Running the Campaign - E-Mail Transmission Tips

As soon as you've selected your target audience, built your mailing list and put together the message, you are ready to broadcast it. There are several ways to deliver the message to a list of recipients: the most common are as follows.

1. If your mailing list is short and you don't require advanced tracking features, you may use a traditional email client program like Microsoft Outlook;
2. For larger lists, use bulk mail software to send it directly from your computer or through an external SMTP server;
3. Lastly, you can subscribe to an online email marketing service and have your message delivered from their servers.

In this lesson, we examine the strong and weak points of each option.

Standard e-mail programs

Strictly speaking, e-mail clients like Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and Eudora are for personal correspondence and are not the best choice for professional customer connections through e-mail. Surprisingly, many small to medium businesses still reach their audience this way. Personal e-mail programs are appropriate for later stages when the sales department follows up leads who have positively responded to initial communications. Standard programs are also helpful in keeping all both-way correspondence in one place and tracking down the correspondence history for each contact.

Mass mailing messages using say Microsoft Outlook can be problematic. Outlook is not a bad program, but it simply wasn't intended for this purpose.

It's rather tricky, though possible, to get Outlook to do "mail merging", i.e. sending personalized messages using a single message template but so that each sent message contains a different name in the greeting line, and other information taken directly from the mailing list. There's an article from Microsoft (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287561/) that describes this process. With other e-mail clients, it will take you a lot of time, effort and in some cases even programming skills to get the software do it the right way.

Most e-mail clients allow request of a "read receipt" that can be used to track the "open" action and get an idea of how many recipients have successfully received the message and opened it. However, it's up to the recipient whether to send a "read receipt", and although it only requires them one click to do so, you cannot rely on read receipts as an exact measure.

Since e-mail clients are easily configured to check your mailbox for responses, you can also track bounced messages (those that return undelivered) and after some calculations see how reliable your delivery mechanism is. A message can get bounced because an e-mail address doesn't exist any more or because the message has been blocked by a spam filter. In the latter case, it may require some further action from your side to confirm that you are really interested in delivering the message to this particular address.

Finally, the frontier of standard e-mail client tracking ability is in receiving "unsubscribe" requests. Note that your e-mail program can't automatically remove the unsubscribed addresses from the next mailing list. It can only receive and show these requests, and provide you with an idea of how high the "unsubscribe rate" of your campaign is. It's impossible to automatically manage subscriptions with standard e-mail programs and track actions such as clickthru, sales and conversion rate.

All in all, standard e-mail programs quickly exhaust their capabilities as a professional e-mail broadcast instrument, especially when it comes to large mailing lists, scheduled correspondence cycles, advanced tracking and analytics, and subscription management.

E-mail marketing software

Nowadays there's a great selection of e-mail marketing software. Take a look at some software rating and review sites where you can choose one most suited to you:
http://email-marketing-software-review.toptenreviews.com/. In this course, we illustrate the bulk sending process using Email Marketing Director (http://www.arialsoftware.com/emailmarketingdirector.htm) as it has been rated the No.1 bulk email package at Top Ten Reviews at the time of writing. Many of its features are described here, and are standard for many other e-mail marketing packages as well. Here's a list of features that will be useful for comparisons when making your choice.


Explanation

Mailing list import
Possible to import a mailing list from a text file, datasheet, or database


Mailing list segmentation and contact grouping
Possible to filter the mailing list based on custom criteria, and send different templates to different segments

WYSIWYG HTML editor
Ability to edit your message both in HTML source and visual modes, add a plain text variant, use pre-installed templates, and preview the message in a browser

Spell checker
Ability to spell check your message before sending

Auto-detect mail settings
The program can automatically extract the information about the SMTP server from a standard mail application like MS Outlook

Direct send mode
Instead of handing off your message to an external SMTP server, the program will use the DNS system to find the recipient's server, connect to it directly, and try to transmit the message. Note that this mode is less reliable because your own computer is now acting like an SMTP server but some fastidious receivers may not recognize it as such.

Adding unsubscribe link
You may include an "unsubscribe" link in the bottom of your message for better compliance with the CAN-SPAM act. Usually clicking this link only opens a blank message with the subject "unsubscribe" which the recipient can then send back to your address.

Scheduling e-mail campaigns
Possible to schedule each mailing to run automatically at a certain time

Subscription management
Possible to connect to mailboxes through POP and IMAP, collect messages with "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" subjects, and reflect these subscriptions in your next mailing list

Tracking and analysis module
The main measurements that can be made for an e-mail campaign are: bounce rate; unsubscribe rate; open rate; clickthru rate; conversion rate. Very often e-mail marketing applications offer advanced tracking as a separate subscription-based service – mainly they provide clickthru and conversion rates because you need a Web based datacenter for these.

Database writeback
This is what really few programs out there are able to do. If you store your contacts in your own (corporate) database, or have a CRM solution in place, and you want the results of the e-mail campaign to be recorded in your database for later analysis, a few software programs can do this for you (like Campaign Enterprise from Arial software, the vendor of Email Marketing Director).

Message grouping (throttling)
This feature is used to save bandwidth and lessen the load on your SMTP server, as it limits the number of messages that are send over a period of time, and makes pauses between mailing to separate list portions.

Let's see what the broadcast process looks like in Email Marketing Director.

When you open the program the main window appears with a mailing list column to the right and a campaign list to the left.



Main Window
Main window of Email Marketing Director

Step 1. Import your mailing list or create a new one

Click "New List" in the right pane of the main window. Enter a name for your list. Now you can fill in record by record using either the form view or the table view.

