Deliverability is based on a number of factors, and while certain words or phrases can increase a message’s spam score, no single word automatically sends your message straight to the junk folder. I have seen many subject lines deliberately avoid the word “Free” when it was obviously the most appropriate choice. For example:

• Complimentary Gift with your $100 Purchase!
• Register 3, Receive 100% Discount on 4th Person
• We Will Pay For Shipping, This Week Only

All of those would be tighter, more readable and effective if they used “Free”:

• Free Gift with your $100 Purchase!
• Register 3, Get the 4th Free
• Free Shipping, This Week Only

When something is free, don’t be afraid to try “Free” in your subject line. If the word does lift a spam score, it is only one of many criteria by which your overall score is determined, and likely not to be the tipping point. Most legitimate emailers will see no perceptible decrease in deliverability in using the word, and may actually see an increase in sender reputation since the word is effective enough to boost engagement metrics. So cast aside your email myths from yesteryear and write subject lines that say what you mean.

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Each week on “Emailioration Monday”  we spotlight a single tactic you can implement this week in order to improve your email marketing. Share tips of your own on Twitter at #Emailioration, and see the full collection of Emailioration tips here.

In my experience, this phenomenon exists commonly within email marketing. Many of the marketers I know are responsible for 50%, 75% or even 100% of their company’s entire email program, yet it is only 10% of their job. The rest of the time is split between everything from social media to sales support, from public relations to strategic relationships. Fifteen years ago when I got started in email, it was more than a marketing channel we could use to drive sales and other activity. It was a source of customer insight, as exciting because of what it told us about consumer behavior as it was for how much smarter it was making us as marketers. Email throws off so much eye-opening and actionable data, it contributes as much marketers’ human capital as it does to marketing ROI. All we have to do is be really selfish and learn as much as we can from what email is teaching us, every time we send a message.

Am I wrong in perceiving that this has changed since 1997, and that change has accelerated in the past few years? Whereas email marketing used to be a means of becoming really smart about your audience (and marketing in general), email is more commonly viewed an end – one of the channels marketers need to tick off in their weekly communications to do list. This is understandable, given all the tasks and channels marketers must now juggle, particularly in light of lower budgets, smaller staffs and raised objectives. Getting smart is the nice-to-have, but getting it done is need-to-have.

While I empathize with marketers’ shift in priorities, I nevertheless believe that marketing’s true function is not to drive results today, but to build programs and accumulate institutional knowledge that will continue to drive results for many years to come. Marketers should not just be giving their companies a fish, or even teaching them to fish. Rather, we should be building reefs that attract enough fish to sustain our brands in perpetuity.

The good news is that getting smart and getting it done are not mutually exclusive. Here are three things you can do to speed up your email composition and increase its effectiveness, and which make you smarter at the same time:

1. Look at your last message’s analytics right before you send the next one. Most marketers look at analytics within the first 24 hours of sending a message, but knowing what worked (and didn’t) is more effective when you’re about to start working on the next message. This practice can also help with message composition, as knowing what content was effective last time can make the next message easier to write.

2. Find commonalities in effective subject lines. Include the phrase “subject line” in any question to an email expert, and somewhere in their response will be the phrase “A/B testing.” A/B testing is great – it is often insightful and lifts results. But it is an extra step, and extra steps require time that is often at a premium. Test when you can, and when you can’t spend 3 minutes looking at a report of your Highest Open Rate Subject Lines over the past 3, 6 or 12 months. It is less scientific, but you may find some commonalities among the subject lines that work well. (Then re-sort the table to show the real duds so you know what to avoid.) You may find that 6 of your top 10 include a company name or person’s name. Are 4 of the top 7 questions? Wouldn’t it be exciting to learn that exclamation points work! Or four word subjects. Having a suggestion of what works makes you smarter about your program, and helps you write today’s subject line (which for many emails is half the work, and most of the impact).

