An email campaign can now strategically display HTML5-ready messages to those on your mailing list with HTML5-capable email services. The impact of this integration is huge, as the Hotmail web mail client displays HTML5 video in Chrome, Firefox, and IE9. IE8, which does not support HTML5, still can only show an animated GIF video.

Below is our Email Campaign Service testing HTML5 in Hotmail. Surprisingly, this player also works in a few other clients, such as Outlook 2011 for Mac. Hopefully, this is the start of what will become a large adoption of some form of video into email!

What’s interesting is that while each client has unique needs, there are several strategies and tactics that are essential regardless of the desired outcome.

1. Subscriber Acquisition

Ask anyone who wants to do email marketing (aside from well-known brands)  and they will probably tell you that acquisition is one of the most difficult parts of producing a quality campaign.  Fortunately for e-commerce companies, anyone who purchases from them or visits their site in search of a good deal can easily be converted into a subscriber.

While many sites collect email addresses, and even double opt them in, I’ve found that a good portion of them still lack an official acquisition strategy. They may be collecting “enough” addresses but might not be collecting as many as they could.  It’s easy to test different sign-up box placements, sizes and colors. It’s also easy to create contests, coupon codes and other incentives for people to subscribe.

2. Initial Engagement

After you have successfully captured an email address you need to immediately get the relationship with your new subscriber started. Don’t wait hours, days or months to contact them for the first time. Send them an email immediately! Send them something special and unique and don’t be afraid to ask them to whitelist your sending address.

With inbox engagement becoming an increasingly important factor in message delivery, senders need to strike while the iron is hot and increase inbox actions while they are fresh in the mind of their subscribers.

3. Content

I really get tired of receiving email campaigns with nothing but the same coupon code time and time again. Or with a new sorta-deal, or free shipping, or a third-party advertisement.

Producing quality content on a regular basis is difficult. It takes time and money to do, but for most e-commerce companies, it’s worth the additional expense. Even if you’re on a budget, there are options available for youincluding freelance writers, repurposing blog content or even highlighting product reviews. Get creative and think of new ways to get new content into your subscriber’s inbox.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply respond:

“We have analyzed this, and based on our datasets, our team tells me that we have a 90% chance that this project will generate in excess of $1,000,000 in new revenue within the next 9 months.”

Does that sound like a pipe dream to you?  It did to me too, until we discovered predictive analytics.

Predictive analytics is the running of statistical modeling based on many pieces of data from multiple sources.   The statistical modeling will then tell us what marketing strategies might work, what are the chances they will work, and point out opportunities to us that we never knew existed.  We are doing this now at Fathom Online Marketing and it works so well that we have given this service the nickname “Project Gold Rush.”

To give you a more tangible example, we do ‘pay only for performance’ email marketing for a client.  They compensate us on a cost-per-lead basis, so we really want to generate as many leads for them as we possibly can.  We took all the data from their database, such as: first name, last name, email address, phone number, date of opt-in, time of opt-in, original interest, SalesForce.com data collected from their sales team and we then merged it with our data sources.  These data sources include U.S. Census Bureau data, email campaign performance (who opens what emails and clicks on what links and fills out what forms), other proprietary databases we have created and have access to, and then we take keywords and ad copy performance from pay-per-click campaigns for that client.  Next, we dump all of this data into massive databases and update them in real time.  Lastly, we then run statistical models that ask (among other things):

• Which of our customer segments are most likely to turn into a sale?
• What messages did they respond to?
• What keywords are their hot buttons?
• At what time is someone in segment X ready to make a purchase?

Our models then tell us where to focus our marketing efforts and they do so with amazing accuracy. This can result in us sending fewer emails for our clients, yet making them five times more money from their email campaigns.  In addition, these models can help inform our pay per click, search engine optimization, display, website conversion, and social media strategies for our clients.  The end result is that we predict the future — and the future is: we will make you more money.

