MustangList.com Blog

Sending your emails through an ESP like Mustang List is a good start to better deliverability, but there are a few things you can do on your own to improve your chances of getting into your customers’ inboxes.

Be Clean. First, remove bounces. Invalid email addresses and emails that just can’t make it to their mark make you look bad to the ISPs and costs you money. Mustang List automatically removes your consistent bounces for you.

Second, ask your members to Re-Opt in. We all know that you need to have explicit permission to send marketing emails. But what if you have an old list and you know that your opt-in policy was not very stringent in the past? Just because a member of your list hasn’t unsubscribed does not mean they want to hear from you. Many people can’t be bothered to unsubscribe no matter how easy it is—it’s always easier to delete an email without opening it. It sounds kind of crazy, but asking your members to opt-in again will clean your list of people who are taking up space and costing you money; it will increase your open rates; and it will help to protect you from subscribers who are more likely to hit the spam button in their email client.

Here are two ideas: You can send a dedicated email asking if your subscriber still wants to remain on the list and provide a link for them to click if they want to stay on the list. Alternatively, you can just provide a link at the top of a regular email with a notice like: “Please click here to confirm you wish to continue receiving communications from us.” Stop sending to the members who don’t re-opt in. If this sounds too aggressive to you, then segment the members who didn’t opt-in again and send to them much less frequently, being sure to include the message to opt-in again and remove any chronic non-responders.

Be recognizable. Make sure you use a “From Name” that your subscribers know. Usually this will be your company’s name. Recipients need to know who you are because most people don’t open emails where they don’t recognize the sender.

Be interesting. Your readers have an expectation as to the subject matter and offers you’ll send them in emails. Don’t stray too far off from this expectation. Why? Readers won’t use their spam buttons as often if the emails they receive are interesting and relevant

Be registered. Register, or “authenticate” your domain name with the ISPs. When you send email, ISPs check your identity (domain name) as a measure against spam. With authentication, your identity (domain name) can be verified quickly and the ISPs know you are a legitimate sender: it proves to the ISPs that you are who you say you are—and if there’s someone else out there saying they’re you, they’ll know which sender is legitimate. If your domain is not hosted with Mustang List, contact your service provider for assistance. If Mustang List hosts your domain, we’ve done this for you.

Don’t be spammy. Watch your subject lines and make sure they don’t look like spam. ALL CAPS, overuse of punctuation (!!!!), and certain terms can be red flags for spam. Free offers are good and the use of the word free won’t necessarily be a red flag, but FREE OFFER!!! is shouting spam.

1. Decide what kind of mailing you want to send. Do you want to send email based on the sign-up date, or do you want to send a birthday email? An anniversary email? Make sure you have dates in your subscriber data.
2. Create a Recurring Message.
3. Schedule the Recurring Message and make it Active.
4. Date fields you can use as triggers for mailing in Mustang List are Sign-up, Birthday, and Anniversary. You can send 0-13 days Before, On, or After these dates.
5. To send a test of the message to yourself before the message is Active and sending, enter a test email in the field provided.
6. Once the recurring message is scheduled and Active, the email will send automatically to all new and old subscribers who fit the “rules” of the schedule.

Please see the Mustang List Knowledge Base for detailed instructions.

How do you strengthen your relationship with your customer by speaking to them one-on-one? How do you send them the right message at the right time? How do you increase your brand value in the eyes of your customer? One way is with Date-Triggered Mailings. A date-triggered mailing is an email that sends itself automatically based on a specified date in the customer profile. It’s an easy way to target your customers with a relevant message.

Life-cycle emails.
Life cycle marketing exploits the idea of timing in order to reach customers in a more personalized manner. It’s about communicating with your customers one at a time. It takes into account an action and sends an email to the customer based on that action. For example, using the sign-up date as the trigger (or action), you can send a welcome email the day after the sign-up date to your new subscribers.

