Catch all the email marketing buzz from around the world

Email Marketing India is bringing all the buzz from the industry around the world. Initially the paper is weekly.

Have a look at the first online print.

https://paper.li/aghreni/1418302788#

Any comments and feedback to twitter handle @aghreni.

Inbox by Gmail: 6 implicit facts for Marketers

Inbox by Gmail

“It’s a better way to get back to what matters… ” (Official Blog, Google)

An Explicitly correct statement that reflects what Inbox by Gmail is intended to impart to the users. But, what are the implicit rationales for marketers?

“The Inbox that works for you” essentially points towards the horizon where Email marketing is heading to. After the recent introduction of Grid view of Gmail promotion tab, this new development re-emphasizes the need of redevising the strategy that facilitates the way your brands talk to customers.

A snapshot of the new features:

Bundle of Emails: That’s how it sounds, it’s more about “Segmentation” of the huge number of Emails on the basis of certain selected criteria such as promos, Purchases, Trips etc. So, this is more about segmenting the emails based on actionable points (promos), undergoing actions (Purchases/delivery status) and custom actions-as labelled by users.

Important Highlights: It highlights important “Updates” from Emails such as delivery status, flight status etc. without having to open the mail. It is the Real-time feature of the Email.

Reminder: You will be able set your priorities by having a reminder in your inbox so as to avoid missing them out in the stipulated time. It will also provide required information for the same. For example, if you plan to have your dinner in a nearby restaurant, you can keep it as reminder in Inbox. It will also tell you whether it is open at any point of time. Once you book your seat online, you will also see a locational map of the restaurant in your confirmation mail.

Snooze your messages and reminders: This will facilitate in setting up your priorities to a later time or location. It will highlight your message as reminder at the stop in the assigned time.

And here are 6 Implicit Facts:

1)      Contextual: All emails are not equally important, so Gmail intends to help users in automated ways. Contextual marketing is becoming more and more important for a successful Email Marketing program.

2)      Urgency: In a fast moving world, marketers have to address the time factor associated with any live promotion/campaign. Catch the attention of your consumers before time expires.

3)      Priority: Amidst hundreds of tasks, actions awaiting user’s attention the inbox, Emails will now get prioritised as per the user. Thriving to get maximum priority through well-strategized email marketing effort will be the trigger to success.

4)      Real-time Marketing: This one is interesting and perhaps, the most significant aspect of Inbox. Live information feed from external resources such as external websites, data-base etc. implies arrival of live, fresh and dynamic features in Email marketing. Future marketing communications will happen on the fly.

5)      Perfect Content: Email automation is becoming more and more important. In fact, these new features of Inbox will ask for new Email Content Mechanism. Google is yet to reveal any specifications (if there is, at all) to remain contextual with well-developed HTML content.

6)      Success Matrix: If the inbox itself reveals much of the information about the Email through Subject Lines/thumbnails, what will define the success rate? For example, if an E-commerce company runs a time bound campaign, subscribers will be able to see it on priority, or can snooze it for later. In that case, what will be the success matrix? One thing is for sure, open rate will be affected and would require additional information to assess the performance. After all, the inbox itself will reveal most of the important information for contextual mails.

Connect with us and explore in-depth about how Email Innovations are delivering excellence through real-time Email Marketing and Contextual Marketing.

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/2014/10/27/inbox-by-gmail-6-implicit-facts-for-marketers/#sthash.vorkRunK.dpuf

Infographic on Real time personalization in email campaigns

Reference Sources

Real Time Marketing Report | Econsultancy & Monetate | February 2014

Real-time Marketing Insights Study | Adobe-DMA | July 2013

Five Keys to Success for Marketers | Neolane and DMA | July 2013

The Purchase Path Of Online Buyers |  Forrester Research | Year 2012

Fear of Missing Out | JWT |  March 2012

Mobile Path to Purchase |  Google Insights & Nielsen | November 2013

Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages| Nielsen | April 2012

To know more about Real-time Email Marketing, visit

Kenscio Digital

Real Time Personalisation (RTP)

Responsive Mailers Service

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/#sthash.FcAPq2y6.dpuf

Ecommerce Companies are using Twitter more frequently to keep customers interested and engaged!