Want to know the coolest part?  We give everything I have described above to many of our performance-based email marketing clients for free.

So do you want to predict the future and make a lot of success out of that power?

Again, so simple.

High open rates lead to high click-through rates, presumably, which lead to a high volume of sales or leads generated. That is the formula; now let’s put it into practice.

People open messages when a subject line grabs their attention.  Most subject lines focus  on a quick call to action, such as “Ending Soon” or “Last Chance”, and not about what they truly ought to describe — that is, the content  of the message itself.  A good subject line has to refer to your email message in its entirety. If there is no connection between the subject line and the content of the message, the subscriber will quickly lose interest.

Subscribers know what they want. If they are intrigued by your subject line, they will open your message. Hopefully, they will then scan the content of your email and search for relevant keywords and information that is of value to them. If the content matches what caught their attention in the first place, then you will have their undivided attention and they will click through to learn more. If it does not hold their attention, your message loses its credibility and you could lose your subscriber.

One way to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing is to analyze your open rates with the number of leads or sales generated from your campaign. Take a month or two’s worth of messages and look for trends based on segment, day of the week, time of the send, etc. Do you see patterns between high open rates that lead to a high volume of sales? If so, those are your best subject lines. Once you identify them, compare the kinds of things they have in common with each other. Do they describe the content of your messages well?  Once you understand how your subject lines generate revenue, you will learn more about what your subscribers want from you, and what value you can offer in return.

Hotmail has Active Views, Yahoo links content you may not expect to be linked, Gmail’s priority inbox lets subscribers pick and choose which emails are, well — a priority. So how do we, as today’s email marketers, take the best advantage of all of these new features to bring in more revenue and increase conversions without tearing our hair out?

Be proactive. Sending to a test or seed list should be a habit by now, but if you need more information about how successful your next campaign will be, why not try to send to a smaller segment before the larger send? Try testing to small groups by email provider if your concern is primarily how the campaign is received in each inbox. Compare these results and strategize accordingly for that larger send.

Consider new features and coordinate efforts. Example #1: Yahoo’s email inbox links common search words. How much more effective would your campaign be if your SEO content proactively prepared for this? Example #2: Gmail’s priority inbox makes it harder to get noticed even if you’re getting into the inbox. So why not make every touch point a place to provide an incentive to make your campaigns a priority? This can’t do anything but help your efforts.

Test, review, repeat. Your most effective inbox strategies can be just as valuable as your best calls-to-action. Make sure to note these and utilize those successful approaches.

If you utilize successfully tested strategies and combine your marketing efforts to repeat your successes, not only will you increase conversions but possibly reputation in the process as well, which will make it easier to get into any inbox more effectively.

Number One – Your messages contain too many images.

I know you like using fancy fonts, buttons and gradients in your messages, but anyone who receives your message in Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, or Hotmail is required to manually turn on the images for each of your messages if they have not added you to their address book or white-listed your email address.

I’m not going to tell you to give up all of your images. Spend five extra minutes and determine which parts of your message must be an image and change the rest to HTML.

Number Two – You’re not using a relevant landing page.

What is the purpose of your email? Is it to generate sales, collect new leads or convert old leads? Then why do the links in your message point to your home page?

You need to create new landing pages that makes it easy for your subscribers to complete your desired action. Send them to a shopping cart that already has the product in it or display a lead form that’s populated with the information you already have about the subscriber. Keep the action obvious and the process simple.

Number Three – You let a Web designer code your message.

There are a lot of people out there who know HTML or think they do because they can use Dreamweaver. Unfortunate, HTML renders differently in email than it does on websites. And to complicate matters even more, some email clients render email HTML differently, strip out style sheets, and don’t display background images.

Needless to say, there is a lot to consider when coding HTML for email. If you want your message to display consistently for all of your subscribers, you need the person coding your HTML to know the specific changes that need to be made.

Number Four – You aren’t using calls to action.

