Enabler provide email marketing guidance around B2B and B2C email communications, highlighting how to improve your email deliverability.

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Six reasons why buying data for email is bad

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As a marketer, one of your top priorities is likely to be drumming up leads to pass on to the sales team, and you may feel under a lot of pressure to bring do this in large quantities. So we completely understand that buying an email data list might seem like a quick win – access to thousands of new contacts at the click of a “pay now” button sounds like a no-brainer, especially when the lists are advertised as targeted, verified, accurate, and opted-in.

Unfortunately though, the reality is less assured. A purchased data list is very unlikely to provide you with high quality data that enables you to promote your business effectively, and can cause you a whole host of problems which will impact your ability to email legitimate leads in the future.

Here’s Six Reasons to Remember Why Buying Data Is Bad:

1. Quality Is Not Guaranteed

First and foremost, it’s pretty likely that a list you buy will be littered with old or incorrect email addresses, incomplete names, and other problems affecting the deliverability of your email.

2. Bad Delivery Rates = Bounces

The deliverability issues caused by these incorrect / old email addresses could cause your emails to have a very high bounce rate, which will in turn damage your sender reputation by potentially marking your IP address as that of a spammer, further impacting the deliverability of your emails. Read our blog post on spam filters to help avoid getting caught in this vicious circle.

3. Nobody Knows You

It’s likely that the contacts on your list have never heard of your company before, which immediately lowers the chances of them opening your email. You should be sending to people who are already interested in what you’re sending them, such as existing customers who have engaged with your brand and those who have specifically opted in to receive messages from you.

4. Less Engaged Recipients

A recent analysis of a company’s email marketing activity found that business areas emailing to opt-in lists achieved open rates 82% higher than the areas emailing to purchased lists. That’s a significant difference! It’s basically not worth your time emailing people who are unlikely to engage; channel your energy into people who want to hear from you.

5. Shared List = Fed-Up Contacts

It may well be the case that other companies have bought the same list as you, meaning that the recipients are already annoyed by all the emails they’re receiving before yours has hit their inbox. You don’t want to join a crowd of ignored competitors.

6. You May Fall Foul Of The Law

Your communications need to be in line with the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 (UK) or CAN-SPAM Act (USA), or you could face hefty fines. Unfortunately your email itself may follow the legislation to the letter, but if the email addresses were harvested illegally in the first place, you’ll still be breaking the law. Additionally, from 25th May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force, meaning that the way companies are allowed to store and process personal data will change. Here’s our GDPR guide to help you get to grips with the new regulations.

 

Okay, – so what should you do?

Now we’ve talked you out of buying a list, let’s discuss the six best ways to source your data instead…

1. Attract An Audience With Engaging Content

Produce content that you know people are going to want to read, and make sure that when it goes live it’s been optimised for SEO so that your audience can easily find it (get in touch if you’d like help with this) . The content itself may be blog articles, white papers, a series of top tips, opinion/advice pieces, reviews, templates, or anything else you think would be engaging.

2. Include a Gated Asset

If it’s not enough for people to be reading your content and hopefully contacting you as a result, you can set up a data capture / sign up form that people have to complete before they can view your content. This gives your content a feeling of exclusivity, and also allows you to grow your leads

3. Create a Lead Magnet

Following on from the above, you could also create a lead magnet – this means an irresistible incentive for the customer to give you their contact information, and often comes in the form of a discount code.

4. Use a Reputable Email Service Provider

Doing so will help to protect your sender reputation, and ensure that you’re adhering to spam legislation by providing the tools needed to offer an unsubscribe and process it within 10 days. An email service provider like Enabler is also able to offer comprehensive reporting and testing facilities, allowing you to optimise your emails, and keeps your database up-to-date by logging unsubscribes and bounces and removing them automatically from your mailing lists.

5. Encourage Sign-Ups

Include a sign-up box on every page of your website to offer people maximum opportunity to subscribe to your emails. Keep it simple and quick to complete – all you really need is an email address, but if you must you can also include fields for first and last name.

6. Cross-Channel Promotion

Make the most of your other marketing channels, such as social media and your website, to promote the content of your emails and why people should sign up for them. For example, if you were soon to send an email featuring “Five top tips for x!” you could tweet something along the lines of “Sign up to our emails to discover five top tips for x!” ahead of time.