A recent report in Economic Times of India dated 24th June carried an interesting trend article on how Indian e-commerce companies are leveraging the social networks like twitter to keep their ever growing twitter base interested and engaged with their brand directly on twitter.

e-commerce companies like Myntra, Snapdeal, Flipkart and Amazon are working on creating their brand on twitter and have a dedicated team to social media. The number of followers on twitter for brands like Myntra, Snapdeal and Flipkart and by influence with customer pales in comparison to major offline and online brands. The top 20 brands in the world on twitter ranked by the influence with customers are Whole Foods, Starbucks, Samsung, Jet Blue, Toms and etc. You can view the entire list and why they have been ranked by Business Insider.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-top-20-brands-on-twitter-ranked-by-influence-with-customers-2012-7?IR=T#

Find more at https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140625070937-3292551-ecommerce-companies-are-using-twitter-more-frequently-to-keep-customers-interested-and-engaged?trk=object-title

Make your marketing email content more dynamic and contextual

Every one of us are receiving lots of promotional mailers each day. Have you ever wondered if these could be much more live with the content that is as fresh from an oven or with an event that just happened or with the offer that has not expired or with a point balance that is just as on my loyalty card or what my friends are speaking about on an offer!

All of the email marketing tools that are available in the market today can assist marketers with content assembly that is as stale when the data cut was made from the CRM system and dispatched through the email tool. It has no clue when the mail was read by the recipient. Several days have elapsed between the data and content that was assembled into the email and when read.

Do Recipients like these kind of stale and irrelevant content in the email? or you sent an email with the offer that expired when the recipient saw it and actioned on it? Do you see an unhappy customer?

or Do you want positively surprise your customers by keeping your email content that is live, fresh, social and contextual?

Find more of the article at https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140616144458-3292551-make-your-marketing-email-content-more-dynamic-and-contextual?trk=object-title

India Digital Marketing Annual Report for year 2014

With the successful completion of digital marketing survey “Kenscio Motto 2014” conducted earlier in this year, Kenscio has released an insightful, strategically analysed full length report based on the participant marketers’ responses. Titled “Futuristic Digital Marketing in India”, this report attempts to provide a comprehensive compilation of thought-provoking and action oriented insights for digital marketers.

The survey was based on a set of market-centric inputs derived from Kenscio’s vast experience of serving the digital direct marketing industry in India. After compiling and analysing the responses gathered from more than 250 marketing professionals, many surprising findings popped up out showing significant consistencies and patterns in strategic level of thoughts across industries.

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/2014/04/23/first-annual-digital-marketing-report-2014-released-by-kenscio/#sthash.p2tJMkAy.dpuf

Real time, Contextual, Agile email marketing with live content in campaigns

There is a lot of news today about email marketing campaigns which can deliver content live from websites and social media based on the recipient behaviour at the time of opening the email, location and device. Delivering such live content in real time and context provides exciting and engaging opportunities for marketers to connect with the recipients and drive them towards further actions.

With such engaging campaigns with live contextual real-time content in email, marketers are seeing higher CTR (click through rate is a measure of clicks generated over the impressions served). As the ROI is a direct measure of CTR, higher CTR will result in higher clicks for the same number of impressions.

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/2014/02/27/real-time-contextual-agile-email-marketing-with-live-content-in-campaigns/#sthash.I3V5nQ2Z.dpuf

The all new Pinterest inspired Gmail’s Promotion Tab

Yes, you read that right! Gmail is reportedly making changes under the hood to transform the traditional looking rows of emails, with a sweet looking grid of images. This change only comes for the Promotions Tab, and this is what Gmail has posted in it’s official blog:

“Promotional mail has a lot of images, from pictures of snazzy new shoes to photos of that rock-climbing gym you’ve been wanting to try. But right now, those images are buried inside your messages—and with only subject lines to go on, it can be a challenge to quickly pick out the deals and offers that interest you most. To help you find what you’re looking for faster, you can now sign up for a new field trial for Gmail that lets you view the Promotions tab in a more visual way.”

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/2014/03/26/the-all-new-pintrest-inspired-gmails-promotion-tab/#sthash.RBcX6rsu.dpuf

Real time, Contextual, Agile marketing with live content in email campaigns

There is a lot of news today about email marketing campaigns which can deliver content live from websites and social media based on the recipient behaviour at the time of opening the email, location and device. Delivering such live content in real time and context provides exciting and engaging opportunities for marketers to connect with the recipients and drive them towards further actions.

With such engaging campaigns with live contextual real-time content in email, marketers are seeing higher CTR (click through rate is a measure of clicks generated over the impressions served). As the ROI is a direct measure of CTR, higher CTR will result in higher clicks for the same number of impressions.