In fact, based on the sign-up date, you can send a series of emails to new subscribers while they’re new and their interest in your company is high. Within a few days or a week after the sign up you could send: an email asking for updated profile information (especially if you collect sign-ups through a sign up box); an email with more information about your company; or an incentive email to make a first purchase on your website or to take some action to become more engaged with your company.

Birthday and Anniversary emails.
Special events in your customers’ lives are a great opportunity for you to stay in touch, send a relevant and well-timed email, and offer a special discount or incentive you might not be able to send list-wide. One often sees “birthday clubs” in the food service industry where members are sent a coupon for a free item in participating restaurants. Birthday clubs can also be very effective for building your list, too—signing up to the email list can be incentivized by the promise of a birthday “gift.” If a birthday club doesn’t fit into your business model, think about all the other events that can trigger a mailing, for example: anniversaries, graduation dates, the expiration of a membership, or the closing date of a new home purchase.

For birthdays and anniversaries, you might want to send an email on the actual date or even a few days in advance if you’re including a special offer to help celebrate the event. You might have a series of emails around a graduation date where you send before and after the event offering both congratulations as well as relevant deals.

For time-sensitive dates, such as expirations, you’ll want to send a notification email before the date passes. And some events, such as mailing on the anniversary of the purchase of a new home, might just be used to stay in touch and say hello.

Date-triggered mailing is a great addition to your email enterprise. It’s also one of the easy to use features of Mustang List—all you need are some subscribers and dates, and you can get started right away.

Your email sign-up page is not just a way to collect opt-in information; it’s an opportunity to engage in a dialogue with your future subscribers. You can use your email sign up page to promote your email program and your subscribers can use the page to sign up and indicate their preferences. Clearly communicating the type of email communication you send can increase your customers’ trust in your business, leading to increased sign-ups. By carefully considering the type and amount of information you collect, you offer some control to your customers in regards to the information they will receive from you. And by collecting better data, you can better target your subscribers, leading to higher open rates.

Things to consider when building a great email sign-up page:

• Make it interesting and/or fun. Promote the email publication as a stand-alone product. Communicate the value it will have to your customers if they sign up. Remember that you can use this page as a landing page if you promote your email publication on third party websites, etc.
• Provide a sample newsletter. Have a full graphic version of the newsletter that potential subscribers can view. This sample should be the real deal showing everything from the subject line at the top of the newsletter to the unsubscribe links at the bottom. This is important: it provides a better picture (literally) of what your customers are signing up for and it legitimizes your email communications by showing that you play by the rules (you have unsubscribe links, etc.).
• Link to archived newsletter content. Sharing archived newsletter content on your website will demonstrate to your customers your commitment to providing valuable information in your emails.
• Incentivize the sign-up. Mention that in the first email you will receive a promo code for X% off, or something similar.
• Keep it simple. Only ask for the information you need and intend to use. An overly long sign-up page can lead to abandonment of the sign-up process.
• Email change of address. Make sure you allow customers to update their email addresses.
• Use drop down menus wherever possible. Using drop down menus for things like city, state, and country will ensure you get responses that you can use for targeting and will eliminate misspellings, abbreviations, etc. that you cannot target with.
• Validate the information. Validate zip codes to ensure they’re real. Validate email addresses. Validate everything you can.
• Do more with less information. If you have your programmers populate fields on the backend you can ask for less information from your customers but still get what you need to work with. For example, from the zip code, programmers can auto-populate fields for city and state.
• Clearly state the frequency of the emails you send (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). Better yet, let your customers choose the frequency they prefer.
• Provide choice. Not every customer wants to read every message. If you can provide several different email publications, let them choose which interests them the most. Give your customers what they want and your value will increase in their eyes. Remember, you can use your newsletters to cross sell your other email subscriptions.
• Clear way to unsubscribe. If the sign-up page is also a preference/profile page from which subscribers unsubscribe, make sure it’s very clear how to unsubscribe.
• Be polite. Make sure you have a Thank You/Confirmation page that appears after customers submit the sign-up page. Thank them for signing up and let them know what will happen next (they will receive a welcome email in the next couple hours, they will begin receiving email in the next week or so, etc.—whatever applies).

