Wow, what a day we had at the Adestra Spring Email Summit last week! We were thrilled to see how many people turned up and participated in what we consider to be one of our best events yet.

The breakout sessions have had some great feedback, so I thought I’d take a moment to share the main take-aways from the sessions I headed up:

Automation and Personalisation

As marketers, we are all faced with huge time constraints, so why not look at ways to make things that little bit easier and free up your time for other things? Automating your campaign processes is key here. But what can we automate?

Sign up forms, trigger emails and the customer journey – Why not add some code behind your website sign-up forms that will automatically trigger an email to welcome new customers? Sending the welcome email at the point of engagement is vital in promoting your brand and striking whilst the iron is hot. You could add a preference centre as well, to ask your contact what they really want to hear about. This first email is also a great opportunity to tell people how often they can expect to hear from you.

Engaging your contacts on a customer journey is a great way to remove the manual processes that often underpin our campaigns. It also means your contacts can rely on regular mails that are relevant to them, and they are more likely to be engaged with.

XML feeds – Do you find yourself replicating copy from your website for your email? If so, why not take a load off and include some crafty XML feeds in your email that will pull in real time, up to date information from your site? Including a Twitter feed in your email is also a great way of creating a buzz around your brand and encourages people to engage with you.

Personalised content – Telling people what they want to hear is intrinsic to having them read your email and therefore engage with your content. Take a look at this shining example of using conditional content to personalise your email per contact.

Effective Newsletter Design

More and more emails are being delivered into the inbox. So how can you make yours stand out for all the right reasons?

Keep it above the fold – You have approximately 200px at the top of your email to impress the recipient, so make it count. Think about your key information and call to action and make sure it’s the first thing people see. If you’re a MessageFocus client, this is a great place to use the heat-map functionality, to see where people are clicking in your email and test link placement.

Image Vs Text - Think about which email clients your mail is being opened in, and use client detection reporting to test and optimise for your most relevant email clients. It’s also important to consider ‘images off’ in clients such as Outlook; how can you ensure your message comes across before images are downloaded? Text! Make sure your content can be read easily and is not hidden within images by using text for the most important bits. Make sure you’re using Alt tags behind images to encourage people to download them. Also, make sure you’re not just using stock images – make them relevant!

Make sure your email is legal – Including your company information and a working unsubscribe is a legal requirement so make sure that these are included somewhere in your content. Why not set up a boilerplate within your workspace so that this information is pulled into your email automatically?

Designing with Mobile in Mind

The swift rise of mobile usage has Marketers chomping at the bit to take advantage of this new ‘email on the go’ phase, but how’s best to go about it? Design is key to the success of your mobile email. Here are a few hints and tips to get you started.

Media queries – The ultimate way to make your email responsive for mobile. Using some clever coding, your email template can ‘rearrange itself’ dependent on the device that it is being opened on. So, your email will render for desktops when opened in that way but will shrink and re-jig when opened on a mobile. Genius! This is important technology that definitely warrants an update to your template.

Mobile responsive website – The best mobile emails are those that are backed up by a mobile responsive website. After all, what’s the point in maximising your email to encourage click through if the contact is lost after they reach your site?

Enhancing links – When viewing an email on your mobile, you don’t get the opportunity to scan over links as you do on a desktop, nor do you have the pinpoint accuracy of using a mouse. So what can we do? We can make our links more obvious and think about fat fingers! Ensuring links look like links is important here, and ensuring that they are not hidden within heaps of text is also a good place to start.

Scrolling – Research suggests that people are more inclined to view your email content if they don’t have to scroll from left to right but can view all the info using an up and down motion. Think about enhancing your email to facilitate this with a single column design.

I think that’s about it for now. Thanks again to all our clients who joined me at my breakout sessions. And if you’re an Adestra client, please do let myself or your Account Manager know should you have any queries at all.

As the official email partner, on June 26th and 27th we’ll be at Marketing Week Live 2013, on stand A133, ready to show you why our enterprise email platform, MessageFocus is the perfect tool for delivering results from your email marketing.

Adestra are proud to be the official email partner for Marketing Week Live 2013 and we’ve got some exciting things planned for the show.