Why are you sending email if you aren’t looking for a specific response? It doesn’t matter who you are or why you are sending email, everyone is looking for some sort of conversion. Just like with the landing page, you don’t want people guessing what that conversion goal is. Use calls to action in your subject line, throughout your copy, and as the text on buttons. If you have different calls to action in your message, create a separate landing page for each of them that easily allows the specific action to be taken.

1. Generate More Email Conversions – This is typically the primary goal for all email marketers looking to increase ROI. More opens and clicks will help you achieve this. You may also want to increase your sending volume or frequency. Just be sure to monitor for side effects.
2. Generate Higher Revenue Conversions – Are you too focused on your lower ticket products just because they are easier to sell? Do you differentiate your services based on price alone? Consider the benefits of promoting your more expensive and higher margin items. Focus on creating awesome content showcasing their benefits.
3. Increase Email Conversion Rates – What’s the point in optimizing your emails if your website and landing pages aren’t optimized as well? Conversions typically don’t occur in the body of your email, so it is extremely important to take external factors into consideration. Consider using additional dedicated landing pages or testing the product pages of your e-commerce site. Transactional messages can also help by providing timely information that can give your buyers added confidence in your products or services.
4. Retain/Resell - The beauty of email is that even after the sale, you can communicate with your customers and subscribers. Do they need to replace consumable parts? Do you offer a complementary service that can make their experience even better? For those with a recurring revenue model, I’d say that you should never stop emailing your customers (unless they unsubscribe). Constantly nurture your relationships, remind them of the value of your goods or services and build loyalty.
5. Cut Email Marketing Costs - You rarely hear about cutting costs with email marketing, but it should always be an option. The industry is maturing and getting more competitive. Now may be a good time to consider renegotiating your contract with your email service provider. You can also get more extreme by reducing frequency or cutting back on promotions. Note: I wouldn’t advise doing either of these without thorough testing.

What tips do you have for increasing email marketing ROI?

Want more increased revenue tips? Seven Steps to Growing Revenue From Email Marketing

1. You’ve just given a knockout presentation with great information.  Instead of waiting around at the end to try and talk to every single person and exchange business cards, you simply have one additional slide at the end of the presentation.  You thank them for coming and on this slide ask that if they would like this presentation emailed to them and to sign up to receive your monthly email newsletters, to simply text NEWS to 12345.  The recipient would immediately receive a text asking for their email address.  Once they reply, a response lets them know that this presentation is waiting for them in their email.  This method is faster and easier, not only for you, but also for the attendees.  Even if some of the attendees only have texting capabilities, it gives them a chance to subscribe as well.
2. Your brick and mortar stores run a 30-second TV spot advertising special promotions.  At the end of the ad it states: Enter to win a $500 shopping spree and receive additional promotions via email by texting SPREE to 12345. This not only creates a sense of urgency to enter a contest, but it also signs up subscribers to receive your emails.
3. The local hospital wants to expand their patient services.  You want your current subscribers to know this, but you also want potential patients to know.  The hospital advertises in the local newspaper, magazine, on sides of buses, TV and direct mail.  Adding a call to action on these print ads for people to sign up for email newsletters, updates and events by texting NEWS to 12345.  You could also have signs located in waiting areas, reception desks, exam rooms, etc. with posters advertising Want more info about your doctor or updates on the latest research? Text DOCTOR to 12345. This is a great way to keep the conversation flowing between the hospital and patients.

Almost everyone has a cell phone with texting capabilities.  And with the growth of mobile technology, it is now the #1 device for immediate conversation and connection.  So start connecting by implementing an SMS strategy in your marketing mix today.  Test out Fathom Online Marketing’s demo by texting TEXTDEMO to 55678.

Want more email and mobile ideas? Learn how to grow your email list with QR codes!

Why?