Anchor tags can serve as a sort of table of contents your readers can use to jump down to the information that interests them.

To set up anchor tags, you need to do two things. You need to insert the anchor next to the content you want to link to (the Anchor Point) and you need to create the links that go to the Anchor Points.

1. You add the anchor tags when you are creating a message or adding a message. In the workspace for where you create or paste your message, you’ll see the WYSIWYG html editor.
2. Go to the portion of the email where the content you want to link to begins. For example, if you have a “This Month’s Features” table of contents box in the upper portion of your email, you might have a “Tip of the Month” section that you want to link to from the “table of contents.” Scroll down your email and go to the beginning of the tip. Place your cursor at the beginning of the paragraph or sentence you want to link to (where the tip begins, in this example).
3. Click on the icon that looks like a boat anchor.
4. A pop-up screen will appear for you to “Insert/edit anchor” with a field for you to enter the Anchor name. Enter the name for the anchor: for example, you could enter “tip” as the name of the anchor for the “Tip of the Month” section. You cannot have two anchors with the same name—they must be unique. Click Insert.
5. You will now see a tiny box with an anchor in it in your email where you placed your cursor. This is the Anchor Point your link will go to when clicked. Don’t worry, this icon is not visible in the final email.
6. Now you need to create the link that will go to this anchor point. Highlight, or select, the words you want to be the link. For example, highlight “Tip of the Month” in the “This Month’s Features” table of contents.
7. After highlighting your text, click on the icon for creating a hyperlink (it looks like a piece of chain). If it is not clickable, try highlighting your text again—the icon is only clickable if text is highlighted.
8. After clicking the hyperlink icon, a pop up box for “Insert/edit link” will appear with a field for you to enter the Link URL. Enter the name of the anchor point you created in step 4 above with a # in front of it: for example, you would enter #tip. Be careful to enter the name of the anchor exactly as you created it. It is case sensitive. Do not change the option “open link in same window.” Click Insert.
9. You will see that the text you had highlighted is now hyperlinked: it’s blue and underlined.

Create other anchor points and tags as described in steps 2-8 above. After creating your anchor tags, click Save Changes and Preview. When the Preview screen opens, test your anchor tag links and make sure they go to the right places in your text.

You work really hard to get a reader to open an email: you think of the perfect offer, the perfect subject line, and with the best of luck, your subscriber opens your email. Don’t risk losing them once they open your email by making them scroll to find the information that interests them.

If your emails are jam-packed with information and tend to be a bit long (maybe you only send once monthly or you just have a lot of information to communicate) you might want to consider using anchor tags. Anchor tags allow your readers to jump right to the information they want to read and skip the information of less interest to them.

You can implement anchor tags in many ways. You can use them as a sort of a table of contents for an email newsletter. If you send out a newsletter comprised of regular features (such as a Tip of the Month, Calendar, etc.), you can create a newsletter “highlights” box with anchor tags linking to the articles for each of the features. Or, if you write an introductory paragraph in your emails, you could mention the features of the current issue and use anchor tags to link directly to the content further down in the email.

Whatever you do, remember the purpose of anchor tags is to provide readers with a quick way to link to the content further down the page. They should be short and appear above the fold—remember, you’re trying to cut down on the need to scroll.

Maybe your creative could use a face-lift. Maybe your offers have become stale and predictable. Don’t underestimate the difference an update to your email design can make. With a fresh design and some new offers, you might find you can keep your new members engaged longer and you can re-activate some members that seem to be losing interest.