3. Scrutinize unsubscribes. Just as examining subject line trends gives you examples, taking note of which messages drive unsubscribes provides you with warnings. Before you write your next message, run the Messages With Highest Unsubscribe Rate report over the past 3, 6 or 12 months depending on your email volume. Look at the messages with highest unsubscribe rates, particularly if they are outliers with an unsub rate of .1% or more higher than your average. The principal reasons that people unsubscribe from email is because the messages are too frequent, or have become too boring. Look for evidence of either in your greatest offending messages. This makes creating your emails easier because knowing what not to write is as valuable as knowing what kind of content should go in an email.

Don’t forget, however, that email is also a medium all its own. Reserving some pieces of unique content which only appear within your emails will help build anticipation and underscore the stand alone value of the email channel. For example, if you run a sweepstakes or promotion, announce the winner only within your email newsletter. Run client or member interviews in email exclusively, or publish a relevant weekly statistic or data point there. I know it is tempting to push all our content out through as many channels as we can, but the long-term view requires that we also focus on what value we can add to the channels we rely on, not just the value we can extract from them.

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Each week on “Emailioration Monday”  we spotlight a single tactic you can implement this week in order to improve your email marketing. Share tips of your own on Twitter at #Emailioration, and see the full collection of Emailioration tips here.

Not all clicks, however, are created equal. Sometimes however, you don’t want just a click – you want your visitor to take whatever action that click-through to your website precipitates. We have had an event registration module within Real Magnet for a long time, which many clients use for webinars, conferences, meetings and white paper downloads. Regardless of the application, it is essentially a shopping cart that collects purchase or registration data (and payment if necessary), and integrates fully with the rest of the Real Magnet application.

Wouldn’t it be cool, then, if Social Magnet didn’t just measure clicks, but also conversions? Well now it does. Our new Conversion Reporting allows you to see exactly how many webinar registrants or white paper downloads are attributed to each channel, and each message within each channel. Here’s what one of the reports looks like:

Click to enlarge.

Pictured here is an Overall Conversion Report, organized by channel. The data is for a single registration event (in this case, a white paper download campaign) and shows how many clicks and conversions are attributable to the messages within each channel that were used to promote the event.

I’ve been using the tool to promote our own white papers and webinars, and the level of insight gleaned pretty quickly can be eye-opening. Seeing which channel drives clicks can be very different from which channel drives conversions. For example, in the data above, Twitter is casting off a ton of clicks, but has only a 10% conversion rate. LinkedIn, by contrast, has a fraction of the clicks as Twitter, but at a 50% conversion rate is almost rivaling LinkedIn in total registrations.

Analytics should always drive action, so after seeing data like this a marketer may well conclude that LinkedIn is far more fertile ground for registrations, and put more energy into building an audience there or begin buying targeted ads.

I think the marketer’s job is not just to drive results, but also to understand why the results are being driven, in order to replicate success in the future. With so many digital channels at our disposal, channel attribution becomes critical, to make sure we focus our energy where it does the most good, squeezing all the productivity we can out of the resources we have available.

Evaluating Email Through Return on Resources (ROR)
by Mike May
Published on 5-2-12 in MediaPost’s Email Insider

Return on investment (ROI) is the metric marketers most commonly use to compare ads, campaigns and even entire channels. ROI makes sense for evaluating marketing when the primary input is external spending: buying media, printing expense, postage, creative costs or sponsorship fees, for example.

Email, however, does not fit neatly into the same model. Sure, there is an expense associated with email, but the principal input into an email campaign — where your audience is earned over time and not bought (or rented) with a lump sum — is the amount of time and energy your company has devoted to it. Because the monetary “investment” denominator in email is comparatively low, using a strict ROI calculation will always allow it to shine. That’s fine with those of us in the email industry, as we always win the ROI contests. But it misrepresents what must actually be invested in email in order for it to perform: the internal resources that nurture and grow the program.

I’m sorry to be the one to blow the whistle on this ROI game email has been winning, but it’s high time we stopped looking at email in the context of ROI altogether. Now is the time to consider a return on resources metric. Am ROR measurement will better evaluate how relevant inputs affect results, which in turn can help ensure that email gets the resources it needs to perform at the highest level.

