MindComet

Less is More: Improve Your Newsletter Sign-up Totals

The key to increasing subscription rates for your newsletters is simple: reduce the barrier between the reader and the Submit button.

When asking site visitors to sign up for newsletters, it is tempting to learn as you possibly can about the subscriber. Most sites will often ask for more information than is necessary.

But the only thing you really need to know is their email addresses. You don’t need any other information.  That is of course unless you want to personalize your newsletters.  Then in which case, you will want to know their names.

Recent tests have shown that lowering the barrier between the reader and Submit buttons have significantly increased sign-up rates.  So keep your sign-up processes simple, short & sweet.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by MindComet on Oct. 31, 2006

Setting the Standard for Deliverability

What are the standards for Email Deliverability and Bounce Management?  The Email Experience Council is looking for the answer.  In a press release published yesterday the EEC announced they are currently conducting a survey to gather results that will be used to identify and institute standards for report and benchmarking in email.

The survey is open until Friday, October 27, 2006.  To read the full press release and take the survey, click here.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by MindComet on Oct. 24, 2006

Subject Line Awareness

The biggest concern among most email marketers is that their emails will be marked as spam and never reach their intended audience.  The most efficient way to avoid this is to optimize your subject line.  Certain words such as ‘free’, ‘offer’ and ‘discount’ raise red flags for most email clients.  There are open source programs such as SpamAssassin that calculate the possibility that an email is spam.  It scores emails on a scale from 0 – 5 based on it’s subject line and content.  The higher your score is, the more likely it will be considered spam.  If you use a subject line that is safe such as ‘Weekly Newsletter #1’, ‘Weekly Newsletter #2’ and so forth, stick with it.  Witty subject lines sometimes confuse users and will in turn report you to their ISP.  That’s not to say that you have to completely avoid catchy subject lines, but there’s a very fine line between ‘catchy’ and ‘spammy’.

As it stands now, there is no sure-fire formula to creating a consistent subject line.  If you’re lacking inspiration, pick up your local newspaper.  Articles usually highlight the story’s most important features.  Also remember to always get to the point with your subject line.  If you mislead your audience, they may lose confidence in your brand.  Lastly and most importantly, TEST your emails as much as you can to ensure their rightful delivery.  This is the only way to determine trends and styles that work for you.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by MindComet on Oct. 17, 2006

A Brief History of Deliverability

For most email marketers today, “deliverability” is a commonly used term.  But this hasn’t always been the case.  Over the past 10 years, the use of email has increased and subsequently, more and more inboxes were flooded with unwanted messages.  In order to defeat spammers across the board, ISP’s implemented complex filters on arriving emails to block potential SPAM.  In it’s infancy stages, information on ISP filtering was not made public.  Additionally, many legitimate emails were marked as SPAM, which sent them straight to the Junk Folder or weren’t delivered at all.  The influx of filtering resulted in lower open rates, lower response rates and lower conversion rates for all email marketers.

The ongoing inconsistencies of SPAM filtering lead to the birth of “deliverability” in 2003.  Since then, this issue has started to stabilize through federal legislations and the implementation of various authentication technologies.  As it stands now, deliverability is a market within the email industry with its own experts, consultants and the like.

For further information on deliverability download this document created by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by MindComet on Oct. 16, 2006

E-Mail = email

At the Recent OMMA event in New York, the Email Experience Council, www.emailexperience.org, set its first email-related standard: the official spelling of email, without a hyphen. 

However, the decision was not a random one.  Speaker Paul Beck provided an overview of the research and survey efforts that helped form the decision.  The evolution follows suit of such words as “online” that was originally presented as a combination of a two separate words.

This announcement is the starting-point for the standardization and evolution in email marketing.  With it’s new identity in place, email will once again become a significant tool for both marketing campaigns and branding efforts alike.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by MindComet on Oct. 09, 2006