If you tend to offer the same kind of special from email to email, try mixing it up a little. See how a Free Shipping offer performs. Try a dollar off with minimum purchase offer vs. giving a percent off the total. Changing the nature of the deal can catch your reader’s eye and elicit a click-through. If your emails are not offer-based, but are rather content-based, work on having clear subject lines that give readers a hint as to what’s in store for them if they open the email.

If your email design hasn’t changed in the last year or so, consider a redesign. You could freshen up the color palette and adjust the font or it could be a complete overhaul—changing the concept and even the name of the publication as well as the design.

Another thing to consider is re-working the layout. For an email that is text-heavy, you might try putting the content on your website so you can shorten the email by providing links to the “full story” on your website. If your email uses a lot of graphics, make sure that the graphics are not pulling the eye away from your main message.

Come up with a few options and test the different designs and/or offers to random samples of your list. See which emails get more clicks and trigger more members to spend time and money on your website after clicking. If you’re testing creative, you’ll probably want to keep the subject lines the same, so all else is equal.

And remember, since you’re trying to get members who haven’t recently opened emails to open this new email and see the new design, you’ll want to carefully strategize the subject line. You might even want to target the least active members with the new creative and an extra-special offer, whereas for your more engaged members, you simply ask them to check out your new design. You’ll have to decide which approach is more likely to be successful with your customers. Whatever you do, try a few different things with different subsets of members so you have some results to compare.

Another way to breathe new life into an email list with a fair number of inactive members is to send targeted emails. You can target a sub-set of subscribers on your list that have something in common or to whom you want to present the same offer—they purchased from your website in the last week, or they live in the same city, or they have the same profession, for example. Normally the offer in a targeted email is something especially relevant to the targeted group of subscribers and might not even be something you’d offer list-wide.

You have probably already collected information on your sign-up form that you can use for targeting. Information like: Date subscribed to list, Zip Code, City, State, Country, Date of Birth, Source of sign up (web page, convention, trade show, etc.). But you might find you need to collect more information from your subscribers to effectively market to them.

State may not make a difference in the products you market, but gender might. You might want to market according to your subscribers’ hobbies or preferred vacation destinations. You can make categories for the different types of products you sell and ask your customers to choose the products (categories) that most interest them. Realtors can make categories for the number of bedrooms or sizes of houses for sale and ask customers to select the options (categories) that fit what they’re looking for. Once you have this useful information you can send emails to your customers that are relevant and valuable to them.

Here are some ideas for getting your subscribers to update their profiles to give you the additional information you need to market more effectively:

• Opt-in Form. Start with a good opt-in form—don’t ask for too much information, but ask for enough. And only ask for information you intend to use.
• Contests. Hold a contest and post a contest entry form on your website. Link to this form from an email promoting the contest and require that the form be filled out entirely in order to enter the contest. Go ahead and require all of the fields—it’s not too much to ask for information in exchange for an entry into the contest. Make sure this new information is passed onto your email database through APIs or otherwise and that it can update the current email subscribers in the database with the additional information. If you promote the contest on your website (not just exclusively to your email list) remember that though you can ask for an opt-in to your email newsletter, you cannot require the opt-in in order to enter the contest.
• Send Periodic Info Update Emails. After the initial welcome email, send an email soliciting more information. Some kind of message that engages the customer to help you know what information to send them: “let us know what you’re interested in so we can send you emails you want to open,” for example. This can be especially useful if you don’t collect subscriber info upon sign-up (when you use a subscribe box on your home page, for example).
• Customize the Content. If you can customize the content of the email based on your subscribers’ preferences, let them know! Put a note near the content that can be customized mentioning that the information displayed can be customized by city, state, preference, etc. next time they receive the email if they update their preferences. Provide a link to your subscriber update page with this note.

In the last blog, we looked at how you can try to re-engage subscribers who are not opening your emails. But what about subscribers whose responses are diminishing, but whom you haven’t ‘lost’ yet?