Here is why evaluating your email program through ROR can make your email program more effective and better understood:

Better absolute gauge of email’s return: Measuring marketing is not a popularity contest. The goal is not to anoint a winner, but to improve each channel. Email’s appeal is not its efficiency, which is what ROI measures. Rather, it is its effectiveness. ROR removes the emphasis from the direct expense and draws attention to what results email actually drives.

More accurate comparison to complementary channels: Email is not alone in benefiting from a ROR measurement. Social media, video, webinars, blogging and other forms of content marketing are similar to email in that the principal input is not money spent, but resources devoted. And in many organizations, the resources devoted to email are also involved in these other initiatives, so ROR helps organizations identify how much of the resource pie each should receive.

Renewed emphasis on the resources needed: I worked in the online advertising industry during its dark years. That industry had a very difficult time recovering once CPMs plummeted. Two things happened when the out-of-pocket expense (the “I” in ROI) for buying online media dropped: 1) ROI naturally increased, even when the actual return from lousy “Punch the Monkey!” ads was also dismal; and 2) Advertisers had a hard time justifying the need for better creative since the media expense was so low, and ROI appeared so high. As a result of the low expense and high ROI, advertisers took their eyes off the ball — not necessarily to have an impressive ROI, but to actually drive results from the channel.

I see the same thing happening in email, even today. Because it costs so little to send a few hundred thousand messages, many marketers do not put the necessary energy and resources into campaign planning, segmenting, content strategy or creative. Focusing on ROR reminds us that the real input in email is not what you pay your ESP, but the years you have spent gaining the permission to contact tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the first place.

Improved understanding of scale: Ultimately, marketing metrics of all kinds should drive some action. Analyze your search advertising, for example, and you may find that it has among the highest ROI of all your channels, and that increasing search spending is the best way of spending the extra 10% in your marketing budget next year.

Again, email is different. Only in the largest organizations can an increase of 10% actually be actionable. If the staff tending email and/or social channels is small (and it is commonly part of a single person, right?) any change to the “budget” simply translates into “you need to spend more time doing this.” Email suffers when email marketers are responsible for a lot more than email, so better evaluating the return on the time marketers put into email can help protect the channel’s claim to that time. Keeping the emphasis on the actual results is the only way to affect headcount (or reallocate other responsibilities) in a way to scale email aggressively, which will lift email’s results more than squeezing more blood from the stone in the cubicle by the kitchen.

Why your spouse? If you know of someone who is more eager to tell you when you haven’t done something right, go ahead and add that person instead.

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Each week on “Emailioration Monday”  we spotlight a single tactic you can implement this week in order to improve your email marketing. Share tips of your own on Twitter at #Emailioration, and see the full collection of Emailioration tips here.

Why email list cleaning is important

List hygiene impacts deliverability, or rather, a dirty list inhibits deliverability. There are several different types of bounces – some temporary (or “soft”) and some permanent (“hard”). They each mean something different and are read in different ways by ISPs and email administrators, but the underlying message for each is the same: a bounce suggests that an email marketer is trying to reach a mailbox that may not be expecting a message from this particular sender. Sometimes this is because of a technology hiccup (like a full mailbox or a mail server temporarily off-line). Other times it is an error (a typo in the email address, for example). Some bounces are simply the result of changed circumstances, such as a domain no longer existing or a user at a domain leaving the company. But in all cases the mail does not get through, which can compromise your sender reputation to some degree, making it harder for some of your other messages to land squarely in the inbox. Because they are permanent errors, there is no reason to continue mailing to them with the hope that mail will eventually make it through – it won’t.

