Laying the Groundwork for Email Marketing

In a recent post we looked at how you should identify the top 20% of your customer base, and then treat them like VIP customers in your email marketing strategy.

So how do you approach the development of this strategy?

Think Creative

It's time to get creative. Think about how you've served the needs of this top 20%. Think about how you have been creative in solving their problems.

Then write up a case study of each successful project. Pick something you can be proud of, and detail it as a success story. If you can, ask for testimonials from happy clients.

Keep a Record

Keep a log or diary of successful techniques you have used, articles you have read that have improved your delivery, and any client questions or problems you find yourself answering repeatedly.

Meet The Press

Begin to court the press. Journalists often frequent chat rooms and forums. Get in there and start talking about your company and answering questions. Get out to the local press and present your firm as a solver of business problems. If you have contacts or colleagues in the know, ask for details about anyone they know in trade publications, and start to play the game. Write letters to magazines, attend shows and events. Get used to representing your firm in the media.

Be a Winner

If there are any competitions in your field that you can enter because you have the ability, do it. Even if the world at large might not think a win for "best T-shirt design" is Earth-shattering news, let people know about it. Everything that keeps your name in people's minds is helpful. Winners do business.

As you develop these items over time, you are assembling a library of resources that you will be able to draw on in your email marketing efforts -- questions you can answer and stories you can tell that will connect with your audience. Keep a record of what you have developed, ready for use when you need it.

This is basic groundwork to make sure that your email messages contain something of value. Next we'll look at delivering on the strategy.

Top Five E-mail Marketing Mistakes

Before we continue to explore the benefits of a good e-campaign, we need to look at some cardinal rules, or rather the breaking of those rules.

When companies decide that they are going to use email to market their products and services many of them make the classic mistake of thinking it will be a cinch. Without careful thought as to what will actually go in the emails, you will be sending the electronic equivalent of those shiny junk envelopes that customers toss in the garbage.

The top five mistakes companies make when using email to market are...

1. Poor content. You read magazines, right? The average glossy magazine now has about a third of its weight taken up by advertising. But we tolerate that. Why? Well, because the other stuff is both interesting and readable. Great content and advertising work well together. So, take a look at your firm's emails, and get harsh. Is the content likely to keep the customer reading? Is it brief but well-written? Does it offer an insight into your product or offer a solution to their problems? Take the time to look at what your marketing guys have done with the emails and make sure that they're worth reading. Otherwise, scrap them and start again.


2. Bad SPG. Spelling and grammar must be perfect. This cannot be over-exaggerated. Put yourself in your customer's shoes (you know, the guys who pay for your groceries). If someone sent you an email that looked like it was written by an eight year old, would you respect them?


3. Multi-media swamping. Don't overload your emails with graphics. These take time to load on customer's computers, and they're often filtered anyway. They also distract from your message. Don't waste your customer's time, or they won't give you theirs.


4. Be allowed. This is really simple. Make sure that your recipients have agreed for you to send them email. If they haven't, it will be tagged as spam. Once your customers consider your message as spam, it is spam. Period.


5. Try, try again. Too many businesses do too many things without thinking first, and emailing is one of them. Test out your email marketing on a small group of customers first. Don't screen them; make it as blind as possible. Choose twenty customers, and test with them. You'll know who opened what and who responded. This is a great way to test the quality of your strategy.

This raises the point of having a strategy. We'll be covering what an e-campaign actually looks like soon. But just remember one thing: what's bad for your customer is bad for your business.

Developing an e-campaign

Email has not died yet. It is still an effective form of communication, even in the age of Facebook and instant messaging. What many businesses don't realize, however, is that email is a marketing tool that can be used to generate business. And I'm not talking about spam, which is rightly vilified, and will eventually be wiped out or at least severely limited.

What I am talking about is using email to target your customers in an intelligent, research-led way. Many businesses still think that email is just a quicker version of snail mail. They are missing out on a highly effective addition to their e marketing arsenal.

Before you can use email as a proper, effective marketing tool, as part of an e-campaign rather than just a shotgun approach, you need to consider a basic concept in marketing...

The cream of the crop

First of all, don't even bother to use email as a marketing tool until you have identified the top 20 percent of your customer base. These are your best customers. The old 80/20 principle, whereby twenty percent of your customers provide you with eighty percent of your profits, means that you should identify your top 20%, and focus your email campaign on them alone. So identify these people.

And then:

• Consider how they became your customers. Was it via referrals, through a trade show, or through networking?
• Decide just what it is that makes those customers profitable. Why are they your top 20% and what lessons can you learn to help you attract more like them?
• What do you need to tell those customers, or what do they need to know to buy your services? What information do they require?
• What is the best way to reach those customers?