Adjust Your Frequency

What is the point where the return on your emails (and the value of your emails) diminishes because you have fatigued your customers by sending email too frequently? For the most part you’ll have to determine this on your own: there is no one answer to how many emails are too many vs. how many are effective. But here are a few places you can begin:

1. Since frequency is in the eye of the beholder, one strategy for dealing with this issue is to let your customers decide how frequently they receive email from you. Let them sign up for weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly emails. You can segment them into groups or categories based on this preference. You can either create separate publications for each of these preferences (for example, combining two weeks’ worth of weekly emails for your bi-weekly subscribers or a months’ worth of emails into one email for your monthly subscribers) or you can just send your regular weekly email that falls on the week your monthly subscribers get their once-a-month email (and the weeks when your bi-weekly subscribers get their bi-weekly emails). It’s much easier to manage sending at different frequencies than it seems.
2. If you think you might be over-sending to your customers, then try sending less often. Before you commit to a new schedule, test the diminished frequency on a portion of your list. Segment a sizeable portion of your list and for the next month or so, send to them less frequently than you normally do. Whatever period of time you decide to use as the test period, make sure that by the end of the test period, you’ve sent a few emails so you can better measure the effect reduced frequency has on open rates. You could find out that you can send less often but have the same number of emails opened as when you send more often—because you gain back some customers that had stopped opening email they perceived as coming too often.
3. Are you risking fatiguing your customers who receive more than one of your email publications? If you mail to several lists, check to see how many subscribers are on both lists. Consider the effect the frequency of your mailings has on the single subscriber who receives all (or many) of your different email publications. If there is a lot of list overlap, or duplicate subscribers, you might need to reconsider the frequency with which you send your emails to these subscribers. If you can’t adjust your frequency, then consider alternating the emails the duplicate subscribers receive so that they don’t get overloaded.

Communicate with your customers and solicit their feedback as to the frequency with which they prefer to receive your emails. Test different sending frequencies. And above all, when you make adjustments, pay attention to your open rates—especially the open rates among customers that are not freshly added—so you can measure the effect of your efforts at re-vitalizing your list.

In the last blog, one of the list building strategies was to look at your current subscriber list for opportunities to re-engage inactive members. These subscribers know your brand and can be relatively easy to convert into more active members.

Over the next few blogs, we’ll consider a few strategies for re-activating members.

Engage the Non-Responders

People who automatically delete your emails without opening them—but won’t unsubscribe from your list—take up space and cost you money when you send to them. They also drive down your open rates.

Remember there’s a period of engagement after a customer signs up for your list. It’s within this period that they are most likely to respond to your offers. If after a month or so from signing up for your list the subscriber has not opened one of your emails, it’s not likely you’ll receive a response from this subscriber later down the road.

Try sending a “Last Chance Special Offer” email to subscribers who haven’t opened an email in the last 2 or 3 months (or whatever time frame is appropriate for your business model and your sending frequency). Delete from your list anyone who doesn’t open this email. If they don’t want your extra special offer (make sure the nature of the deal is clear in the subject line) and haven’t opened an email from you in 3 months, they probably don’t want to hear your message.

Alternatively, you could send an email to these subscribers asking if they want to remain on your list—reminding them of the value of your email communications and requesting any feedback as to what they’d like to see in your emails. A few years ago, MINI sent me an email asking if I was ‘bored’ with their emails (I hadn’t opened any in several weeks). The catchy subject line (I think the word ‘bored’ was in the subject) got me to open that email and for a while, at least, I opened their subsequent emails. Delete subscribers who don’t open this email and enjoy the slightly increased open rates.

For subscribers who do respond to an effort at re-engagement, you might consider targeting them separately from your regular list for a period of time. Now that you have them engaged, carefully get them back with the program. You might send email to them a little less frequently. You could also present them with some special deals that you might not be able to offer list-wide, but that you can offer on a more limited basis. This might require a little more strategy on your part, but it’s well worth the effort.