What the different bounce types tell you

The most critical bounce types to pay attention to are Hard Bounces. Real Magnet classifies these into three different categories. Here is an explanation of each, some reasons why you may see them, and what action to take:

- Bad Domain: A bad domain bounce means that the domain within the email address you have sent to does not exist. In some cases, this is from a subscriber who fat-fingered the signup process, and typed “company.cm” instead of “company.com” or made some other typo. Other times it is from a domain that no longer exists, the result of a merger or simply going out of business. Bad Domains are also simply made up, such as when someone is required to enter an email address in order to download a whitepaper but does not actually want any follow-up email. Bad Domains are very common in list purchases, as often the lists are quite old and contain extinct domains.

Bad Domain bounces are easy to triage and manage. To start, go through your list of Bad Domains and look for obvious typos (like a “.cm” address instead of “.com”). Fix these and try leaving them in your list until your next cleaning. Look also for domains that you know no longer exist, such as free email providers that have gone out of business, or companies that no longer exist. Go ahead and suppress those – there is nobody home and no amount of ringing the bell will cause the door to open. Finally, other addresses with Bad Domains that you cannot immediately identify, but that have been unresponsive for some time, should simply be suppressed.

A Bad Domain bounce resulting from a company merger. After a month of transition (showing up as Generic Soft bounces here), the old domain finally went offline, resulting in Bad Domains. (Click to enlarge.)

- User Not Found: With these bounces, the domain exists but the user at the domain does not. For example, realmagnet.com exists as a domain, but if you mail to winniethepooh@realmagnet.com you will get a User Not Found bounce, as Mr. The Pooh left Real Magnet to pursue other opportunities and spend more time with his family over a year ago. List appending is another cause of User Not Found bounces, which occurs when you (or someone from whom you have purchased a list) see a name like winniethepooh@realmagnet.com on your list and make (inaccurate) assumptions of other email addresses that may be on the same list, such as christopherrobin@realmagnet.com (who actually goes by just crobbin@realmagnet.com). It is also not unthinkable that list sellers would simply make up names at an existing domain in order to have more to sell.

User Not Found bounces are the most toxic to deliverability, as each one sends a message to an ISP or an email administrator at a domain you would like to reach (and at which you likely have other contacts) that you are emailing a non-existent address. Real Magnet employs an Auto Suppression on some User Not Found Bounces: if an address receives a User Not Found hard bounce two consecutive times within 30 days, with no intervening success within those bounces, our application will automatically suppress the name. If you mail less frequently than every 30 days, however, you should inspect your User Not Found bounces regularly for recurring failures and suppress them.

This User Not Found bounce was the second one in the past 30 days, with no intervening success. Real Magnet will automatically suppress this name. (Click to enlarge.)

- Generic Hard: These bounces do not fit neatly into either other classification, either because they are a little different or because the ISP or email administrator that returned the bounce has its own name for it. Bad data is a common culprit. If an import is bungled and multiple email addresses are strung together into a single field (which happens more frequently than you would think),  Generic Hard bounce will occur. Many Generic Hard are also actually Bad Domains, resulting from typos that makes then unreadable and un-proccessable.

Unlike User Not Found bounces, many Generic Hard are recoverable. Go through your Generic Hard and you may well find the errors I’ve cited here – multiple email addresses in a single field, typos, and other obvious data entry or import errors. You can fix these, and re-introduce the correct email addresses into your database. Not only will this improve your deliverability by stripping out bounces, but you’ve just added new names to your list.

Until next time, stay relevant, stay engaged, and get delivered!

To improve your email results, be more social.

One of the hallmarks of a successful email program is anticipation – the better your audience knows you and the more they expect to hear from you, the more likely they are to notice, open, read and interact with your messages. One way to build anticipation is in the inbox itself, by mailing on a regular schedule and driving engagement with each message. But the inbox doesn’t have the market cornered on anticipation. The more relevant your brand is to your subscribers in general, the more anticipation grows. Just like regularly scheduled and engaging emails, increased activity in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+ or any other social network can place your brand more in your subscribers’ lives, which can translate into improved engagement metrics across all channels – email included.

How exactly to build that social interaction is covered in much more detail in the new Real Magnet eBook, The Social Starter Kit. You can download it for free if you’re interested.

