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You Must Know What Your Audience Wants

March 17, 2014March 23, 2015 Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

Know What Your Audience Wants

I used to work on a busy newsdesk at a national newspaper and it is no exaggeration to say that many hundreds, of not thousands of emails would come in every day. You must know what your audience wants or you won’t get them to take the correct action.

It was a full time job in itself just reading through all the information which came through the newsroom each day to find ones we would want to follow up for publication.

The fact is that only a tiny percentage of the information which poured into the newsroom ever got to come out of the other side as an article in the next day’s publication – the rest was just deleted.

But at least everything got read before it got deleted right? Wrong.

There were not enough hours in the day to read everything so this is what would typically happen:

not a look in – some people or organizations who had gained a reputation of sending absolute rubbish would have their emails immediately deleted – unread.
you’ve got to be joking – some emails were just too long and boring to read and as a result, they did not get read at all. If the email went on for six or seven pages and looked boring then it would not even get read. Yes we may have missed some good stories by ignoring this source of content but that is what happened.
you have ten seconds starting from now – If I didn’t know who an email was from then I would look at it…for all of about ten seconds (or less) Basically if the first paragraph didn’t grab my attention then I stopped reading and moved on to the next one.
I know you and I like you – Some people sent in emails that were timely, relevant, interesting and right up our street. These were always given the most attention as they were most likely to contain material we could use as content for the next day’s paper.
Please stop annoying me – At the opposite end of the spectrum were emails from PR companies which were nothing short of marketing drivel. You could judge the levels of desperation by the amount of times they would send the same email and follow them up with maddening phone calls.

You don’t have to work for a newspaper to learn lessons from these examples because they can apply to anyone who sends an email to anyone ever.

Basically know what your audience wants and send emails that will actually want to read. You won’t get it right all the time but if around eight out of ten of your emails are on target then you should be doing very well indeed.

Help Yourself Avoid The Email Spam Trap

March 14, 2014March 23, 2015 Patrick Griffin 1 Comment

Email spam tips

Email spam tips: Last time we looked at what email spam actually is but today it is time to look at how you can help yourself unwittingly be labeled as a potential spammer.

You may get this unwanted tag if you decide to include information at the end of your emails about why your email is NOT spam.

There is no reason in the world to do this because it only serves to make you look like a spammer.

RocketResponder’s Tim Linden wrote about this on his own blog recently and this is what he had to say…

One of our customers is having problems with deliverability and so I was looking through his account for reasons for this.

His from email address was a custom domain, valid email address, even had SPF records to allow RocketResponder to send from that address (which isn’t necessary the way we send them, but the fact he did it was above most normal customers).

I was really puzzled because the emails he was sending looked more “newslettery” than “spammy” too. Until I got to the bottom of the email.

Every email had at the bottom one of those really long 3 paragraph warnings that most spammers use, where they say they aren’t spamming they have the right to spam, etc. But on top of this one it said it was against the law to report him as spam. Seriously?

Now I don’t know about you but most of the spam I get has one of these warning books at the bottom. So it became very clear he was getting himself filtered for looking like a spammer. But on top of that I know many people would see that “law” as an invitation to prove him wrong.

When it comes to email make it very easy to unsubscribe, and don’t talk about it. That’s it. I don’t see any big time companies putting huge things in there, no they want you focused on the content. So quit reminding them about unsubscribing. Make it easy so if they want to they can, but don’t make them want to more!

So What Exactly Is Email Spam?

March 12, 2014March 23, 2015 Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

What Exactly Is Email Spam

Anyone who sends email for business should want to avoid spam at all costs so what exactly is email spam?

It is perhaps the one thing about business to business emails that annoys people more than anything else.

But just what is email spam and how can you avoid sending it out by mistake?

Spam can actually mean different things to different people.

For example this is how Wikipedia defines email spam:

Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email, is a subset of electronic spam involving nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Clicking on links in spam email may send users to phishing web sites or sites that are hosting malware.”

That is not necessarily true, or more accurately, not always true in every instance.

For example if you have a list of people then is is perfectly acceptable to send the entire list an identical message with only perhaps the greeting changed.

The key point from the above definition is the word “unsolicited” and it makes all the difference.

If someone signs up to your list then they want to (or at least accept that they will) receive emails from you so that is not spam.

But sending out exactly the same email to a group of people who never agreed to receive email from you is spam. This could happen, for example, if you bought a list of email addresses.

Also don’t be fooled into thinking that just because someone is on your list that you are free to email them about anything you choose.

Say you have a blog and you got people to sign up for “regular updates” but they end up getting ten marketing emails for each blog update then that would almost certainly be considered by many to be spam.

Some other examples of spam could include:

A newsletter sent out to a list of people whose details you obtained from attending a conference 18 months ago.
A promotional offer you are sending out to a list of email addresses you bought from someone else. Clearly you don’t know who these people are, they have no relationship with you and might reasonably be expected not to want to receive marketing emails from you.
Marketing emails you send to people whose emails you obtained in the normal course of doing business with you but who were never asked whether they wanted to receive such emails from you in the first place.

If A Message Is Worth Sending, It’s Worth Sending Again

March 10, 2014June 15, 2015 Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

Email marketing tips and tricks: There are times when it is helpful not to be timid in your email marketing.

Let’s say you have an important announcement to get across to your subscribers.

It is something you know they would be interested in, or at least you hope that they would be interested in it.

This might be a brand new launch, a cool new product or a special promotion that you want everyone to be aware of.

So naturally you send an email to your RocketResponder list telling them about the cool new thing you know they will love.

The problem is that people being people, not everyone will actually read your email.

And this will include some of the people who might be really interested in the contents of your email.

Now it has been shown that if you send an email multiple times to people the following could happen:

you will annoy your subscribers and turn them into unsubscribers (very bad)
they will still not read your email (bad)
they will become interested enough to find out why you are sending so many emails that they will open one and (hopefully) take action.

OK so there is a more subtle way to minimize the chances of the first two events happening.

If you have a very important message to get across then devise an email series just for this one topic.

So if you want to send three, five or seven emails to promote the launch, event or new product then send three, five or seven related emails on the subject. You could, for example, talk about the new product or promotion, explain some of its main points in the email series or give a series of hints or tutorials if appropriate.

Obviously you don’t want to hammer home the message every time you send an email but there will be times when you really want to ensure that your message gets read and understood by the maximum number of people.

Why Your Emails Keep Going To Spam Part Three

March 7, 2014March 23, 2015 Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

Emails Keep Going To Spam

Today RocketResponder’s Tim Linden concludes his three part look at the issue of spam. Let’s take a look at why your emails keep going to spam.

In the previous two posts he explained why emails you want to see in your inbox might go to spam and what practical steps you can take to avoid that happening.

In today’s concluding post Tim explains just some of the things that RocketResponder do to ensure that your emails get into the inboxes of those who have subscribed to your list…

So I’m sure you’re wondering what we do at RocketResponder to ensure your emails aren’t being filtered because of other users.

Well we do a few things:

We send the emails from your email address.
We use a different sub domain for every member for all links in the emails themselves.
We monitor engagement and group similar senders into different sending IP groups.
We monitor all our IPs against blacklists and feedback loops and get notified every few hours of changes.

If you aren’t using RocketResponder then you should give it a try, we give you 30 days to try it out without paying or entering credit card info or even creating a Paypal subscription.

You’ll also save some money too, we charge $20 per 10,000 subscribers which is a huge bargain. Most other guys charge in 1000 subscriber increments, and they charge for unsubscribed users!

Via: TimLinden.com