and use it to infer things about your customers. Zip codes can be used to segment your list on warm vs. cold climates and dynamically insert images of beach and mountain vacations. Use gender to segment your list and dynamically feature male and female lifestyle images. If you don’t have age, you can even try using the domain of the email address, where Gmail users tend to be younger and AOL and Hotmail users skew older. Then use this to create an email that features prom vs. club dresses.

In the end, dynamic content can be used in millions of different scenarios. It’s up to you as a marketer to take what information you have and use it to create very targeted and relevant emails for your each of your customers.

It’s been estimated that a majority of consumers will view their emails exclusively on mobile phones by the year 2014. Now this doesn’t mean that PCs or laptops are soon to become obsolete, it just means that email marketers have a limited time to get their mobile email strategy in place. Be sure to take a look at your web analytics tool and discover which phones are being used, so that you can best target the needs of your audience.

If your customers aren’t quite up to speed on mobile technology, now is a good time to start introducing it to them! Give your customers the option to view their emails on their phone by placing a link to a mobile version of your email. This version can be created in a couple of different formats – either as hosted plain text or a smaller, scaled down version of the email. You might choose to display your email in plain text if you are unable to get your original email template to render properly in mobile phones. To do this, simply put the content of your email into text, host it on a server and include a link to it in your regular email template.

Another option to try is creating a mobile-friendly hosted version of your email and including a link to that. First, create a smaller version of your email using a standard mobile phone screen sizes. Check your web analytics tool to see what kind of mobile traffic you’re already getting. If you’re not sure, or not currently getting any, 320 x 480 pixels is a common screen size and should work well for iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones.

Once you’ve determined the size of your mobile version email, you’ll need to scale down your original email template to fit into it. If there are multiple messages in your email, you may have to decide to condense the copy to your most important points due to the limited space. You should also design this version using a maximum of one or two links with short, but strong call to actions.

Maybe the customers in your email list are technologically savvy and are frequently viewing your emails through their mobile phones. To get your message across better, make sure your email templates render properly on all phones. Return Path and Litmus are just a couple of the many vendors out there that can help you with just this. Basically, you’ll create an HTML email as usual and either load it into their system or send a live test message to them. You’ll then see screen captures of how your email renders across all ISPs and mobile phones. Based on what you see, adjust your templates accordingly so that they display perfectly in all locations. An email preview tool is especially helpful when it comes to mobile rendering since it can be incredibly difficult to test.

Since you know that your customers are using their phones to interact with you, take the next step and build a mobile website to link your emails to. Again, there are several vendors that can assist with this if resources are not available within your own company. They all offer a number of different solutions from out-of-the-box software to a completely customized store. Linking to a mobile site from a mobile email will streamline the shopping experience and simplify the entire purchase process. Customers will appreciate that they are given a choice in how they want to interact with you. In the end, this should result in a completely optimized mobile email flow and you’ll experience higher revenue from it.

If you’re lucky enough to have customers who have both a mobile phone AND have given you the number to it, SMS or text messaging is the next logical step to take in your email marketing strategy. Though it can be expensive, the extra revenue you generate might be well worth it! If you aren’t already, be sure to ask for the mobile carrier at the time of sign up to avoid the cost of acquiring this information later.

To start, determine your strategy for a campaign that coordinates text messages with emails. You’ll want to test whether the combination of an SMS message and an email, an SMS message only or an email only strategy produces the most response or revenue. To do this, cut your email list into at least four test segments – SMS + Email, SMS Only, Email Only and a control. For the creative part, design an email as usual. For the SMS message, create a text version of that is 160 characters or less and includes a link. There are many different vendors out there, such as bit.ly, that can shorten links for you and provide tracking information at the same time.

Next, send your campaign accordingly making sure that your control group doesn’t receive any marketing messages since they will be the basis for comparison. Analyze your results by calculating lifts in whatever metrics are relevant to your business.

All in all, now is the time to start thinking about and developing your mobile strategy. No matter what level of savvy your customers are, start preparing for the time when mobile phones are more commonly used for email than computers. Until that happens, you might even enjoy some extra revenue by letting customers choose how and when they want to view your emails.