How do you prepare the newsletter for Black Friday?

November 11th, 2012

Black Friday opens the shopping season – it’s an important time to make your offer known to your subscribers. Even if you don’t get a purchase know, it’s best to make a good impression, so they will keep you in mind for the following period.This day is well known in US and it usually takes place in the last friday of November. In the last years this day has become more and more taken into account by Romanian retailers as well. Especially in the IT&C industry.

The time when the users expect the best offers to buy is coming, they will have a hard time making the choice, so make a difference.
Here are some things you need to take into account when you’re preparing the newsletter for Black Friday.

Plan it

When to send it’s a tough question the crowded times. On Black Friday and the following time till the holidays – the inbox will be full. You can’t guess the right time to send to avoid the crowded moments, so the strategy recommended is to send the emails soon enough so people can take advantage of the offer.

Make a difference

It’s moments like this when you need to have different offers based on subscriber’s activity. This will help you send firstly the offers to the active subscribers and, in case of delivery problems at the time you make sure the messages get to active adresses. With the active subscribers you make sure you get more conversions, instead of sending and delivering to old or unused emails.

Monitor the competition

You also may need to keep an eye on the competition. This will help you understand what you need to do to be different, what is your main benefit for your customers. This may not be in time for Black Friday but at least for the holidays.

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Email marketing strategies for eCommerce

November 3rd, 2012

If you own an online shop, email marketing is very important to obtain more traffic and boost up sales. Traditional marketing (tv, print) are very expensive and, often, you can’t measure accurately the results. We have some advice on how to set the strategy for your email newsletters to get the attention of more subscribers and get conversions.

1. Build the list

A problem in eCommerce when it comes to building the list is the fact that you will get the data of the users after they complete the check-out flow and about 70-80% of the users leave the check-out before completing it. So many prospects are lost. You need to have an incentive for the ones that subscribe so you can enlarge your list. A discount or a voucher might be a good idea. The list and the way you built it may be your main advantage or disadvantage in the results you will have in email marketing.

2. Conversion nurturing

Nurturing a conversion consist in following up the user after he had an interaction with but didn’t complete it. It’s convincing the user to get from secondary conversion to primary conversion.

For example, some users first downloaded a document with information about the product, but they didn’t complete the purchase. You can remind them about their unfinished process with a follow up email and to make more interesting you may add a discount.

3. Behavioural segmentation

A very efficient strategy is to send email based on subscribers activity. Use engaging techniques for the inactive ones and try to win them back. For the active ones that don’t convert you need to find an incentive.

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5 types of subject lines that will raise the opening rate

October 28th, 2012

How to write the right subject lines so your subscribers will open the email? There is more than one answer to this question, there are many more ways to find the best subjects. Below there are some examples of subjects that will improve the opening rate.

1.     Question subject lines

The question subjects get more attention from the user and if your question is relevant for his interest they will want to find out the answer. Often the subscriber just scans between the many messages he gets and you need to awake his interest.

2.     Call-to-action subjects

Adding a verb that will call the user to action is very efficient in order to get clicks. When you use the right words you can make them curious to discover want you got for them. You need to have a verb to make the text more dynamic. Some of the most used verbs for call to actions are: see, find out, discover etc.

3.     Forbiding subjects

Although the fact that forbiding something will only make the other do it is a cliche, it isn’t used very often in marketing. In your direct communication to the user, a subject like: “Firstname, don’t open this email!” will have the exact opposite effect.

4.     Personalized subjects

Personalization helps you a lot in your relationship with the subscribers. Using his name in the subject line has bigger chances to convince him that your email suits him and his interests.

5.     Subject that say « You don’t have much time left… »

Subjects that say it’s urgent, that say that subecribers don’t have much time left to take an offer will determine them to act.

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How to build your list with AdWords

October 11th, 2012

How to build your list with AdWords

If you want to get good results quickly in raising your sales, but also building your list, you should get started with Google AdWords.

If you need to build your list with AdWords you have to create a special landing page with an opt-in  and all the information the user needs to know about your product/service in order to convince him to subscribe. The success of the campaign stands mostly in the relevant keywords and the way your landing page is built.

  1. Relevant keywords

Use relevant keywords for your domain, don’t try to bring users on page by using irrelevant keywords. It’s just a way to increase your bounce rate.

  1. Convince them to subscribe

In your landing page you need to have all the necessary information to convince users to subscribe. Un extra reason will be very good: a promotion, a voucher, a document they will receive after subscribing.

If you are not convinced that AdWords is the best choice for your business, below you have some of the most important advantages for this type of advertising.

Why should you invest in AdWords

Huge traffic – More than 200 million searches on Google everyday

Immediate results – Once you set the ads you will start getting visitors

Relevant visitors – Google AdWords gives you the possibility to target precisely. When you are setting the campaign you need to choose the most relevant keywords. Just the users that search those keywords will be able to see your ads. A side from that Google offers other targeting possibilities: geographically (you can set the ads only for a town), or by language etc.

