Customer Driven Email Templates and Color Themes

Is the choice of email templates/color themes used in your mailers customer driven?

Why not let your customers pick an email template and color theme from a set of available themes when they register/optin to your marketing campaign? It could be something similar to how blogger lets you choose a template and color theme for your blog. Your mailer program could then leverage this to send out visually personalized email.

A customer driven email template/color theme should bump up your open rates too, especially since your visually personalized email has a higher chance of recognition during a preview pane scan of emails.

List Poisoning

What if Mr. Smith your competitor, goes to your opt in page and signs up as Mr. Idiot by entering one/some of your potential prospects email addresses and your automated mailer program send's out a highly personalized unsolicited email addressing them as 'Dear Mr. Idiot'?

Welcome to the murky world of 'List Poisoning'. Not only do you get flagged as a spammer, but your company would have earned a set of die hard enemies, who'd do anything and everything to tell everyone who the real idiot is.

Another ploy of list poisoners is to optin using mulitple spam trap email addresses to get you flagged as a spammer. Often the optin's originate from the same ip address in quick succession.

Preventing List Poisoning: Unfortunately you might not be able to prevent someone entering incorrect data in your opt in page, but you could always quarantine the opt-in list, review/validate it for data accuracy, and then send out a confirmation email before actually adding them to your mail list.

This would affect your opt in rate adversely, but sacrificing on a few not too eager prospects might be worth it if you can prevent making a set of seriously annoyed prospects. It's all about choice.

Optimal Send Time of Your Email

When is the best time to send out your promotional email?

I'm sure you would have done your research and know the latest recommended weekly optimal email send time slots, but so does every other e-marketer and SPAMMER. Infact your email could end up competing with scores of other commerical email's send at the same time slot.

So why not make this process customer driven and give your customer the choice of 'opting their preferred email send time'? You could find their preferred time in the following ways

1. Ask your customer when they subscribe (Direct)
2. Conduct an email/web survey to find out (Direct)
3. Find previous mail open time from email open metrics (InDirect)

So you'd have to add another segment criteria based on 'preferred send time' to ensure your emails reach your customers at their preferred time.

Marketing through Customer Blogs

As an eMarketer, have you tried to reach out to blogs written by your customers/prospects as a fellow blogger? Bloggers just love, adore and connect with people who take an active interest in their blogs. And I'm sure as a marketer it's your constant endeavour to get customers to love, adore and listen to you.

Here are 5 tips to engage with your customers/prospects who blog

1. Setup a corporate blog yourself
2. Read/Subscribe to your customer blogs
3. Post constructive comments on your customer blogs
4. Vote their blogs as one of your favourites
5. Provide useful blogger widgets, templates and tips

Customer blogs provide you the marketer a great opportunity to undestand/target your customer better. With the number of bloggers increasing by the day, maybe it's time for you to leverage this and add another dimension to your customer driven internet marketing campagin.

Reputation Filtering

Ever wondered why your carefuly crafted email devoid
of any 'spammy phrases' still fails to reach it's recipients?

According to a report published by ReturnPath 

"83% of the time Sender Reputation is the root cause for Email non Delivery"

       ISP's use eMail firewall/gateway servers like
BrightMailand IronPort to do reputation filtering
upfront before content filtering. The table below 
indicates the amount of reputation versus content
filtering done by ISP's

The results of the study indicate that reputation is the most
valuable asset of an eMarketer and needs to be safegaurded at all costs. So please think twice beforeyou buy a list or SPAM someone.

Worried about your reputation?
Find out if you have been black listed at  http://lookup.uribl.com/

Previewing your Subject and From Lines

So why is previewing the Subject and From Lines so important?

• The From line is what recipients use to determine whether to delete an email.
• The Subject line is what motivates people to actually open the email

All mail clients donot render the from and subject lines in the same way. The table below illustrates the differences in major mail clients.

So you could significantly improve your mail open rates, if you were to preview/test your mail in different email clients before sending it out. This handy tool could be a life saver.