Launch of the 2013 Adestra Subject Line Analysis Report

Your ammunition to write killer subject lines

Our 2013 subject line report analyses the keywords that directly influence the results on email performance across more metrics and sectors than ever before. And we’re giving all visitors to our stand access to the report where you’ll learn the results from 95k email campaigns.

Plus Parry Malm, Account Director at Adestra and author of the report, will present the key findings from the report on both days at the show.

Where: Email & Direct Marketing Theatre

When: Wednesday 26 June: 16:00 – 16:30 and Thursday 17 June: 12:40 – 13:10

What: What keywords work in subject lines – according to 2.2bn emails

“The 2013 subject study is truly ground-breaking. You’ll find out the effect your keywords have on your response rates. Having looked at 2.2bn emails over 95,000 campaigns, you’ll walk away with insights you can put into action as soon as you’re back in the office.  You’ll find out things like how “newsletter” can increase unsubscribes, “alert” spikes opens, and “sex” continues to sell, even in subject lines.” Parry Malm, Adestra

______________________________________________________________________________________

Join us for a spot of afternoon tea

We’re proud to be a respected, UK based Email Service Provider with clients all over the world.
We do this with award nominated, 24/7 customer service and advanced technology which is UK hosted and managed.

To celebrate our UK heritage, we’ll be serving afternoon tea ‘on the lawn’ on our stand A137 at 3pm each day. So if you love tea and delicious cakes, then pop along and see us.

RSVP today
______________________________________________________________________________________

Come and see us on stand A137 at Marketing Week Live

Choose Adestra and you’ll enjoy technology and customer service that’s second to none, giving you the resources you need to deliver successful email marketing that delivers results.

Since forming in 2004, we’ve worked hard to become one of the email marketing industry’s most respected names. We’re proud of our enterprise email platform, MessageFocus and our fantastic support services.

For more information on what Adestra are doing at Marketing Week Live, contact us on moreinfo@adestra.com

Last week Adestra sponsored the Professional Publishers Association (PPA) annual conference. We have a number of publishing clients and it’s a great opportunity to talk with some of them, and see what’s buzzing in their world.

Turns out that, as far as marketing goes, publishers are working on the same issues as most other industries: how to adapt to changing technologies and more sophisticated customers.

There were three big trends that I noticed, and I think they’re all applicable far beyond publishing:

Going mobile

The UK publishing industry is leading the way when it comes to mobile apps: British-produced apps account for upwards of 25% of the market^[1]. But that doesn’t mean all their websites or email communications are entirely mobile-friendly. Working on implementing responsive design, and tailoring content to platforms is still very much a work in progress.

New revenue streams

One of the key quotes I took away from the sessions was that, “retailers have become very good at being publishers, now it’s time for publishers to work on becoming better retailers.^[2]”  Affiliate marketing programs, curated content, and the ability to deliver premium offers to premium customers are all top of mind. Also big was ensuring you’re partnering with the right vendors to implement systems and analytics to execute and measure these new programs.

Developing a single customer view

Customers are engaging with publishers on a variety of platforms, sometimes many at the same time. So it’s important to deliver a consistent, tailored experience that defies hardware and location. This means a rock-solid brand image across media, and the ability to track customer behaviour and personalise content, no matter how they may access it.

credit: Scott Brinker, @chiefmartec

So what does all this mean for your digital marketing strategy?

It means ensuring you’re designing for a multi-screen reality, with responsive design, and clear ways to complete a call to action on whichever device your reader happens to have picked up.

It means ensuring promotions align tightly with brand, and all your communications, (including emails, landing pages, website, and apps, as well as offline ads and products) offer a consistent experience.

It means collecting and maintaining a clean, robust database of your customer and contact data, testing what resonates, and using those results to deliver relevant, personalised, and timely content.

And above all, it means collaborating with your marketing technology vendors to ensure this can be your reality, too.

^[1] PPA Publishing Futures Survey 2013
^[2] Marcus Rich, dmg media, during the “Publishing Futures: The Brand and Beyond” session

Unlocking the true value of your precious data is high on every marketers agenda. With phrases like “Big Data”, “modern marketing” and the steady stream of new ways to get your message out there, this may seem like a momentous task.