Optimized expenses – If you are optimizing your campaign you can reduce your costs. Optimization consist in removing the irrelevant keywords and this means that the cost per click may drop if you have relevant keywords. Still, if you are on the domain with tough competition (real estate, for example) the cost per click may reach high values.

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Email marketing for business clients

August 27th, 2012

B2B email marketing should be approached differently than the one B2C (business-to-consumer). The lists are, the most of times, smaller, so efficiency is required in order to get the most of them. In b2b communication is different, the tone of voice is more serious, not that friendly as the one used in b2c communication.

Below we detailed a few advice to help you conceiving b2b newsletter, taking into account the differences of this type of audience.

1. Know your audience: when you communicate to companies is good to know who you are talking to. If you send the emails to the IT administrator (he is the decision maker), a newsletter filled with images and an artistic text will probably be not so well received.

2. Mobile friendly: Make sure your emails can easily be read on mobile devices. To make it possible you have to have a short text, with a big and clearly stated call to action.

3. Make „From” line and subject line relevant

For the „From” and subject line the recommendations are similar to the ones you need to apply when you are sending newsletters to the consumer. In the „From” line you got to have the name of your company, but choose it wisely, so you won’t have to change afterwards.

4. Test: before sending test every newsletter. Check the display of the emails of the most used email clients on your list. For business client, most of the times is Outlook Express. Also test the email on various devices: tablet, smartphone, desktop.

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Building the list – offline tactics

August 20th, 2012

In a previous article we detailed the ways to collect subscribers online, but there are also offline methods to collect addresses. Email marketing is an efficient channel for the people that interact

1. Events

The events that you are attending are a good opportunity to raise email addresses. You can collect business cards or badges.

2. Prints

Put your subscription URL on your printed promotional materials (flyers, brochures, catalogues, etc). The URL must be short and easy to remember. You can also add a little description to say why people should subscribe to your newsletter.

3. In store

One of the most convenient methods to collect subscribers is at the « point of purchase » (shops, restaurants, hotels, etc). To obtain them easily, we suggest that it would be better to have some incentive or promotion at the subscription. For this method to be efficient is very important the behavior of the employee that makes contact with the client.

4. QR codes

With the qr codes you can make the subscription to your newsletter more accessible. When you create the subscription form you can put the QR code leading to it on the tags of your products, on the flyers, or other printed materials. Users will be able to scan it with their phone and subscribe. For further details on how you can create a QR code for your form with WomSend read this article.

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Why should you send welcome emails?

July 25th, 2012

After a consumer started a relationship with you and he gave you the permission to make him part of your email marketing campaigns, you need to have a reaction to his action, to answer somehow. When someone subscribes to your newsletter is important to have an autoresponder campaign set so you can confirm the registration and welcome him properly. If you are using the double opt-in subscription method you should use the confirmation email to thank the user.

With welcome emails you will get good results because the user just subscribed, so he is waiting information from you, he is waiting for a confirmation that he will receive something. That is the moment when the consumer is interested in your products/services and you can easily get his attention.

Welcome email content

  • A link to confirm the subscription to the newsletter;
  • A thank you message for the subscriber;
  • A request to add you to his Address Book;
  • Possibility to set preferences.

Advantages of welcome emails

  1. High open rates: welcome emails get high open rates because they are sent when the user just subscribed, so he is interested in your brand.
  2. Easy to do: they don’t require big investments in time or money. You have to create a template for his emails, and set autoresponse campaign at each subscription.
  1. Build the relationship: with welcome emails you thank your subscribers for giving you the permission to email them.
  2. You set expectations: you can use this email to give subscribers the opportunity to choose what information they want to get by using the Preference center.
  3. Improve delivery rate: welcome email is a great pretext to ask them to add you to their Address Book to make sure they will receive all the emails in their inbox.
  4. Offer a reward: in the welcome email you can offer a voucher or a discount for the order/action.

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Create efficient content for email newsletters

July 22nd, 2012

After having established the segmentation criteria for your list and the frequency, you need to work on the content you are offering to your subscribers in order to get high indicators.

Having the permission and staying relevant are the essential elements in email marketing that can help you build a relationship. The second step is to find out what information your subscribers what to receive. A survey can be very helpfull with this. Also, ideas for content can come from carefully observing the indicators of the previous sent newsletters or the traffic ones on your website or blog. See what your users read and develop those subjects.

Generally, the subscribers will not be very happy with receiving only sales newsletters, you need content that will convince them about your products benefits.

Personalization helps

Your can personalizate your content so you can reach your target better. For example, using thelast name of the subscriber in the header of your message. „Hi, Andrew!” instead of just „Hi” can help you win his attention for the lines below.

Placing the important information

The important information needs to stand on the top of the newsletter in order to gain the reader before he abandons the email.

If you are using Womsend you will be able to analyze the click rate on every link according to it’s location. This way you can optimize the positioning of the information and other design elements in the newsletter.

The subject line- the key to high open rates

The subject is the first contact that your subscriber has with the email. It’s the only chance you have to convince him to open and read the information. A good subject line should be concise and based on facts, without metaphors.

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