You can also import a mailing list from a ready CSV file if you prefer.



Mailing List Editor
Mailing list in Email Marketing Director

Step 2. Create a new campaign

Under the campaign list in the main menu, click "New". You will be taken to the three-step campaign wizard. In the first step, select a mailing list you've previously created, or create a new one. Then put together your message using the visual editor. You can add an attachment and specify if you want to provide a plain text variant along with the HTML version (or you only want to use the plain text version). It is possible to insert merge fields into the message – during the mailing process these fields will be substituted with the actual data from the mailing list. For instance, if you insert {FirstName} into the message or subject, it will be replaced with "John" when the message is sent to John and "Jane" when the message is sent to Jane.




Campaign Editor
Campaign Editor. Step 2: Message editing

In step 3, you provide extra information, such as to where send the campaign report and whether to limit the number of messages sent per hour.

When finished, save the campaign and it appears in your campaign list. To run this campaign press "Run selected campaign" under the campaign list in the main window.

The strengths of desktop bulk mail applications is that they let you keep your mailing lists in your own database while offering a decent ability to integrate with local and remote databases. Usually, they also offer a powerful HTML editor which is rarely available in web-based applications. Finally, since your PC is the control center of the process, you always know the status of each campaign that is in progress, each sent message, and it’s possible to stop or delay things at any time.

There are some major drawbacks, for example sending bulk mail messages consumes a lot of traffic between your PC and your SMTP server. Even if you use a direct send mode, it's still a lot of outgoing traffic. In addition, some external SMTP servers limit the number of outgoing messages, and in a direct mode your computer is not whitelisted with the main e-mail service providers (SMTP receivers) and thus the delivery rate decreases, while increasing the risk that your IP address will be banned for spamming.

Web services that specialize in e-mail marketing are free from these weak points.

Email marketing services

You can choose to send your campaigns using special Web based services like Vertical Response (www.verticalresponse.com) and Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com). You create an account with them, import your mailing list into their database, create or import a message, schedule it for sending and at the appointed time it is sent using their servers.

Advanced services offer almost as many conveniences as desktop applications, including mailing list segmentation, campaign scheduling and a WYSIWYG editor to create messages. Additionally, you don't have to worry about deliverability, spam filter compliance and traffic – this is taken care of by these services whose sending servers are usually white-listed with most email service providers like Yahoo! or Hotmail.

Web-based email marketing services usually charge on a monthly basis or per thousand addresses in your mailing list. This recurring expense might become annoying when compared to a one-time purchase of a desktop application, especially if you use this type of service to deliver a newsletter or some other kind of email that doesn't convert directly to sales.

Since email marketing services are responsible for delivery of your message to recipient mailboxes, they may impose certain limitations on the outgoing e-mail. Thus, you may be required to include a physical postal address of your business in the message, or tailor it in another way for better compliance with spam protection regulations. The size of the message also can be limited because these companies need to predict and control the traffic flow from their servers.

If you plan to market internationally and send messages in different languages, make sure that the service of your choice supports the Unicode format.

If you are looking for a decent email marketing service, Top Ten Reviews is a good place to start.

Other email transmission tips

Keep these simple tips in mind when scheduling your campaign for transmission,

* Information products, especially business improvements, how-to and self-help, enjoy the best responses during January, February, October and November.
* January is considered the best overall month for mail-order marketing, while July and August yield the lowest response rate.
* Holiday offers work best from September through December. Ecommerce websites that sell gift merchandise get peak traffic around Christmas.
* Since it is possible to time an email marketing campaign up to the hour, marketers set numerous experiments with the best day and even time of day to send out their campaigns. Most agree on the following: on Monday people look through their email quickly, because their inbox is full after the weekend. On Friday people are getting ready for the weekend and also get rid of their email without excessive attention. Tuesday and Wednesday are considered the best days to mail, with a follow-up on Thursday.

However, if you mainly target home office / small business owners, you might want to consider late Friday / early Saturday. Many of them enjoy working with their email on Saturday mornings.

Gaming and entertainment offers best work if sent on Thursday.


* Some marketers report that the click-thru increases up to 12 percent if the campaign is sent out at noon.
* It is a good idea to monitor website traffic and schedule campaigns so that they slightly proceed the peak periods. This way items are marketed just as interest peaks.
* To prevent over-saturation with promo emails, we recommend an optimum frequency of an email twice a month (or once every two weeks), one of them being an informational kind of newsletter and the other one which includes promotional material.

Conclusion

Email transmission is the most important step in the entire email marketing process, and you may have to set up some experiments before performing really serious mass mailings. Try to use small portions of your list to answer the following questions:

* What provides you with the best deliverability rate, bulk mailing software or a web-based service?
* What kind of mailing list is more responsive to your offers, your own in-house list or one you've purchased?
* What days and times of day work best for your type of business?
* What kind of emails discourage your audience from clicking the unsubscribe link: promotional, or informational? What is the optimum frequency for the both kinds of email?

Once you've got answers about your own unique audience and which is specific to your business you will feel much more confident sending out the large-scale campaign.
Here's what should be retained from this lesson:

1. Once you have your mailing list, and have set up your message or messages, you may use bulk mail software or a web-based marketing service to deliver it to your target audience.
2. Web based services offer a better deliverability rate and – sometimes – tracking possibilities, however, their fees are recurring, and they may impose more limitations on the content and size of the message.
3. For the most broad and general sample of the Internet audience, the best frequency for your email messages is twice a month, with the best days being the middle of the week, in the afternoon.