My clients aren’t household names. My clients aren’t branding – they’re selling. If you are not trying to make money off your emails, I say go ahead and make them as pretty as you want! Have a ball! If, however, your goal is to maximize your ROI and get people clicking, buying, filling out lead forms or making a phone call, then ugly is what you really want. I’m not saying that your email should repulse, offend or have some ridiculous color scheme; I am just saying you want to avoid the temptation to create some household -name, beautiful-branding wanna be email campaign.

The majority of those beautifully crafted email campaigns are almost all images. According to MarketingSherpa, 66% of people have images turned off in their email programs by default. If you are a household name, or you have a constant 70% open rate, then you can pull that off. Otherwise you are sending your subscribers an email of big red X’s. If you want people to turn on your images, they need to see some content that appeals to them first. Firefox has a plug-in called Image-Show-Hide that will let you turn off images in your browser. See what the emails look like with images off during the design phase so you don’t waste your time making edits once you finally see it with images off during testing. Make sure your email conveys your message just as well with the images turned off as it does with them turned on.

Secondly, do you want people to look at your email or do you want them to click and convert? You have about 3 seconds to get their attention and make them want more or you’ll miss that conversion. How do you get people to convert? A good value proposition and a well-placed call to action! If people are concentrating on your pretty images, they are more likely to miss your call to action.

We recently ran a test on email navigation. Version A had plan old HTML text links to different conversion pages. Version B had beautifully crafted, eye-catching buttons for each one of those same links. Guess what? Version A’s boring text links blew away the colorful images in version B. It received 16% more clicks than the prettier version. Imagine how much more money you could make if you had 16% more traffic coming in from your emails?

It’s been tested a million times, and the way your email looks matters a lot less than you think when it comes to making you money. Even though all it takes is a simple A/B test to realize the power of uglying up your email, there are still very few people doing it. Test it already!

When clients come to us on a performance basis they picture that perfect email template. When we present them with our idea they can often be confused by the direction we take them in. It takes those clients longer to take off because we end up having to first test the pretty email they want against the one we know will convert.

Rest assured that the perfect email you are picturing in your mind and the plain Jane email that brings you the most wealth are not one and the same.

HTML & CSS

• W3Schools offers free HTML and CSS tutorials. You’ll need to know both for designing email templates and editing content.

Email Marketing Creative and Design

• Adobe Photoshop for editing images, creating layouts, and slicing large images.
• HTML editor such as Adobe Dreamweaver for creating and previewing HTML. Just make sure you use the coding view in Dreamweaver to build your html email template.

Email Lists

• Sign Up Forms to help you build a high converting email marketing list.
• TextPad to open different types of text files.
• Microsoft Access to work with large databases.
• Microsoft Excel as a general purpose database tool.

Email Message Delivery

• Email Service Provider because there is no reason for you to manage the complex process of transferring email when there are hundreds of great, and ultimately less expensive, options available.
• Transactional Messages to immediately communicate time-sensitive information to your subscribers.
• Rendering Tests to preview how your email design looks across ISPs, browsers, devices and operating systems.
• Delivery Reports to learn more about potential blocks or delivery issues at certain ISPs.
• Test Accounts with AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo at the bare minimum. Check rendering and delivery manually.

Tracking

• Open and Click Tracking should be provided by your Email Service Provider, if not, get a new one.
• Conversion Tracking to segment out subscribers who have completed your desired conversion goal.
• Google Analytics to continue tracking subscribers after they leave the email and peruse your website.

These are all great tools and are the bare minimum to get started creating effective email marketing campaigns. What is the best email marketing tool though? What one tool will help your email marketing performance and generate the highest ROI?

In my opinion, the best email marketing tool is a smart, creative, and outgoing team.  No one person is ever going to be the best at strategy, design, analysis AND testing. Sure, they can attack the low hanging fruit of email marketing, but they aren’t going to be able to generate the highest ROI for a big email database by themselves.

By allowing your team members to focus on their one area of expertise, you can build an email program that is strong in every area, not just one or two.