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Each week on “Emailioration Monday”  we spotlight a single tactic you can implement this week in order to improve your email marketing. Share tips of your own on Twitter at #Emailioration, and see the full collection of Emailioration tips here.

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In some ways, Twitter is a lot like email. It is a channel that allows for broadcast messages, and many people follow other people and brands expressly for the messages intended for a mass audience. But it also allows for one-to-one communication, with the main difference to email being that even the one-to-one communication reaches your entire list of followers. It is as if you are sending a message to one person and cc’ing ten thousand. In email, this practice would be unendurable, but Twitter messages are infinitely more transient than email messages. They do not land in an inbox waiting to be dealt with, but appear fleetingly on a feed before disappearing into the ether. Instead of being roped into someone else’s conversation unwillingly, seeing a conversation on Twitter is more like eavesdropping.

Brands use many different content strategies on Twitter. Here are a few of the most popular:

Example 1: Broadcasting
ForeSee
http://twitter.com/ForeSee

Perhaps the most common use of Twitter for business (particularly with B-to-B brands) is for content broadcasting. Brands that generate a lot of original content (such as blogs, articles, white papers or research reports), or supplement their online activity with in-person events and conferences will find Twitter a handy channel to keep an audience informed and updated on relevant news.

ForeSee is a B-to-B company serving the digital retail industry. Its twitter account (below) focuses principally on content broadcasting, alerting its audience to new blog posts, research reports it has contributed to, and events where it is exhibiting.

The challenge to this content strategy is to maintain engagement with your audience, as content broadcasting is really just talking about yourself. It is only productive if you have a sizable and engaged audience, so supplement broadcasting with other types of content that help grow your audience, allowing for more profitable and scalable broadcasting.
Example 2: Customer Service
Zappos.com
http://twitter.com/Zappos_Service

Twitter has become the go-to channel for real-time customer service, in part because pioneers like Best Buy launched high-profile real-time customer service initiatives in the channel, conditioning customers of all brands to expect the same level of immediate attentiveness. Zappos.com wins accolades for its outstanding customer service every year, and was quick to meet customer expectations for Twitter-based service. The company has several Twitter accounts, including the one below expressly for customer service.

You will see in the example that the Zappos staffer who is currently on duty introduces herself in a friendly and approachable way. (There is no point in a customer service channel that is off-putting.) The other two tweets in this example are direct to specific customers, in response to questions to @Zappos_Service that are not visible on this feed.

When a customer sends a tweet to a brand, the tweet is visible on that person’s feed and could be seen by all of his or her followers. It is this public correspondence that compels brands to respond, as ignoring the tweet could well prompt another tweet from the same person, with growing impatience at the lack of a response. Zappos responds to tweets from its customers publicly, which means that all 11,781 of its followers might see its advice to @FeeFiFoMennifer that she should wear the shoes around the house for a while, and its response to @Theresa_is_Dead that she is welcome (presumably for something Zappos told her through Twitter previously).

Why would Zappos include all 12,000 followers on these one-to-one conversations? More importantly, why would 12,000 people follow this account knowing that one-to-somebody-else conversations are the principal content? The answer is that this is both how and why Twitter works. It is a hybrid channel, allowing for broadcasting and personal communication, at the same time. Zappos wants 12,000 people to see it taking care of @FeeFiFoMennifer and @Theresa_is_Dead because all of these people also realize that when they have a problem, they will enjoy the exact same immediate and personal attention that Mennifer and Theresa are receiving. This level of service is a powerful statement to be able to convey to customers and prospects. How powerful? Enough that 12,000 of them would follow this account to witness it.