In his presentation at DataIQNOW! last week, Parry debunked the myths of “Big Data”, in favour of focusing on “Little Data”. This is the data that you can proactively use straight away.

In an email marketing context, there are three simple examples:

Open rates: If you increase your open rate, you’re giving yourself a chance. The main thing here is to have an effective subject line strategy – don’t view each email as a one-off, view them as part of a long-term branding campaign and ensure your subject lines build your brand on a sustainable basis.

Click through rates: Action speaks louder than words – structure your emails so they drive action. Consider the psychological state of your customers and create your emails so they drive people to take action.

Conversion rates: These days there’s no excuse to not be able to attribute revenue to email. Start tracking your conversions now. This way, you can see what variables within your control make you more money.

You can watch his 90 second synopsis of his presentation here >

It was a freezing cold day at the NEC at the UK’s number one event for online and multi-channel retailers. Last week, I presented a workshop at Internet Retailing Expo 2013.

The Adestra presentation was about “Email Conversion Optimisation”. You can download the presentation slides here, but first here are my key takeaways.

1. Getting your emails opened…

How do you optimise your emails for opens in the mobile era? The same points still apply for mobiles as they do for webmail and desktop email clients. Focus on optimising from name, subject line and the pre-header text and you’re emails will be crying out to be opened.

2. Getting your emails clicked on…
Think mobile. Mobile retail email open rates jumped by 50% over the holiday period last year with more and more people reading their emails on their mobile devices. But what about those who clicked on an email on a mobile phone? Think big buttons, simply structured emails and responsive design.

Read our blog on mobile open and click through rates for the retail sector here >

3. Getting your subscribers to convert…

What types of email boost conversion?Abandoned basket emails easily deliver the highest ROI – so why are less than half of retailers doing them? Yet only 19% of retailers have an automated abandoned basket recovery system, one of the easiest tools to implement and quickest to prove return – shows a sneak preview of new research from the Econsultancy/Adestra Email Marketing Industry Census 2013.

You can also see how data notifications (birthday emails, purchase reminders) that you can automate also deliver good ROI.

You can download the slides from the presentation here >

Adestra’s Conversion Capture

At Internet Retailing Expo, we launched our new abandoned basket functionality Conversion Capture. Conversion Capture, our new abandoned basket email technology. We’d love for you to see how it can make your website ROI skyrocket. So why not sign up for a demo?

www.adestra.com/conversioncapture

Adestra, the leading ESP in the publishing industry, is exhibiting at Publishing Expo 2013.  Adestra is also holding a presentation on email strategies for mobile.

Adestra has unrivalled experience in publishing and works with many leading brands including: Dennis Publishing, Informa Telecoms, Future Publishing, UBM, and Incisive Media. Adestra has many long term customers that keep using its MessageFocus email platform for many years as it simply works and delivers excellent results. Richard Ayerst, Head of Digital Marketing at Dennis Publishing, says:

“As a business we have lots of suppliers, and what you want from a supplier is least fuss with an easy working relationship – Adestra achieves this, the team produces results, plus nobody complains from my side. Job done.”

Looking for email advice? Book a 1:1 session with Adestra

Book a 1:1 email session with one of our email marketing experts. Whether you want talk about how mobile effects you or how you can save time with your email marketing, we can help.

Book a 1:1 session with the Adestra team here >

Adestra is also presenting a seminar at Publishing Expo on Tuesday 26th Feb:

Title: New email strategies for the mobile audience
Synopsis: Which, when you come to think of it, is pretty much everyone. Because we’re all mobile, right? Here’s how email marketing reaches that ever-on-the-move audience.

Date: 26th February
Time: 10:00am
Place: Digital & Multi-Publishing Theatre

SPEAKER: Parry Malm, Account Director, Adestra

I am sure you have some fantastic emails planned for 2013. Therefore, it is worth spending some time ensuring you maximise your open rates, so that as many recipients as possible read your great email! Here are a few quick and easy tips on maximising your open rates:

Launch time: Something that we are always asked is when the best time to launch an email campaign is. Though this is not an exact science, there are certain ways that you can determine when the best launch time will be. One way is using the timeline in the reporting section of MessageFocus. Aim to send just before peak reads were shown for your previous campaigns, as this indicates when people are most receptive to your emails. It is also worth seeing which days you get the most opens on, as this could indicate a better day to send your emails. Activity on your website can also be a good indicator for launch times. If certain times are busier, consider sending your emails around these times. Always remember to test, test and test again!