From a simple count down or count up timer to drive urgency in recipients, to much more engaging real time or dynamic offers based on recipient behaviour, the email marketing is becoming is much agile in nature rather than static personalisation at the time of sending email.

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/2014/02/27/real-time-contextual-agile-email-marketing-with-live-content-in-campaigns/

Google gmail image caching, why google didn't do it right

Both the gmail users and the marketers are seeing many things going wrong with Google gmail image caching through its proxy servers. The intentions were not mentioned by google and not convincing enough, why its users needed that change.  Is it simply a better user experience by serving image faster?  or preventing images from compromising the security of the user's computer? If so google has better techniques to cache those images on its servers without fetching them from their destination location as other streaming companies do! It doesn't require a google's proxy link.

Second, the implementation is so bad that google doesn't know whether the image is static or dynamic. As the content on web is going dynamic and personalised, how can google serve some stale content which it fetched when one gmail user opened it at some time and keep serving the old stuff again and again when the user opens.

Now from the past couple of days, their image proxy servers are failing to serve even static images. Here are some mailers from retailers, that have some images missing on gmail.

It looks like google tried to get control over email marketing landscape and failed to understand the eco system and goofed up in the process.  

It is better for google to restore the broken things first before attempting to do something funny.

More articles on the subject

1. Gmail Images Broken in our Marketing Emails
2. Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
3. Thanks, Google: Cashing In On Gmail Caching
4. Gmail is back up, but strange problem persists

PS: The comments and remarks are of the blogger and not as a representative of any company.

Participate in Kenscio Motto 2014 contest and win an iPad Mini.

Kenscio Digital Marketing is running a survey about digital marketing strategy and execution for Marketers.

Respond and Win an ipad mini.

http://kenscio.com/motto2014/index.php

RTPersonalisation Platform Launched: Will Bring Live Content Into Emails

BANGALORE, MUMBAI and GURGAON, India, December 6, 2013 /PRNewswire/ –

Kenscio Digital Marketing announces its platform RTPersonalisation, which will enable email marketers to actively change the content of the email post they send out. The content can be changed based upon time of open, recipient location, available inventory, weather, social media content and many more. The platform has been developed at its recent development centre in Hyderabad.

“We seemed to have been losing vibe, post the new Tabbed Gmail Mailbox-specially for one of our crucial ‘Midnight Deal’ communication going out. The communication is landing into the Promotion tab and by the time a user checks that, the deal has expired before he actually landed on our product page. RTPersonalisation helped us put a clock on the head of users with the help of the fantastic tool that dynamically shows the actual time remaining. They helped us create a sense of urgency by letting them miss the deals and they ensure they should not miss it the next time onwards,” says Mr. Mandeep Gulati of Indiatimes Shopping, one of the early adaptors of the platform.

“I am very excited with the results that the team had delivered and the momentum that we have gained. This is a moment of pride as this is our first major product release since our existence of 4 years in the market. This will be an independent offering and will have its own P&L. We are looking to join hands with creative partners and we also welcome Indian and International email marketing companies and agencies,” says Mr. Manjunath K G, CEO of Kenscio Digital Marketing.

“The platform will bring a new revolution into the email marketing space and has the potential to change the landscape drastically. It will be a convergence of email marketing, social media and real time interaction. These innovations will help our clients deliver richer and more meaningful experiences. It will not only enable email as a channel to play a more strategic role for the brand but also strengthen its ability to drive decision making amongst consumers,” said Mr. Vivek Das who is responsible for Digital and CRM at a leading WPP agency in India.
The platform is system agnostic and will work with every email service provider and email client (Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, Yahoo, etc.)

“We timed the launch of the platform in sync with the Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF – an initiative by Google India). The timing becomes very critical for each participating merchant, as they are already gearing up for the event in anticipation of churning out large volume of transactions over the 3 days of the festival. We will be offering special one-off pricing for all the participants of the festival where they will be not charged on the impressions/opens but a just flat fee Rs. 20,000 (till GOSF 2013 ends),” added Saurav Patnaik, Co-founder & CBO, Kenscio.

About RTPersonalisation
RTPersonalisation is an innovative platform developed by Kenscio Digital Marketing Pvt Ltd. to focus on bringing realtime content into emails. The clientele includes Ford India, Basiclife clothing, Indiatimes shopping, Firstcry, Rummy Circle and many more.
About Kenscio

Kenscio Digital Marketing Private Limited is a digital direct marketing solutions and services company. Founded in early 2009 – the 90 member team is located in offices across Bangalore, Delhi NCR, and Mumbai. Kenscio’s Development centre is based out of Hyderabad.