 

Most of these techniques are targeted towards acquiring new leads, but remember that it’s also super important to retain your existing customers. Firstly (and obviously) your existing customers are likely to repurchase if you look after them, and may also create new customers for you through word-of-mouth and recommendation. You could tap into this by rolling out a refer-a-friend campaign, with a form to capture friends’ details and offer incentives to both your customer and their buddies. There are loads of other ways to build your email lists explored in our Email List Building blog post.

Hopefully you can see that it simply isn’t a worthwhile investment to buy a data list for your emails. There are too many pitfalls and too few chances of success. Instead you should focus on growing your database organically, and maintaining a positive sender reputation. If you’d like help in your email endeavours, give our Enabler team a call on 0207 099 6370, or drop an email to enablermail@pancentric.com.

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Emoji here, emoji there, emojis everywhere

Emojis are everywhere…on social media platforms, blogs, text messages, and now they are even in movies. They are used by almost everyone – even your grandma (once she’s worked out how her smartphone works).  Although you personally might not use them, it is highly likely that someone has sent you an emoji on more than one occasion by now.

One platform where emojis are undoubtedly quite useful is email marketing; especially when your open rates are at stake!

With marketers making every effort to cut through the noise within the inbox and get their message seen by their target audience, emojis come in quite handy.  When used appropriately, these little emojis can be a huge help with increasing open rates.

Before choosing whether to use or ignore them, perhaps have a quick read about our experience with emojis and what we really think of them. There’s no stopping these little guys, with 56 new emojis moving onto your smartphone this autumn, so if you are thinking about using emojis within your email marketing we have some helpful advice…

The best way to really maximise the impact of these little icons and really drive increased engagement is to place them within your subject lines.

 

Emoji-Style Subject Lines

One excellent example of emojis within your subject lines is when they are used as an extension of your brand. For example, if you are a music company selling gig tickets, you could use a speaker emoji in a subject line:

Another attention grabbing example is the one I from travel agent, as shown below. The company was able to convey the call to action: Book a trip > Get on the plane > Enjoy the sunshine, all through the use of emojis.  With emojis taking up so few characters, they free up valuable space for this tech-savvy travel to convey their CTA hook: a ‘discount’ and sale’.

And here is my favourite one, from a fashion retailer who has taken email personalisation and targeted data to the emoji level. Not only did they send a birthday message, they also included a birthday balloon in the subject line:

Why Use Emoji Subject Lines?  They Help Boost Open Rates

There’s something about an emoji that simply makes people want to click. Why? The answer to that is actually quite interesting. According to TNW (The Next Web), when we see a face emoji online, the same parts of our brain react as when we look at a real human face hence the instant engagement with emoji. Our mood adjusts depending on the emoji’s association in our brain and sometimes we even mimic the emoji’s face expression subconsciously. At this point we engage with the emoji by opening an email/ reading an article or anything else that call-to-action (CTA) asks us to do as we empathize with these online avatars.

 

How To Use Emojis In Your Emails:

Inserting emoji is as simple as copying an emoji from a website/ document and pasting it into a subject line of your email. However to ensure the symbol displays correctly, make sure you test the email by sending it to yourself and your colleagues.

There are, however a few things that could go wrong when using emojis in the subject lines.  For example, the email client might not support emojis in the subject line, displaying the symbol ‘▢’instead.

The emojis will display differently depending on recipients’ operating system (see example right). Most browsers support emoji on iOS, OS X, Android and Windows operating systems.

For more info on emoji compatibility with emails and browsers, here are some helpful links:

Litmus – Emoji Support in Email

Can I Emoji – Browser Support

We’ve found a useful site where you can choose emojis and check how they would render within a different inboxes.

 

 

 

 

Emojis – Are They Good Or Bad?

 

It depends. As shown above, when used appropriately, emojis can convey emotions or act as an extension of your brand.  They also help shorten subject lines (1 emoji = 1 character), boost open rates and in turn click-through rates.

There is however, a risk of overusing or even misusing emojis. A big no-no for emoji use would be to insert an emoji within the main body of an email, especially if the context of the email is serious or has a professional target audience.