Following the announcement, I polled acquaintances, friends and reviewed comments from industry folks about whether or not they would use the new Facebook Messages. The consensus among the people I surveyed varied between “What’s that?” and “No thanks, I already have email and I don’t need another place to check.”

Here we are, roughly four months out from Facebook’s message, and the excitement has died down a little. Maybe more than a little. I’ve been tracking the impact of Facebook email addresses on our major client since the implementation, as email addresses became more and more available, and while there has been growth, it’s been relatively minor.

Those numbers represent the presence of @facebook.com email addresses in two email lists. Yahoo! still holds first place in both databases.

However, numbers only tell one small part of the story. Even Facebook admits that Facebook Messages isn’t a replacement of email. In Facebook’s blog, one of their engineers says:

“To be clear, Messages is not email [my emphasis]. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.”

Having used Messages since it was possible for me to do so, I can say that I find the lack of the things mentioned above, particularly subject line and the inability to cc: so that I can include people indirectly in my “conversation”, quite annoying. If you send out a message to more than one person, any responses someone sends you get distributed to everyone who got the original message (along with complaints about getting messages not meant for them).

In addition, it is presently impossible to delete a segment of a conversation. You have to wipe out the entire thing. Joel Seligstein, the author of the above blog post, states:

“I’m intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From ‘hey nice to meet you’ to ‘do you want to get coffee sometime’ to ‘our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight.’ That’s a really cool idea.”

I beg to differ with Mr. Seligstein. I don’t necessarily want to remember EVERYTHING I said to someone, and I’m guessing I’m not alone in that. In one thread, I could have a deep and meaningful conversation followed by a really stupid comment I’d like to kill and forget because I hit the Enter button before my brain had a chance to edit itself. Only I can’t.

Facebook is the largest, most heavily used social media site on the planet. It would be foolish to assume that they won’t change and adapt as the Messages (and @facebook.com email address) rollout continues and user feedback comes in. In the meantime, what it seems to be that they’ve done is reinvent Twitter with no 140 character limitation. I have to be honest – if I want to use Twitter, that’s where I’ll go.

In the meantime, it would be interesting to know if anyone has seen a major increase in the presence by percentage of ‘facebook.com’ addresses in their mailing lists. Until that happens, Facebook Messages is not going to have half the impact on how email is done as the growing Mobile market. Right now, that’s where the challenges lie for email marketers.

Use conversion history. Be aware of those who have converted in the past, and include related products or services in your emails to them. This will help strengthen your existing relationship and keep it active by maintaining relevance and ideally get repeat conversions for you. In addition, you can reward them for their business with special offers for related items.

Deliver on your promise. If a large chunk of your database is opening but not converting, consider the fact that you may not be following through with what you are offering in the subject. Be sure that the content of your email immediately supports the claim of your subject. Not delivering is an easy way to frustrate and lose your subscribers and your reputation.

Give them more of what they want and less of what they don’t. If you’re sending emails with more than one call to action, consider replacing some of the weaker performing ones with the better performing ones. You’re wasting your time, and your subscribers’, with links that aren’t interesting and don’t perform.

Recognize the failures. Document ”red flags” such as subject lines that decrease opens, calls to action that don’t work and strategies that repeatedly elicit complaints. You should develop a habit of recognizing these items and keeping them away from your campaigns.

If you don’t have the data in place to do any of these, then your email marketing is stuck in the stone age. Consider upgrading to a new provider and implementing tracking code across all campaigns and landing page. After all, the best way to improve conversions and revenue is by testing and you can’t do that effectively without tracking.

Tim Roman: Charlie, tell me about yourself?

Charlie Sheen: You can’t process me with a normal brain.

Tim Roman: What? That’s all you’ve got for me about yourself? Are you addicted to drugs or something?

Charlie Sheen: The only thing I’m addicted to right now is winning.

Tim Roman: Riiiiiight, I forgot that was your new thing. So tell me what do you know about email marketing?

Charlie Sheen: I will not believe that if I do something then I have to follow a certain path because it was written for normal people. People who aren’t special. People who don’t have tiger blood and Adonis DNA.