Today, Kenscio services more than 60 clients in India and provides them a complete array of end to end digital direct marketing services and solutions. Each client’s needs are different and Kenscio’s Solutions ranging from building a base, reaching out to the subscribers, optimizing by segmentation, analytics and real time personalization are tailor made for each need.

To a large number of clients in India, Australia, Indonesia, China, UK, Germany, France and GCC countries, Kenscio provides Automation and Integration, Custom Development, Reporting and Dashboarding, QA services, Reputation Monitoring, and Campaign Deployments.

The death of “Display all Images” and what it means for you

Last week Google took a bold step by letting images load by default (no more “Display all Images”). One might wonder why the option existed in the first place and there is (or was) a very good reason why it did.

Images used in an email message are most commonly stored at a hosting server; which serves the images on request i.e. when a reader opens the message. This mechanism however can be exploited by spammers to plant malicious code on the reader’s machine, making it a very good reason to block images from all senders by default, and letting the reader decide which ones to load.

Google claims to have found a way to close this loophole by creating a filtering layer between the reader’s machine and the image hosting server. In other words, Google will now use internal proxy servers to request for images, host these images on Google Servers and finally serve images to the customer via Google’s internal network (in case nothing fishy is returned from the original hosting server)

As a Gmail User, this means that your inbox will now load images in all messages on its own and you’ll no longer have to click on “Display all Images”. If you are an Email Marketer, the repercussions may be a slightly different.

For starters, customers will now immediately see the entire email content (and not bits of it as before), since both text and images will load automatically. This in theory should translate into a better email experience for customers and create more opportunities for marketers to further improve email engagement.

On the other hand, Google will now intercept all interaction between the customer and marketer’s server; and effectively create a layer between the marketer and the customer. As a result it will no longer be possible to identify the geographic location, device information or multiple open behaviors of customers.

While this may prevent marketers to dynamically change the email content after sending the email, it will still allow them to target customer with geographic and device friendly content. As far as basic email tracking goes; open, click and conversion tracking will continue to work as before, with an exception to tracking multiple opens, which may no longer be possible. However, this would also mean that all opens are actually tracked (and not left out if someone did not select “Display all Images”) removing the discrepancy in numbers of unique openers & clickers.

While these changes in how Google delivers emails to customers may restrict marketers; it also creates opportunities for marketers to improve engagement, by making clever use of text and images.

Get in touch with Kenscio to find how you can make the most out of engagement with Gmail based customers.

Boost customer engagement via CSAT campaigns

Other than solving world hunger or eradicating AIDS, if you are an online marketer, at some point of time you must have killed your brain cells over the deliverability of your email communication or pondered upon all that you could do to boost customer engagement.

Though we have covered deliverability and engagement as separate topics in several of our articles and whitepapers, in this article we’d like to explore how you could kill two birds (deliverability and engagement problems) with one stone (read on!).

Fundamentally, deliverability and engagement are intertwined. One cannot have good deliverability with poor engagement rates, and if deliverability is poor, you certainly cannot expect first-class engagement. It’s a cruel vicious circle.

Presuming you do everything by the book (have the right infrastructure, best practices in place, do not spam, etc), you could then initiate a CSAT survey program. Why? Because surveys are interactive in nature and require your customers to share their perceptions and opinions (something all customers love!). Hence, as a general rule CSAT surveys have the potential to obtain extremely high responses, some of our clients have obtained as much as over 40% open rates and easily a 60% of CTR (clicks over opens).

These surveys not only boost your engagement, make your email marketing interactive (like it should be) but also give a boost to your sender reputation (the score ISPs assign to you; the marketer). So just one program can:

1. Find out what your customers think of you, your products / services, and share their feedback
2. Give you bonus points in the books of your customers for caring to ask for their opinion
3. Empower you with knowledge that when used wisely can help improve customer retention and long term profitability of your company
4. Get you thumbs up from ISPs

If you think that all this is good, but you might not be able to manage it, think again. Email is the most flexible and powerful channel to manage such automations and Kenscio can get you started and setup in no time. It is possible to:

- Automate the survey campaign
- Automatically exclude customers who have completed the survey
- Only target a segment of customers who have actually bought something from you
- Dynamically populate survey questions based on customer demographics, behaviour or purchase history

Whether you are into e-commerce, publishing, travel, finance, real estate or any other industry for that matter; if you serve customers, you should identify customer perceptions about you. This could be in form of Customer Feedback, Product Review, Service Quality, Event Surveys etc.