We also recommended to not replace words with emojis. The reason for that is the fact that recipients can’t always figure out what message the sender is trying to convey. For example a sentence ‘Have a Nice Day’, when used with an emoji would read as follows:

Everyone interprets an emoji symbol differently, so the question is – will your recipients correctly guess the word you are trying to replace? This is only a simple example but as you can imagine, the more complex the sentence the lesser chance the recipient will decrypt your message correctly.

There is also a risk that the emoji will not display at all or display as a question mark or empty box symbol and so the recipient would read ‘Have a � day. ‘

 

Think Before You Emoji

Emjois might seem like fun, but you should consider their use carefully.  You should avoid using them for sensitive or important matters as it may irritate or offend your recipients, as you could be seen to be trivialising the subject matter.

One recently unfortunate use of emojis that backfired was with an American politician who asked young voters on social media platforms to express their opinion on student loan debt using 3 emojis. What could possibly go wrong?  Quite a bit.

By using emojis in this fashion your target audience is likely to feel (as was the case here) that you are not taking them or the subject matter seriously.

You should also consider your brand and whether using emojis is appropriate for your tone of voice.  Some brands may be able to use emojis in the main body of the email copy, for example toys manufacturer or other brands that target younger audiences or millennials (apparently the latter are inseparable from emojis).

So always ask whether emojis are appropriate for your brand, and think carefully about the icons you choose and how you place them within your emails.

However you decide to implement them, please…

…use emojis responsibly.

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Spam filters: what are they and how to avoid them

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Spam filter problems are something you’ll probably come across during your time as an email marketer.  At present just 79%* of permission-based emails actually reach customer inboxes, as ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and spam filters constantly try to find better ways to reduce the amount of irrelevant content in users’ inboxes. So with almost a quarter of emails being earmarked as spam, how do you ensure you reach the inbox? It’s therefore never been more important to understand how spam filters work, which is why we’re here to help build your knowledgebase so you that can confidently create and send emails that should avoid being flagged as spam.

 

First things first…

To begin to understand how to avoid the spam-filters, we firstly need to tackle the question ‘What is spam?’. There are hundreds of different definitions of spam out there, but the most comprehensive one is that spam is unsolicited, irrelevant email, sent in bulk to a list of people. For example, if you bought a list of data and started to send emails to the people on that list, although you think you are sending these people content you believe to be relevant or beneficial to them, you are in fact contacting people who have not opted in to receive your emails. Because you have not been given explicit permission to market to these people, your emails would be considered ‘spam’ by these individuals. (Note to self – only ever email opted-in customers).

 

Being marked as ‘Spam’ – what does it mean for your emails?

Spam might seem like just an annoyance in the inbox, but when individuals actively start marking your emails as ‘spam’ or ‘junk’, Email Service Providers (ESPs) will start to take notice. Having your emails flagged as spam will negatively impact your reputation as a sender, and if poor sending practices continue Email Service Providers will start filtering your emails directly into the spam folder to ensure you never reach people’s inboxes. So to maintain good email deliverability and avoid being flagged as spam, it’s worth understanding the laws and regulations that ESPs abide by. Different countries have different regulations regarding spam, for example the UK uses the 2003 Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, USA has the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and Canada has its own Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), but every country / ESP has common regulations which all email marketers must abide by, including:

  • Always providing an unsubscribe link which work for at least 30 days post-send

  • Not using deceptive headers, from names and addresses or subject lines. 

(You can find a comprehensive list of laws by country at the end of this article).

Failure to comply with these regulations can result in costly penalties which differ per country. For example, violating the CAN-SPAM Act could see you fined $11,000 per offense… which translates to $11,000 for every email address you sent to. To ensure you don’t fall foul, it’s definitely worth having a read of the legislation before using any new data source.

 

Spam Filters – How do they work?  

It can be rather tricky when it comes to judging how spam filters determine how ‘spammy’ an email is. To put it simply, they’ll systematically weigh up each component of your email and assign each part a spam rating. For the purposes of this we’ll call the rating 1-10, 1 =‘not spammy’ and 10= ‘very spammy’. Once every email component has been rated the email will then be given a spam score which will decide whether an email can pass through the filter. If the score exceeds a threshold (let’s call it 5 for this example) then the email will get flagged as spam, will not pass go and heads straight to the spam folder or is completely blocked from being delivered.