Tim Roman: Ok. So what you’re saying is that to be a successful email marketer, you need to have tiger blood and Adonis DNA? I guess that’s one way to look at it since successful email marketers ARE very unique people. After all, they need to be:

1. Analytical when monitoring statistics, reports, and tests.
2. Creative when designing templates, strategies, and content.
3. Innovative to develop #winning strategies and produce statistically significant test results.

Charlie Sheen: C’mon bro, I won best picture at 20. I wasn’t even trying. I wasn’t even warm.

Tim Roman: Who could forget! You sound like you know a lot about email marketing and building lists for a celebrity.

Charlie Sheen: Look what I’m dealing with, man, I’m dealing with fools and trolls.

Tim Roman: Are you kidding me? If you keep looking at your million plus twitter followers that way, you’ll be history in no time. You’ve got to value the relationship with your subscribers whether they are on Twitter or on your email list.  You keep thinking they’re fools and you’ll lose their attention, their loyalty and more importantly, their conversions. I still think you’re on some drug.

Charlie Sheen: I am on a drug, it’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.

Tim Roman: I’m on a drug too, it’s called ROI. I’ve found the best way to get high is with email marketing since according to the DMA it generates the highest ROI of $43 for each dollar spent.

Charlie Sheen: I was banging seven-gram rocks, because that’s how I roll.  I have one speed, I have one gear: Go.

Tim Roman: I’m banging millions in my email lists, hundreds of segments, dynamic content, transactional messages and I top it off everyday with a team of copywriters that produce the most exotic and engaging content. You can’t top that.

Charlie Sheen: Winning.

Tim Roman: No you’re not. I’m winning. I’m winning millions in revenue for my clients.

Charlie Sheen: I’m bi-winning.

Tim Roman: You keep thinking that.

Charlie Sheen: I’m sorry man, I got magic and I’ve got poetry in my fingertips, you know, most of the time, and this includes naps.

Tim Roman: Alright, fair enough. Great talking with you. Hurry up and bang out Major League 3 before something bad happens to you.

The study indicates that the copywriting in your email doesn’t control the overall performance of the message, but instead acts as the liaison, leading your subscribers to your main calls to action that are relevant to their interests. From point A to point B, if the email is well designed with appropriate calls to action, your subscribers will click through to your landing pages to know more. From here they will read your copy, since they feel it directly corresponds to their point of interest.

This is where copy must be the most engaging and relevant; once you clearly have their attention and they are looking for further information. All copy is important to help produce a quality product, but be mindful of when and where your readers are actually reading your copy, and when they are simply scanning the page for relevance. This will lead to subscribers actually reading what you write, and, if it is written well, will lead to greater conversions and higher revenue.

The earlier you fix your list and collection practices, the easier it will be to maintain a successful strategy in the future. As Minute Maid has said in their recent advertisements, “Put good in, get good out.”

Let’s look at some common tactics used for growing your list and how they can be done better to ensure you are building a high-converting email marketing list.

Incentives

Incentives can be a great way to quickly increase the size of your list. Unfortunately, many people sign up for them simply to win, not to get information from the sponsor. This can result in the collection of many invalid email address, an increase in unsubscribes, and increased spam complaints.

Be open about the purpose of the contest and how you will use the collected information.  Consider using a separate checkbox so entrants can explicitly opt-in to receiving marketing email from you.

Referrals

Referrals can be as direct as asking your subscribers to recommend your newsletter to their friends and family or including the ability to post your emails to social media sites.

Giving your subscribers the ability to share a message is easy. Many email service providers have built-in tools to do this. The hard part is creating content that is valuable enough for your subscribers to want to share it.

Like that “Free Shipping” offer you sent today, and last week, and the week before. It isn’t going to get shared. What will is the short video for your amazing new product or service or some fun new tips for making someone’s life easier.