Every time you send an email survey, you initiate another opportunity to engage with your customers. Surveys built within an email message have better chances of getting a response, and the more responses you get the better will be your sender reputation with ISPs

So what are you waiting for? Get in touch to kick start your survey campaign.

Subscribers are like Volcanoes

Subscribers come in all shapes and sizes, however, its not how they look and weigh that is important; but how they behave and interact (with you, the marketer). And it is in this respect that subscribers are very much like volcanoes.

Like volcanoes, subscribers can also be classified as: Erupting, Active, Dormant, and Extinct.

Erupting volcanoes burst with activity and are vital for life and earth’s ecology. Similarly, such subscribers are very important for the success of your email marketing campaigns. They engage, convert and respond to you with least effort.

Active volcanoes have great potential to erupt. Similarly, subscribers who seem calm but have been full of activity in the recent past can easily be re-ignited with the right communication and targeted content.

Dormant volcanoes are volcanoes that used to be active but haven’t shown any signs of activity in the recent past. Such subscribers are like a Question Mark, your efforts should be focused at trying not to lose them. With careful communication and re-engagement strategies you should be able to win some back.

Extinct volcanoes have no history of eruption in considerable past and are not expected to erupt in comparable time scale of future. Subscribers that fall under this category, unfortunately only add cosmetic value to your database (Size!). They are cost heads that hardly provide any return and worse; they can even affect your sender reputation and deliverability.

Identifying such segments is the first step towards defining your communication strategy for your subscribers. By classifying subscribers into appropriate buckets you’ll be able to channel your efforts to:

- Ensure Erupting subscribers stay Erupting
- Push Active subscribers to move to the Erupting state
- Convert the Dormant subscribers to become Active and consequently Erupting
- With careful and infrequent communication identify how many Extinct might still be Dormant.

On paper this approach looks simple and elegant, but how do we ensure that at a given time of day we have the most updated information on these segments? In other words, your subscribers will keep jumping from one category to another, how do we ensure that every jump is recorded and tagged in real time?

Well, we have a super awesome magic potion just for this very purpose, get in touch and one of our wizards will fix this up for you in no time.

Give Customers the Power of Choice

Nothing is permanent except change.
– Heraclitus (Greek Philosopher)          
  
People change and so do their interests, habits, hobbies etc. Hence, it’s safe to assume that your email subscribers will change. The question is whether you can adapt to this change. Acknowledging this change doesn’t require you to revamp your email strategy every time your subscribers profile changes, instead it requires your email program to be flexible enough to let them choose what is right for them.

Research shows that subscribers (customers) will choose to maintain a deeper and long lasting relationship with you, when they are given the power of choice.

Furthermore, enabling subscribers to make choices makes them feel that they are in control and that they have the ability to dictate what and when they wish to hear from you. This increases the likelihood that they’ll look forward to your email messages and increases the chances that they’ll respond. This is the power of preferences.

What are Preferences?
Preferences are what that differentiates your subscribers. These are information about your subscribers that allow you to tailor your communication to suit their needs. For example, some might eagerly look forward to a daily promotional mailer, where as other might find these annoying. Similarly, you may have various product or service to offer and your subscribers will prefer some over others.

What is an Email Preference Center?
An Email Preference Center allows your recipients to easily change their subscription details. This might include content type, frequency, interests in various offerings, ability to opt down or opt out etc.

Hidden Potential?
Preference Center gives you a means to know more about your subscribers. In addition to the basic information that is captured at the time of sign up, your preference center enables you to collect important information that will help improve and nurture your relationship with your subscribers.
Furthermore, marketers who use preference centers are more successful at retaining un-subscribers than the ones who don’t…
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Get in touch to obtain your copy of the complete whitepaper on Email Preference Center or speak to one of our consultants today to see how you can improve your email marketing programs with the power of Preference Center.

Email Marketing Best Practices: Use of Style Sheets in Email Newsletter

Many Web designers use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to simplify the coding process and ensure a consistent style throughout a Website. Use of CSS in HTML emails can be problematic, however, as many email clients will not render style sheets correctly.

Here is a handy reference on whether an email client renders certain types of style sheets correctly.



Avoid using CSS if possible; but if you must use them, choose the embedded styles also known as ‘inline’. Embed the style within the two container tags and not within the header because some email clients will truncate or strip out the header.