When you know who your top 20% are, make a solemn promise to yourself and your business that you are going to treat them like VIPs, and that your e-campaign will recognize them as the bedrock for future growth.

Future articles will focus on what action you must take to cultivate your 20% list effectively, and develop an e-campaign that will drive sales and build your firm's reputation.

How Long Should You Keep an Email?

I don't like to delete emails. It's true, I'm the guy that can find something that was sent to me long before Britney Spears married Kevin Federline.

This means that my inbox is loaded with tens of thousands of emails, some of which are from as far back as 2004.

This prompted the topic to come up recently at our weekly office meeting. How long should you keep an email? A week? A month? A year? Forever?! What if you delete it and then you need it again for legal purposes? Once it's gone, it's gone forever.

The discussion quickly escalated to what type of policy a company should have regarding saving emails. Up to this point, CWS has had a loose policy that we keep a copy of all email communication with customers, but delete all those emails from your brother-in-law. You know, the ones that you shouldn't be getting at work in the first place.

But if your company policy is to keep a copy of every email, how do you monitor whether this is actually being done and support mailboxes that become very very large? This brought up an interesting discussion... Does your company have a policy on deleting or saving emails? If so, what is it and how is it enforced?

RapidNewsletter Gets New Features

This morning we pushed out some enhancements and fixes to our RapidNewsletter service. In case you haven't heard, RapidNewsletter is our full-circle email marketing solution. It allows you to effectively reach those who matter the most to your business -- your customers. Research has shown that a quality email newsletter can be one of the most effective ways to maintain customer relationships.

With RapidNewsletter, you can design and execute an email marketing campaign from beginning to end -- build and edit email lists, create newsletters with articles and images, run detailed tracking reports, and much more! We designed RapidNewsletter to drive traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, solidify customer retention, and strengthen customer relations.

Here are the changes we released today:

Better management of the address groups within your mailing list. When adding new addresses or editing existing ones, it's much easier to designate which groups the subscriber belongs to.

Any subscriber can now be marked to receive "Text Only" messages. Most RapidNewsletter mailings are sent in HTML (for formatted text and images), but for a variety of reasons, people prefer to receive all their email in plain text. For a long time, you've been able to send a RapidNewsletter mailing in text instead of HTML, but now you can manage this preference on a user-by-user basis as well.

New ways to edit the content of existing newsletters. It's much faster to make changes to your existing mailings. You can reorder articles by dragging and dropping, and click titles to edit in place. It's also easier now to remove an image from an article after you've loaded it.

Improved statistics displays. For large mailings, the statistics tables could get unwieldy. We've added paging and better handling of long URLs to make these charts easier to read.

You'll see these improvements immediately the next time you log into your account. If you haven't tried RapidNewsletter yet, now is the perfect time to set up a free account and give it a try! We're working on a number of other new features that you can expect to see in the near future as well. If you have any suggestions on features, improvements, or enhancements to RapidNewsletter be sure to let us know.

End of the year maintenance

It's the end of the year, and do you know where your web site is? Is some of your content outdated, or worse, not showing up at all? Making an annual assessment of your site is a great idea, and here are a few suggestions on what to look for.

1. Is your "About Us" page updated?
Have you been in business for 8 years for the last 3 years? Check on how current this page is. Update any time sensitive items and any services you may or may no longer provide.

2. Are your contact forms working properly?
Make sure that when a customer wants to contact you, messages get to the correct person. Be sure that a form, whose recipient may not always be obvious, is sending messages to your current sales person and not the one who left six months ago.

3. If you have other email addresses or contact information on your web site, are they correct?
Review all your published contact information. Nothing can turn a potential customer away faster than not being able to contact you.

4. Do all your links work -- both within your site and especially those that link off site?
When you're linking to content that you don't control, it's critical to review those links regularly to make sure they're still valid. Check all links, even the ones within your site, to make sure that your customers are getting to the correct place. There is a free online tool to check them here.

5. Check your WHOIS record.
This record is used by your registrar to contact you in case your domain (web site address) is about to expire, or for other important notices. Check yours at Network Solutions.

6. Do an overall review of your web site.
Check photos and see if they're still current and representative of your business. Are any graphics dated? Should you update any content? Do your pages load fast enough or are they slow?

This sort of review should be done yearly at a minimum. Some items can be checked quickly, and others may take some time, depending on the scale of your site. But in the long run, the advantages of a well-maintained website make it worth your time and effort.

New GroupLoop Feature: Additional Email Support

One of our most common feature requests for GroupLoop is tighter integration with email software. The application already offers several features for notification by email, like when you post a new message or document, or set a reminder for calendar events. But now GroupLoop can accept incoming email, too. You can send a message to your GroupLoop account and it will be automatically forwarded to other members while still maintaining the central archive that makes GroupLoop so useful.

