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Email Marketing
Opt-in Email Marketing – Engaging Customers
You are in the right place to take advantage of one of the greatest advances in the marketing industry: Opt-in email marketing for B2C email marketing and B2B email marketing. Email has so many positive aspects such as ease of use, lower cost, flexibility, quantifiable, and targeted. Email is good. Email IS NOT some four-letter word to be avoided.
Opt-in Email marketing has a definitive industry direction:
Personalized, targeted, permission-based, interactive rich media
More simply, emails that the customer authorizes delivery, are informative and relevant, and have a proper level of interactivity that enriches the experience. The closer your emailing efforts approach this direction, the better your return-on-investment. Stop spending all your ad dollars on less efficient, non-quantifiable methods and add email marketing to your mix.
The use of email is to ultimately create, build and / or maintain the customer value experience and relationship throughout the customer lifecycle. Some of the uses of email marketing are:
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Bulk email marketing, B2C email marketing, B2B email marketing
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Product, service, web site introductions, loyalty programs
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Newsletters, periodic or official communications, press releases
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Account status, order confirmation, customer service, up sell opportunities
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Upgrade offers, new store location, holiday hours, jokes
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Coupons, sales, overstock, discontinued products, product announcements
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Employee notifications, promotions, benefits notices
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Prospect for new customers, build an opt-in email marketing list
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Report, survey, map, invoice, menu, catalog, brochure, annual report distribution
Opt-in email marketing contains most of the same components of other marketing programs. Let’s introduce you to some industry terms and an overview of opt-in email marketing.
Everyone Asks – What is Spam?
No discussion of email would be complete without mentioning spam. Yes, it is a canned meat product, but that’s not important now. Spam is the curse of all legitimate email marketing providers. It’s too a broad subject to begin to explain here, however here is a quick definition:
Spam is Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), such that the recipient has not provided specific permission to receive your email AND the content of the email is relevant (non-specific, excluding personal information) to many potential recipients.
For a more complete explanation, see www.spamhaus.org/definition.html. Per Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam), 80 – 85% of all emails are spam and the amount of spam is increasing each year despite the efforts of organizations such as Spamhaus (http://www.spamhaus.org/) and the Federal Trade Commission (http://www.ftc.gov/spam). The FTC’s Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 (http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/spam/rules.htm) is really an play on words. This document is to limit spam yet carries the acronym CAN-SPAM which is sort of an oxymoron.
Email Marketing Success Factors – From Sender to Recipient
Opt-in email marketing has evolved into a complex science. Your message has about 2 seconds to survive the “Do I want this email” test before its deleted. Primarily because of spam, there are many landmines to avoid in getting the message to its intended recipient. Excluding the consideration of whether the recipient will be interested in reading the email, here are hurdles even successful emails must overcome:
Content
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Design Constraints – message size “limit”, no Flash (.swf), no video (.mov) files
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Content testing before sending – will your email be flagged as spam
Deliverability
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Opt-in email marketing list – recipients have opted-in (gave their permission for you to send commercial marketing emails to them)
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Deliverable email addresses – minimal bad addresses, full mailbox, unsubscribes
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Emails received from a recognized and reputable sender (do I need to say AdsValue !)
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Internet Service Provider (ISP) - filter out obvious spam
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White-listed – your sending ISP isn’t blocked from sending emails
Viewing
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Day of week – better open rates (OR) earlier in the week, click-thru-rates (CTR) better near / on weekends
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Monitor resolution – 800x600 (see less on the screen) or 1024x768 (see more)
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Viewer software – capabilities, default email (rejection) settings
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Viewing pane configuration – people view mostly the upper left portion of an email
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Viewer settings – email size, accept graphics or text only, spam filtering level
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Spam filter software – add-on spam-filtering software for extreme email haters
Other success components of your overall email marketing campaign should include:
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Having a reliable Opt-in / Opt Out process – a Confirmed Opt-in process is the best - the recipient needs to Opt-in, then verify they opted in by confirming their choice
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Providing interesting and relevant content – something that the recipient requests or indicated an interest
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Avoiding offensive content and spyware, deceptive ads, imbedding spyware code, or ads for ventures such as get-rich-quick schemes, pornography, prescription drugs, credit repair, stock tips, phishing schemes, chain emails, etc.
How Can I Implement A Successful Opt-in Email Marketing Campaign?
Knowing the success factors, let’s get started with your B2C email marketing campaign or B2B email marketing campaign.
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Identify Objectives & Budget – brand awareness, increase sales, customer retention
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Identify Target Audience – all customers, geographic , gender, age, interests
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Make Contact with Your Audience – email (of course), refine and grow your list
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Test Segmented Audiences & Offers – email similar but different offers, compare results
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Analyze Progress Against Objectives – Open Rates (OR), Click Thru Rates (CTR), Purchase Rates (PR), other measurements, financial Return On Investment (ROI)
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Repetition – provide periodic emails - customers may not act on the first email and multiple deliveries help solidify the customer / company bond
About Your List – - your opt-in email marketing list is the most important asset in an email marketing campaign. Acquiring and maintaining good email addresses of persons that see value in their relationship with your company should be a perpetual activity of your company. Lists typically lose about 25% each year for bad addresses and unsubscribes. Grow your list by offering a valid reason for them to give you their address. Purchasing lists should be done with great caution, and avoid inexpensive lists because you will probably damage your relationship with your ISP by spamming and many undeliverable addresses.
About Deliverability Data – depending on your primary objectives, deliverability data is fine for campaign measurements and can somewhat represent the “quality” of your email piece. It doesn’t tell you if your campaign was successful or added to your bottom line. Gauge your success with engagements – did the customer buy something from your web site, refer a new customer, buy more than they would have, opt-in to your email program, request a proposal, or possibly visit your store and buy something?
AdsValue Opt-in Email Marketing Products & Services
AdsValue realizes you probably don’t have the time to create and administer an opt-in email marketing campaign beyond a simple less effective text-only email. Ask AdsValue to help grow your business.
AdsValue provides our customers:
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B2C email marketing, B2B email marketing and Bulk email marketing
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No monthly fees, contracts, or hosting fees.
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Personalized service - each opportunity is designed to provide the most appropriate and cost-effective solution to your needs. If we can’t help you, we’ll say so.
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Thinking of doing your campaigns yourself? We can offer full-service features for small campaign prices. You avoid your learning curve and forgotten internal costs.
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No campaign too small, cost-saving co-op emails, integrate your opt-in email marketing campaign with you AdsValue online business profile
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Low-cost individual email solutions – very small campaigns to large campaigns
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Co-op email solutions – join your ad with other ads in one email and save overall costs See sample email. Click on the email to see details.
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List Management – 10 emails or 10,000, we can get your list ready for emailing. On-going list maintenance with each campaign. We’ll set up your program to collect customer contact information to build your list
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Email templates – created for your recurring emails, newsletters
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Rich media solutions – Flash, audio and video messages placed on your web site or the AdsValue website if you don’t have a web site
Get Started Now
How can we help? Contact the AdsValue Sales department through the Service Info Request Form to tell us about your needs.
BONUS ! See other AdsValue services that will complement your email marketing campaigns such as Direct Mail and Surveys.
Thank You for Considering
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