Veronica Stenberg: blog

I’ve worked with and tested a quite a few email marketing software’s through the years. Everything from home built programs to specialist software. I’ve written about and recommended MailChimp before as a brilliant email marketing tool to help you get started with your email marketing activities. (However if you are for say a larger online retailer, I would suggest looking at solutions such as dotMailer or similar).

I’ve worked quite a bit in MailChimp, and here is my checklist, prior to campaign send out – that I always tick off. The key is -  you can never test a campaign to much!

I hope you find this useful.

Email marketing checklist for MailChimp:

1. Have you previewed your newsletter in the most relevant email clients and web-based email clients? (or even better if you run a inbox inspection)

2. Have you sent yourself a test?

3. Have you tested that all the links are working?

4. Have you inserted your personalization code from your distribution list? (and tested this?)

5. Have you used the Google URL builder to create your links?
(http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578)

6. Have you set-up a plain text version?

7. Does your plain text version include the personalization codes?

8. Does your plain text version include links?

9. Have you imported your distribution list?

10. have you made sure all the unsubscribes from the last campaign are removed from this distribution list?

11. Have you entered a subject line, from to name and reply-to email address?

12. Have you run a delivery doctor on your email? (you can also notice that something is WRONG if your email does not get through any of the web based email clients such as BT/Yahoo Mail for example)

Content is king – make your newsletter inspiring, relevant and something to look forward to for your subscribers. This is the key element which will keep your subscribers from unsubscribing.

Then, consider the following points;

1. ONLINE SAMPLE – make sure you have an online version of your latest newsletter which the visitor of your website can view anytime and update this accordingly as soon as you send out a newsletter. Have a link to the online version somewhere relevant and nearby to your sign up page or box, since enabling the visitor to view a copy online – can be the reason they decide to subscribe at all.

2. QUICK & EASY – make the registration for your newsletter as quick and easy as possible – don’t ask for too much information or scare away potential subscribers half-way by complicated forms and mandatory fields which asks for information your website visitors just don’t want to give away to you. If requesting more information, make sure it’s easy and swift to supply this on your particular page or step, perhaps by ticking any relevant options from a range of tick-boxes.

3. SIGN-UP FORM or BUTTON -the sign up button or box for your newsletter should preferably be a static element in the same position, clearly visible – throughout your website.

4. INCENTIVES – arrange competitions on your website or with other companies. In the registration-form have the option to subscribe to your newsletter available as a tick-box in your form. The competition can either be for your own products or why not contact other non-competitive brands with the same target audience and set up a collaboration with them? Other options could be with magazines your target audience reads or other websites they would visit. Do your research.

5. WORK WITH OTHER WEBSITES – engage in competitions with your products in online forums, blogs and magazines where your target audience is active. Most forums offers to sell the details on to you of the participants which announced their interest to receive more infromation from you (if unsure – ask for this option).

To investigate if a forum, website, blog or magazine is suitable for your company; ask to receive their media pack which contains all the infomation you need about their visitor statistics and demographics.

6. SPREAD THE WORD – if you do host competitions on your website for products, add them to sites such as loquax to spread the word, your facebook group/page, your blog, newsletter or twitter. Never forget to insert a forward to a friend option within your competition sign-up form (and your newsletter should contain this option as well you know!).

There are pleanty of active e-zines, blogs and other exiting websites which your target audince may be active on, try to be one step a head of your competitiors is a fulltime job in itself. So search the web, look in to your Google Analytics account – where does the traffic to your website come from? visit the sites. Investigate, be curious and dare to be different and try new things outside the famous box.

Not having a great budget does not have to be a hindrance, instead this can prompt you to be more creative and find new possibilities which does not have to cost the earth:

• Contact complimentrary brands for collaborations or returned favors. Perhaps to swap ad-space in your newsletters or write content for each other.
• Why should your visitors sign-up to your newsletter? make sure to communicate that and make your visitors very well aware of the benefits of being one of your newsletter subscribers.
• Investigate what kind of incentives you can put in place to increase the amount of subscribers, a discount of your products? a chance to win something from your company? a product from another partner brand?
• Perhaps hand-out suitable material (flier) in your brick and mortar store with every bag, prompting your brick and mortar store customers to sign-up for your newsletter and receive a discount upon doing so.
• Insert a link in your company; blog, facebook page, twitter page, and any other relevant pages and sites.

Is that the lady who keeps on sending you emails about “intimate” positions? how to enlarge some of your more private body parts (or lack thereof in my case!) to a incredibly “satisfying” size? or the online-dating emails which
sometimes slips through in to your inbox?

Nowdays, not only, it’s also you, you and you. And me. Until my start at the current
company which I now work for, I was blissfully unaware of the fact that the
newsletters that I was sending out could possibly, even the slightest be counted as
SPAM by various providers. Are you kidding me?

Now I know better, much better.

Which makes me think that there are still more like previous me out there, sending
out newsletters with in-house tools, laughing in the face of SPAM filters, at least
once a month and then getting annoyed with open rates and statistics not being as
good as they actually should and could be be.

Here is a few tips for you:

1. Set up some test accounts on various email providers such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail
and so forth and test your newsletters to external emails, not just your inbox at
the office or the personal email address you happen to have.make sure your newsletters are delivered to a at least the majority of the email accounts on your list.

Also make sure to test this in-house if you have access to various versions of email clients and check the message headers, if you have the option to do so.

2. Include a plain text version, with the URLs for you links inserted in full, this
gets your SPAM rating down. And make sure your plain text version is just that, a plain text version and not a text version including HTML and CSS code, flying all over the window.

3. Ask to be added to the recipients address book – to ensure deliverability.

4. Consider the text and image balance, sometimes large images and less text areas can
set the SPAM filters singing.

5. It’s good praxis to include a link to an online version in the very top of a
newsletter – this is not only great for recipients having issues viewing your
newsletter for different reasons, it also gets your SPAM rating down.

6. Don’t forget a link to your privacy policy – if not including this in full or part of in the bottom of your newsletter.

7. The option to unsubscribe should always be included, no ifs, no butts and remember -
do not force people to login to an account on your site to be able to unsubscribe. Make it as easy to subscribe as unsubscribe to your newsletters. You don’t want to email people that don’t want to hear from you anyway.
(bad Play.com!)

8. Be careful which words you use in the subjectline, also stay away from characters
such as ! % spaces etc

If you still have issues with the SPAM score your newsletter is generating or emails not
getting through as intended, then look in to the structure of your newsletter.
Perhaps there is something in the code or your copy which increases your SPAM score.