Here's how it works. Each GroupLoop committee can now be assigned a "drop box" email address that allows it to process messages. To start using the feature, you'll need to assign a short name to the committee (no spaces or special characters) that will form the email address.



For example, say the account cws.grouploop.com has a committee called GroupLoop Developers. We might assign it a short name of "developers." The email address for that group would then become developers.cws@mail.grouploop.com.

Only people who belong to the committee can send messages to the address. When they do, the text of the email will be created as a new GroupLoop message, and a copy will be forwarded to everyone in the group. If a member replies to the email, their message will be added as a comment under the original posting. This helps keep email conversations centralized, permanently archived and collected by discussion, without requiring a login every time you want to add to the conversation.

To assign a short name to your committee (only account administrators can do this), click the "People" tab and then the committee name under "Manage Committees" in the right sidebar.

We hope this new feature saves you time and helps to make GroupLoop an even more useful part of your workflow!

Spammers Now Sending PDF files

Foiled by increasingly accurate corporate spam filters, spammers have dumped pictures for PDFs in their bulk e-mailings, according to the latest data from security firms.

Image spam, which at the beginning of the year accounted for nearly 60 percent of all junk e-mail, has plummeted and now accounts for only about 15 percent of spam. Taking its place, the number of junk e-mail messages using an attachment in the Portable Document Format (PDF) has steadily climbed since mid-June, accounting for as much as a third of spam.

"It went from zero to -- when the spammers started experimenting -- fifty-fifty image spam and PDF spam," said Matt Sergeant, senior antispam technologist for e-mail security firm MessageLabs. "Now, its gone to wholesale PDF spam."

The ebb and flow of different types of spam is an indicator of the arms race between spammers and network defenders. Image spam took off in late 2006, primarily as a way to tout penny stocks and manipulate the volatile over-the-counter markets. Yet, other types of spam, advertising products from fraudulent pharmaceuticals to sexual enhancement devices, soon started using embedded images as well. The growth of image spam peaked earlier this year, making up as much as two-thirds of all spam in January.

Companies have adapted to the attack, however, detecting the unwanted images and blocking them, said MessageLabs' Sergeant.

"The volume of image spam was so great that a number of large businesses took to wholesale blocking of e-mails coming in with image attachments," he said.

The better filtering has led spammers to change tactics and experiment with PDF files.

While security firms agreed that PDF files started regularly appearing as spam attachment about mid-June, estimates for the volume of PDF spam varied somewhat between companies. MessageLabs, which filters out virus-laden and spam e-mail messages for its clients, estimated that about 30 percent of all spam now uses PDF files. Security firm McAfee had a more modest estimate that 2.6 percent of all junk e-mail messages carried PDF files. While Symantec, the owner of SecurityFocus, has found the fraction varies between 2 and 7 percent.

"The spammers are doing the old cat-and-mouse game," said Guy Roberts, senior research manager for anti-spam at McAfee. "Vendors have caught up to spammers and detection is pretty good for image spam, so (the spammers) are changing tactics in order to get their message across."

The growth of spam e-mail messages with PDF attachments have also caused the total bandwidth of spam to grow quickly, because PDF files tend to be much larger than the GIF images that the files are replacing.

From a spammers point of view, the strength of PDF is that many companies require that their e-mail systems allow the documents to be passed to the user, said Menashe Eliezer, director of anti-spam research for security firm CommTouch. Because PDFs are ubiquitous in the business world, such attachments are more likely to reach the users, he said.

"Now, they are using professional looking PDFs, and if it doesn't look like spam, that's even better," Eliezer said.

While moving unwanted advertisements from images to PDFs may make it more likely that the message reaches the intended recipient, whether or not that person opens the attachment is another question, said Doug Bowers, senior director of anti-spam engineering for Symantec.

"We are interested in seeing if this is really effective in getting a spam message, not just delivered, but also read," Bowers said.

In the end, if PDF spam cannot deliver more eyeballs to spammers, the trend may end up being a short-lived phase, he said.

Article written by Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus 2007-07-18.

My Inbox: Test Time

I received this email today and it reminded me of my college days. Like these kids, I quickly learned that you don't get points for being funny. :(

Fraudulent Email

It has come to our attention that a handful of hosting customers recently received a fraudulent email message claiming to be from CWS. The subject line of this message is "Hosting Regular Security Maintenance."

The message includes an attached PHP script named webguard.php with instructions for the hosting customer to place the script on his or her website and run it. Although this file is presented as a security feature, the opposite is in fact true. The script is malicious and is intended to compromise the security of a server on which it runs.

Should you receive an email of this nature, do not under any circumstances upload the script to your website. If you ever receive an email that claims to be from CWS and have any question at all about its authenticity, please contact us at 1-888-426-7793.