As spam filters become more and more sophisticated, you must ensure that your email marketing doesn’t fall at the first hurdle. After all, there’s no point spending lots of time and money on your campaigns if the subject headings land them straight in the junk folder. Here’s 10 tips to make sure your emails get through.

Tip 1: Don’t use ‘spammy’ words like free, money, win, gift, offers

Tip 2: Avoid using lots of exclamation marks or question marks????!!!!

Tip 3: Make sure there are no spellig mistakes

Tip 4: Keep your subject lines to less than 50 characters

Tip 5: Include your company’s name in the subject so people can see who it’s from

Tip 6: Make your subject line relevant to the content

Tip 7: LOOK at this: Don’t beg for attention by saying, “Read this NOW” or “You HAVE to see this”

Tip 8: DON’T USE ALL CAPITAL LETTERS

Tip 9: Avoid having a blank subject line

Tip 10: Test different email subjects on a proportion of your database and then send the best performer to the rest

Keeping an eye on what ends up in your junk folder can tell you a lot about what to avoid and emarketing packages often contain a spam checker facility that will show you how likely your email is to get through. Alternatively, there’s plenty of free spam checkers out there on the web.

Hope this helps you convert more through your email marketing.

We’re delighted to announce that one of our clients, Everyday Maternity, has been voted Best Independent Maternity Retailer at the Prima Baby Fashion Awards 2010. Thanks to the use of our e-mail marketing system Reach, Everyday Maternity encouraged customers to vote online and Amanda Gregson, founder of Everyday Maternity was elated to be presented with the award of Best Independent Maternity Retailer at the ceremony on 25th February, surrounded by retailers such as Next, Debenhams and Littlewoods.

As the award was based on votes alone from traffic directed to the online poll, it is all the more significant to the Everyday Maternity team based in Chester. Amanda Gregson said “We were honoured to be nominated in the category and set about with a campaign using Reach to encourage votes from our customer database.”

The award has already started a catalyst of events for Everyday Maternity which includes talks to work in conjunction with Prima Baby to host their own fashion shows at the national Baby Shows at Earls Court, NEC & Excel in 2011.

Big Yellow provide flexible self-storage solutions for business and domestic users, in over 60 locations around the UK.

It’s well recognised that it costs a lot more to win a new customer than to keep an existing one, so our client wisely decided to invest in a customer retention programme with Blueleaf Digital. We’re working closely with Big Yellow to profile customers’ requirements and behaviours, targeting them with tailored email campaigns that communicate the right message at the right time.

Personally I hate it when a blanket email comes into my inbox along the lines of…

“Following the talk I gave to you at the Annual Crap Presenter Conference on 17 April, I thought I would drop you an email and see how you’re getting on with the things we discussed.”

Email marketing is about getting a targeted message to a specific database; get it right and your recipient thinks the email is only sent to them and not a mailing list; get it wrong and they think the company who sent it doesn’t care.

OK so what’s wrong with the approach above?

Simple – I was out of the country at the time the email came through and didn’t even attend the conference referred to!

One of the challenges faced by all marketing managers is accountability for the effectiveness of their campaigns. Long gone are the days when a scattergun approach could be employed. Today’s most successful marketing campaigns are those that target carefully segmented data and treat prospects as individuals. But how do you communicate with these prospects in a cost-effective way and then begin segmenting your database?

with blueleaf’s email marketing system

We’ve worked closely with Aaron & Partners LLP, a law firm with offices in Chester and Manchester, for over five years and in that time we’ve used our vast experience and expertise to help them drive their business on to great success. The work we have created ranges from branding and advertising campaigns to a mix of digital solutions including most notably, emarketing. This channel of communication has proven to be extremely effective for the client and we believe that it would be for your firm.

The emarketing campaigns we produce regularly achieve an ‘open rate’ of over 30% and lead to segmentation data being built on over 40% of prospects. This information is enabling Aaron & Partners LLP to further segment their database, leading to even more effective communications ultimately what we all want, more business!

But don’t just take our word for it, to view a video testimonial from Scott Hadden, Marketing Manager for Aaron & Partners LLP, just click on the movie below:

We like to talk at Blueleaf, but not as much as we like to listen.
To get in touch please call 01829 260 600 or if you would prefer to email, please use mail@blue-leaf.co.uk

PS we are committed to engaging with only one law firm per area, to ensure there is no conflict of interest.

How quickly would you expect a response to an email you’d sent? 24 hours, a week or 28 working days? If you email a query into Flybe, it would be the latter! I was absolutely gobsmacked recently when looking to book a flight, that a company can say they’ll reply to emails within 28 working days – surely most people would have given up and gone elsewhere by then?

So I decided to look into this a bit more and came across some research by Transversal (a research company based in Cambridge), stating that “major UK firms take an average of 46 hours to respond to customers’ emails”, and that this is a staggering “13 hours more than the average last year”. The research looked at various customer service channels of the websites of 100 major UK firms, including their FAQ areas and contact centres. Findings included:

- on average, websites could only provide answers for 50% of common customer queries
- telecommunications, insurance, travel, electronics, grocers and utility companies were the worst, being unable to answer 60% of customer queries online
- travel websites had an average email response time of 58 hours (they obviously didn’t contact Flybe!)

If you received this sort of service, wouldn’t it make you feel like your query wasn’t important? I guess that’s why at Blueleaf we aim to respond to all queries on the same day – a simple way to make our clients, suppliers and prospects feel valued.

With us being big fans of timely marketing campaigns here at Blueleaf, we were delighted that our recent Valentine’s Day competition generated a great response through the powers of emarketing. Tying it in with the launch of our new site, we asked visitors to correctly identify our seventh principle for a long and loving relationship.

It was of course, that we’re genuinely nice people to do business with, always important in any client/agency relationship. The first correct entry out of the hat was Lawrence Pickup from Dawson’s Music. Well done Lawrence, a bottle of pink champagne is on its way to you. Look out for the next Blueleaf competition, coming soon.