The shared versions of your messages (in my opinion, all of them) should include a link to your sign up page. Personalize the experience even further by thanking these unique subscribers and tagging their source in your database. Next time, you’ll know who to send to for Facebook exposure.

Initial Engagement

This may be the most important message your ever send to your new subscribers. If you don’t craft it carefully, it may be your last.

Every new subscriber should instantly receive an email from you to confirm their email address and thank them. Set expectations by including an overview of your relationship, how frequently you send, and a link to your privacy policy.

Go a step further and ask them to complete preferences or customize their frequency to create a loyal and enthusiastic subscriber.

More Ideas for Growing your Email List

Grow your Email Marketing List with QR Codes

3 Other Ways to Grow Your Email Marketing List

An Introduction to Email Marketing and Mobile

1. Don’t start out by putting up your guard, or your reader’s. Sending from “do-not-reply@example.com” is a good way to stop the conversation before it begins. You want your reader to reply and respond, so before building your email, get your envelop information in order.
2. Avoid aggressive language that would scare off people who are not ready to commit, such as “BUY NOW” or “APPLY NOW”. Give these commitment-phobes a less anxiety-inducing option to “Learn More” or “Explore Your Options”.
3. Keep your conversation focused. Your design, copy and call to action should all work towards the same goal. Let the recipient know who you are, what you offer and how and why they can and should accept it. Stay away from extra FYI topics that distract your message. Leave off-topic conversations for blogs. Have you seen this funny cat video?
4. When designing your emails think about how you sound to the recipient. You should be communicating with them, not talking at them. Keep the email conversational and do not use unfriendly or pretentious language. Start with “Hi Stephen” rather than a generic “Hi, Customer” or worse, no greeting at all. Talk to the person as you would talk to a friend.

The flow of your email should be consistent and drive the recipient to the call of action. As always, the best practices most appropriate for you are the ones you’ve tested with your list and that you know work. Implementing these tips is another effective way to avoid killing a conversation — and killing your conversions.

One way to achieve this is by optimizing your email marketing and direct marketing strategy for mobile devices.

You’re probably thinking: Do I need to re-format my email campaigns for mobile users? Should I include SMS in the strategy? Should social media play a role? Don’t panic! Let’s go over the basics today and we’ll go more in depth over the next couple of weeks.

The mobile phone is quickly becoming the device of choice for receiving email. While you don’t need to create a whole new email for mobile devices, you need to do the following:

• Know how your messages will be viewed.
• Keep your message contextually relevant.
• Keep your design short and simple.
• Know your customer’s preferences.

Other Considerations

Create opt-in’s via SMS at every customer touch-point. It could be on a TV ad, print ad, business card or even on a napkin! Be sure to have a campaign approved for SMS via an agency that knows what they are doing because, it can be complicated.

More Information: Grow your Email Marketing List with QR Codes

Social media can create an incredible mobile experience. Marketers should be integrating social media into their email campaigns today. These emails can prompt someone to share something via Facebook or Twitter and then be sent a text message or another mobile experience. This can help with your data collection, and improve your understanding of your customer’s wants and needs aiding in increased relevancy in future messages.

Marketers will have a harder time reaching their customers if they don’t think holistically about ways to influence and leverage a response. With more communication options available than ever before, your consumers will increasingly dictate the terms of their online experience.

There are several different kinds of codes that you can build. Let’s look at a few live examples and how they can help you build your email marketing database.

URL

What it is: When it is captured, this code will display the URL to the user and allow them to visit it on their mobile device.
List Growth Opportunity: Promote your newsletter then use this code to link to a mobile-optimized landing page with a subscribe form. You could also use this same format for contests, lead generation, or a quiz. You could even have a snap shot of a video on your print piece and use a QR code to link to the actual video!

Plain Text

What it is: This code will display plain text. Keep in mind that this does not direct the user to a specific call to action. However, if you use does not fit in another category, this one can provide more freedom.
List Growth Opportunity: Use this code to provide hidden or additional information. It could be a clue to a contest or a description of your service or the benefits of subscribing to your newsletter. Since this does not have a built-in call to action, make sure you include your URL or telephone number.