 

 

Avoiding the filters

The tricky part is that each spam filter works differently, with some having stricter ‘pass’ thresholds determined by their server administrations. So while your email might receive a score of 4 for one spam filter, another one might mark it as an 8. The list of spammy criteria is forever evolving as email users continue to identify and mark new email content / senders as spam in their inbox. Spam filters often share this information with each other to help identify new emerging spam. Unfortunately for us marketers, this means there’s no easy or definitive checklist to ensure our emails don’t end up in the spam folder. We do, however, know that there are some key factors to keep an eye on when sending emails.

1. Coding in your campaign. Some spam filters will be triggered by sloppy code, tags which don’t need to be there or code that has been pulled in directly from MS Word. To avoid this being an issue in your campaigns, make sure you are using templates that have been reviewed by a developer, or have a developer build you one from scratch for you. Many ESP’s will provide tools such as HTML or drag and drop editors which will help you avoid these issues.

2. Campaign metadata. Spam filters want to see that you know the people you’re sending to. Personalising your emails is a great way to demonstrate this; it shows the spam filter that you hold information about the recipient other than their email address. You can also ask recipients to add you to their list of trusted mailers.

3. Your IP address. Some spam filters will block or mark an email as spam if it has come from an IP address that has been flagged as having sent spam in the past or been blacklisted, so you need to ensure the IP address you’re emailing from has a good sender reputation. Try to avoid IP pools with poor reputations, where you share sending IP addresses with other senders, as their poor sending behaviour can impact on your deliverability / sender reputation. This usually won’t cause problems if the ESP is taking correct precautions to make sure all emails have unsubscribe links etc, however if you see your deliverability rates drop, it might be worth contacting your ESP to make sure it’s definitely your emails that are causing the drop in deliverability. Sending reputation is incredibly important, so make sure yours is good by sticking to good sending practices.

 

 

Content is key

Why words are a big influencer in avoiding the spam filters

Although content and formatting can be a bit of a hazy subject because there’s no specific content that is always guaranteed to be flagged as spam in an email, I can recommend a few best-practices to make sure you’re doing everything you can to not trigger spam filters and get your email safely to the inbox.

1. Never stop testing.  It’s a great way to find out how different content in your email impacts your deliverability. If you don’t make it into the inbox, it could be something in your content i.e. a negative keyword, too many links or images, or overall tone that is trigger the spam filter. Test and retest the content.

2. Clear unsubscribe links are a must. Don’t try to hide your unsubscribe links within your email – it’s a sure-fire way to get marked as spam if people can’t find the link easily. Think about it from the perspective of the user, you receive an email and you think the content isn’t relevant to you. If you can’t find an unsubscribe link, what do you do? Some people might try and contact the company sending the emails, but most people won’t bother and will just mark the email as spam. Don’t let it happen to you!

3. Be consistent. If your customers are used to a particular type of content / branding from your emails, don’t make a sudden change without warning. Straying from the normal messaging of your brand could trigger people to mark it as spam if they don’t think it’s a genuine email from yourselves.

4. Avoid trigger words. Now although there is no definitive list of words and phrases to avoid, spam filters are already looking out for certain negative keywords which have been previously identified as spam and proven to trigger filters. Using any of these words/phrases in your subject line or email is almost certain to get you a higher spam score and trigger a filter. We can’t list them all, but some simple ones to avoid are:

  • the word Free

  • Exclamation marks (big no-no!), and other symbols such as $ £ %

  • ALL CAPS words

 

For a more comprehensive list of words to avoid, see HubSpot’s ‘Ultimate List of Email Spam Trigger Words’.  

So there you have it, some useful ways you can keep yourself out of spam. With any emails you send make sure you’re really thinking about your opt-in method, how you’re acquiring your data, setting customer’s expectations, where you put your unsubscribe link, and what keywords you use in your email content. By keeping on top of all these you should be able to maintain a good sender reputation and prevent your spam score from triggering any filters.

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