Subject lines: Improving your subject lines can really improve your open rates. Here at Adestra we have done extensive research, using a database of 932 million emails, into what subject lines work best for different business sectors. The best length of a subject line varies between these. For example, short subject lines get better open rates for the events and publishing sectors. Keywords used in subject lines also can have a real effect on open rates. In ecommerce, using “% off” or “sale” in the subject line will increase open rates, but using “coupon” will decrease them. This is something that your account manager can advise you on, by testing keywords and lengths of subject lines against the test database we used for this research. Give this a try and you are guaranteed to see a positive effect on your open rates!

Want to learn more about this?

Download our whitepaper:

Or listen to our webinar

Use a custom ‘From name’: the ‘From name’ is the name that appears in your recipients’ inbox. Using a custom ‘From name’ that your recipients recognise, mean that they are more likely to open your email. You can add this in the campaign options in MessageFocus, so it is a really quick way to improve your open rates.

Give these top tips a try and you are guaranteed to see an improvement in your open rates this year!

Yesterday we hosted our Email Marketing Intelligence Forum at the Leicester Square Penthouse. With a birds eye view of London we spent the afternoon discussing intelligent ways to use email marketing to drive results. There was lots to be learnt and here is what the Adestra table leaders took away from each discussion topic.

Conversion intelligence:

Using behaviour and customer journeys to drive revenue
So what did we learn about Conversion intelligence from our round table participants? That ‘conversion’ means very different things to different businesses! However, we can conclude that there is real need to make these conversions more frequent and more easily quantifiable. How do we do this? By using more targeted messaging and by using the reporting within MessageFocus to put together follow up and reminder campaigns. Adestra’s Conversion Capture was also at the forefront of the conversation and was unveiled as a great way of encouraging conversion when a basket or form has been abandoned by a contact. Automating messages to encourage people to go back to the submission is not only a great way of pushing them to conversion but also a great way to promote your brand.

Mobile intelligence:

Creating a mobile environment to engage the on-demand audience
The main theme that emerged from the mobile intelligence table was that having a mobile strategy is becoming inevitable and crucial, rather than a nice extra. Nearly all attendees had seen a marked increase in mobile opens this year and were either addressing this or beginning to. Approaches ranged from simplifying templates to make the most of smaller screen space, to implementing fully responsive media query templates. The main issues being faced were resources, knowledge gaps and maintaining advertising space in campaigns.

Engagement intelligence:

Getting smart with the data you have to drive results
Adding preference centres to your sign up process remains a highly effective way of collecting vital data. To avoid drop out keep the forms as short & simple as possible. We recommend using branching & check boxes. These are faster to complete & will provide the focused answers you require. Avoid free text boxes which will mess up your segmentation further down the line. Our Centaur case study for the National Home Improvement Show is a great example of how to use sign-up data to generate dynamic content. Preference centres can also be effective when linked to your unsubscribe process to combat the problem of blanket unsubscribes.

Data collection forms linked to Facebook pages & app downloads are a great way to organically grow your database. When someone takes the trouble to visit your Facebook page they’re obviously engaged & feeling pretty positive about your brand. This is a great time to request their email address. Link a pop-up to the page & turn those “likes” into actual customers/subscribers.

Parry’s introduction looked at how assumptions can damage results. It’s surprising how few marketers employ a testing strategy to inform their campaigns. We are still frequently asked what’s the best time to send my email? The answer is, whatever time your test indicates. Subject lines, send times & content can all be tested either in simple A/B split or multi-variant form. The results will provide you with hard facts & remove guess work.

Automation intelligence:

Reducing manual intervention to save you time and resource
The subject area of automation revealed that people generally fell into one of 3 pots, they currently aren’t doing any automation but would like to, they currently did a little but would like to do more, or they did a lot but would like to do more.