SMS

What it is: This code will bring up a phone number or SMS short code. You may optionally pre-format the message content.
List Growth Opportunity: The holy grail of offline email capture? Maybe! Check out the example to see how easily you can integrate this with your SMS solution. Users can provide their email address and subscribe to your database in seconds. The opportunities are truly endless with this code. The best part is that you can acquire the users mobile number at the same time as the email. Just be sure to get separate and explicit permission to send them SMS.

These are just a few ideas to help you grow your email marketing list with QR codes and I’m sure with more time you can think of some even more creative strategies. Here is a link to help you find some free QR code generators.

1. Advertise through a Facebook pay-per-click campaign. If you have a newsletter, Facebook is a great place to get subscribers. Through Facebook pay-per-click campaigns, you can advertise your newsletter to its exact demographic and get great results. A client recently did this and in one week got hundreds of active subscribers!

2. Test your sign-up form. Here are a few testing ideas to help you generate the maximum number of new subscribers to your email list.

• Put your form above the fold. One of our clients recently moved their form above the fold and instantly doubled their new subscribers.
• Put your form on every page. Why hide your form on just one or two pages? Put your form on every page, so no matter what page they land on, they can sign up.
• Communicate what they are signing up for. Make sure subscribers know what they are getting by filling out the form. Do you send daily, weekly, or monthly? Setting expectations early on will generate higher quality subscribers.

3. Offer a freebie for signing up. Offer subscribers who sign up a freebie such as a white paper or a sample packet. Not only does this entice people to sign up, but it gives you a chance to show your value.

Get out there and start building a bigger and better email marketing list today!

In order to increase email marketing conversions and revenue and generate maximum results, you need to spend a lot of time running tests and optimizing every aspect of your campaign. This takes a lot of time and effort, but for those with a large email list, the increase in conversions is worth it.

For those of you who don’t have a lot of time and effort to spend on email marketing, I recommend that you hire an agency to help you, or start by attacking the low hanging fruit of email marketing.

Look at the Stats

I wouldn’t put this on here if I didn’t speak with people on a regular basis who think they can fly email marketing by the seat of their pants. You don’t know what converts your subscribers until you have tested, tested again, and tested some more to confirm the results. What you do on other media (i.e. TV, radio, print, or search) isn’t guaranteed to work in email. Spending just a few minutes looking at the results of a campaign a week after it was sent can help you get a feeling for what works and what doesn’t — even if you aren’t running comprehensive email marketing tests.

Fewer Images

Your favorite brand sends you awesome, trendy emails that typically consist of a bunch of images and no HTML. While it may work great for them, chances are that it won’t for you. Take another step out of the conversion process for your subscribers and build your message with more HTML and fewer images. At a bare minimum, keep your calls to action as text so they are visible even if your email arrives without images enabled.

A/B Testing

I’m sure it sounds intimidating, but it really isn’t. An A/B test can be as simple as building an email and sending it to half of your list with one subject line and the other half of your list with another subject line. Check the statistics a week later and see which version had a higher open rate.

Learn more about A/B testing email marketing.

Deliverability

Monitor the delivery of your emails to make sure they are getting into the inbox. If more than 5% of your messages are being blocked or moved to the junk or spam folder, you have a problem. Work with your email service provider or agency to identify the cause and formulate a strategy to fix it or improve your reputation.

Learn more about message delivery and deliverability.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to optimizing email marketing. If you’re ready to dive in deeper, I suggest you read these earlier posts from our staff.

Seven Steps to Growing Revenue From Email Marketing

Email Marketing Is Changing – Don’t Get Left Behind

Tracking Email Marketing Revenue Generation and Conversions

7 Ways to Increase Email Marketing Conversions in 2011

Image provided by iMaffo on Flickr.