It is worth noting the volume of service activity here as well. Zappos is a huge retailer, owned by Amazon.com and doing many millions of dollars of business every year. Yet Tanya, who signed on a few hours ago to handle the Twitter volume, only has a couple of tweets to manage in a couple hours. Reviewing a longer duration of activity on the account reveals that @Zappos_Service typically has about 50 tweets per day, or one every 30 minutes or so. Most of these are direct response to service inquiries requiring little or no research, such as “You’re welcome – glad to help!” or “Eep – that sounds rough? Call our customer service at 1-877-927-2332 and we’ll try to resolve it for you.” Opening up a service channel through Twitter does not increase the amount of service your brand will have to provide; it just gives your customers another way to reach you.

Example 3: Engagement
PowerBar
http://twitter.com/PoweBar

PowerBar uses its Twitter presence principally to deepen its relationship with customers through engagement. Its products are aimed at endurance athletes so much of its Twitter content is not only about competitive events, but indicates also the brand’s (and its people’s) involvement in them. PowerBar uses its Twitter account to demonstrate its authenticity for its market, by showing that the people at PowerBar are athletes (and people) just like its customers.

In the feed sample below, PowerBar tweets an ad hoc contest, giving someone the opportunity to win an entry to an upcoming triathlon. The design of the contest is clever. Many brands will run social contests where the first person or 10 people to tweet or RT win something. PowerBar opens the window for entry for two hours, and asks its followers to reply to @PowerBar with “Pick Me” for a chance to win. Remember that all of these tweets will show up in the feeds of everyone who follows each person who participates, so over the next two hours the PowerBar brand (and its contest) will generate tens or hundreds of thousands of highly impressions among the friends of competitive athletes, all for the cost of a single triathlon entry (about $100).

We see also the tone that PowerBar uses in its tweets, speaking directly to people as if they are friends, using colloquial and relaxed language. Fans can hear a person on the other side of the @PowerBar account, which helps build engagement with the brand through the approachability.

Speaking to a single person on Twitter may seem like a tactic that squanders social’s scalability, but the opposite is true. Every fan who sees a brand interact directly with another fan begins to realize that this is a brand that cares what its customers have to say. The fan does not need to be part of the direct conversation for the impact to register.

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For more tips on creating and executing your social media strategy, download our free eBook The Social Starter Kit.

New Capabilitites

• Twitter Search
• Infinite Scroll for Twitter (Timelines, Mentions, Retweets and Search)
• Custom Domains for Shortened URLS
• Scheduled Posts (from the Quick Post)
• Recurring Posts (from the Quick Post
• Social Event Conversion Reporting (View conversions from Email, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and the web)

Details are below!

Twitter Search

Twitter Search

The Quick Post widget now supports real time searching on Twitter! Simply click search and enter in a hashtag, keyword, link or phrase and return all the matching posts.

Infinite Scroll for Twitter (Timelines, Mentions, Retweets and Search)

Want to see older posts in your timeline?  With our infinite scroll you can load previously posted tweets from your followers without any limit.  This infinite scroll functionality is present in the timeline, mentions, retweets and search views.

Custom Domains for Shortened URLs

Want to brand the link in your social posts?  Coordinate with us on using a domain you own and we’ll create links that have your corporate brand in them.  For more information contact us (301.652.5074 or at support@realmagnet.com)!

Scheduled Posts (from the Quick Post)

Scheduled posts can now be created directly from the Quick Post widget within Social Magnet.  Once you click on the calendar icon you’ll be presented with a view that allows you to schedule the month, day and time of your social post.

Scheduled Post

Once a date is selected you can schedule that post by clicking the schedule button.

Example Scheduled Post

Recurring Posts (from the Quick Post)

After scheduling a post you have the option to schedule that content to be posted again, and again. It is important to note that the link in all posts will be the same.  This means the metrics for all these posts will be the aggregate metrics and there will be no unique metrics for each particular occurrence. 

Social Event Conversion Reporting

If you’re a Real Magnet Event’s module user you have power analytics built into the module.  With our new Social Conversion reporting you can view the number of registrants converting from Email, Social Media and the web.  This allows you to view which channel converts at a higher percentage and provides vital info on how to structure your marketing campaign for future events.

Social Event Conversion Report

Questions or comments?  Contact us!  301.652.5074 or at support@realmagnet.com