Two of the most popular topics relating to automation which came up throughout the day was welcome programmes – rather than just sending the one thank you for signing up email, convert it into a series, to help build a relationship with the recipient while they are warm. The second one was related to content automation, rather than having to duplicate content which is already on your website, use an XML feed to pull content from your website and populate an email.

Presentation: Marketing Week Live

Hazel Merlino

All round it was an excellent day enjoyed by all. Here is what two delegates had to say:

“Great event, I learn something new at each of these events!”

Future Publishing

“Great afternoon, I will take away a lot from the session and hope to use the knowledge from the Adestra team and other attendees in my own campaigns.”

Informa Exhibitions

If you would like to find out more about Adestra and our best practice events and service to our clients contact us.

When: 7th November 2012
Where: At your desk
Time: 11:15am

The mobile channel has produced a culture of information on-demand. Publishers have responded to this by creating apps, QR codes and mobile friendly websites to make sure that their audience can gain access to subscriptions and content anytime anywhere. The question though is, has this necessarily made us more responsive as an audience? In truth it seems the opposite.

From personal experience I tend to think not. I find I have become worse at actioning emails since I got a smart phone. If I am out and about and I get an email I’ll read it immediately because I can. In the few moments I have to read it I’ll either move on from it in a few seconds with no thought or make a mental note to go back to it on my computer. This, according to recent email marketing think tanks is quite a trend. The idea that recipients use their mobile inbox to scan incoming messages, flag messages they want to action later and delete what they don’t intend to act upon. This is called “Mobile Triage”.

One of our deliverability partners, Litmus, have recently publicised that only 3.3% of users have viewed a single email in more than one environment (for example mobile, desktop and webmail). This means that 97% of emails are only read once! Litmus also say that 38% of all emails are now opened on mobile and recipients who have recently read email on their mobile will do so again about 45% of the time.

What does this tell us?
- You only really have one chance to make recipients act!
- Catering for the mobile audience is no longer an option – it is a must!

What else do we know about the mobile environment?
- You only have a short time to make them act in this environment as they may be on the move.
- You need to make it easy for them to act in this environment given mobile data coverage.

In a 20 minute workshop at the Specialist Media Online Event next week I’ll be taking the above into consideration and looking at how to boost action and response in this environment. You’ll learn the following:

1. When publishers should push content to this audience for ultimate action
2. How publishers should push content to this audience to boost response
3. How to follow up action and in action to ensure conversion

The workshop will be led by Marketing Executive, Serena Elston:

In order to register for the workshop you’ll need to register for the free to attend online event. The Specialist Media Online Event is the place for specialist media businesses and niche publishers to start conversations with other media owners and expert suppliers that could change your business (view the attendee list).The two day live workshop presentation series on the 6-7th November is the ideal opportunity to learn, engage and network from the comfort of your own desk. You’ll also receive exclusive access to industry reports and resources on stand.

There’s a revolution underway in B2B and considered purchase markets which Adestra are proud to be a part of. And the people leading this revolution will come together only once this year: at FUNNEL, the Econsultancy-led event for the senior sales and marketing pioneers of B2B.

For the first time, the sales and marketing teams are getting together to define better ways to turn awareness into interest and interest into revenue – and to track the entire cycle.

Adestra at FUNNEL 2012

And the best subject line ever is (and how it will boost your lifecycle marketing programmes)

Date: Tuesday 13th November
Time: 14:00 – 14:20
Track: Attract
Every customer and prospect touch point is key… and much can be done with complex integrations, lead nurturing and lifecycle programmes. But don’t forget about the building blocks of your email campaigns! In this session, you will delve into the extensive research Adestra have undertaken into subject lines specifically for the B2B sector – including finding out how long it should be, and why you can say “Free” and avoid spam filters. This research is based upon 932 million emails – with a sample of that size, this best practice advice can’t be ignored.

Or pop along to our stand

Our B2B experts will be on stand at FUNNEL, ready to chat or answer any questions that you have. Come and find us in the exhibition area.

To find out more about Econsultancy FUNNEL, please visit the Econsultancy website