So, add the style within the body tags, like this:

Main Text

     

Email Marketing Best Practices: Use of Buttons, Charts & Other Supporting Images in Email Newsletter

Buttons, charts, and other supporting images should use the colors of your design elements to pull the reader’s eye to the images. Make sure the text color used on your images stands out and is readable. Most importantly, make sure the recipient understands the action with the corresponding text or icons in the Buttons. 


See the examples below:  





    

Best Practices on Constructing an Email Newsletter and Improving its Performance

Many companies would like to send their subscribers a periodic email newsletter. The primary objective is to get their subscribers to read what the company has to say and keep the subscribers either informed about or take action.  How to keep the subscribers get hooked to the newsletter and make them act?

Here are some great ideas to improve your email newsletters for better performance.  

Subject line: Use concise subject lines, emphasizing the recipient’s benefit and prompt him/her to take action. Personalization and Individualization with Title, First Name (or Last Name), City, Login Id or Email Id will also greatly benefit.

Editorial for your readers: According to a recent survey, subscribers are engaged more by newsletters with an editorial, than a newsletter without a proper introduction. Another positive effect of the editorial is that you can highlight particular elements of your newsletter to your audience

Directory for a better orientation: If your newsletter consists of several articles, then a link directory is essential. This way your recipients can reach the article they are most interested in reading with one simple click. But make sure you don’t over burden them with too many articles.

Add to address book: Benefit from the positive effects an attractive image can bring you by ensuring that all images and illustrations are directly shown to your subscribers by simply asking your readers to add your email address to their address books. ISPs provides greater deliverability of your newsletter by directly putting them in the inbox of the recipient bypassing spam filters and enable images in the newsletter automatically.

Opportunity to subscribe: If a person receives a forwarded newsletter he/she should immediately have the opportunity to subscribe, so make sure you offer the possibility to subscribe after the obligatory unsubscribe link.

Show the recipient’s email address: State the recipient’s email address to raise the credibility of your email and facilitate readers who receive your newsletter several times to subscribe with the right email address.

Link to profile data: Your recipients should have the chance to update their profile. That way you are you able avoid unnecessary unsubscriptions.

Link to View Online link: Provide a view online link for subscribers whose email servers blocked the images, so that they can visit the landing page directly through their browser.

Engage with your audience: get people encouraged to share travel reviews/ advices / tips / pictures. Offer free reward points for people who help friends and family sign up for our newsletter.

Enable Social Media links: get your subscribers to interact with your social media accounts and share it with their networks.

Enable Forward to a Friend link: get your subscribers to share the email newsletter with their friends and also to invite them to join the newsletter subscription.

Take advantage of every single touch point: Think about every way you can increase subscribers, taking advantage of every contact you have with your customers and prospects. Have a subscription box on every page of your website; at events or in-store promotions ask if the interested person would like to receive the newsletter and preferably obtain permission there and then; add a footer to all staff emails; promote the benefits of signing up by enhancing the subscription value with customer testimonials and offering incentives for sign.

Email Marketing: Have you Found a Crystal Ball Yet?

If you are an email marketer you might have started to believe in destiny. With ISPs headstrong to tighten their policies for bulk senders, rubbing the good ol crystal ball and hoping for the best might seem like a good option. We don’t know much about crystal balls but can sure share some good practices that can help you control the destiny of your email communication.

Gmail has listed a set of guidelines and best practices for Email Marketers, when followed should yield favorable results.

Guidelines for Email Marketers

“The way Gmail classifies spam depends heavily on reports from our users. Gmail users can mark and unmark any message as spam, at any time. To increase the inbox delivery rate of your messages, make sure that all recipients on your distribution lists actually want to receive the mail.” – GMAIL

Presuming you do everything by the book i.e. ensure users opt-in to receive your messages, honor un-subscription, follow the best practices for HTML design, monitor bounces, and ensure your subscribers engage with you and so on; you should not need a crystal ball (or Aladdin’s lamp for that matter). That being said, you can request your faithful subscribers to white-list you!

Being white-listed by subscribers ensures:

1. Your mails almost always lands in their in-boxes.

2. Your reputation with ISPs is significantly improved, so consequently your deliverability improves even for the subscribers who have not white-listed you.

We have listed a set of step by step instructions that you can email to your subscribers and request them to white-list you:

White-Listing Instructions

To ensure the success of this exercise you may consider offering incentives!