Email marketing is a core part of successful digital marketing, it’s one of the old school strategies associated with marketing online but is still very, very effective.
Mike Parry of Inbox Warriors is an email marketing expert, who has helped many business owners use the medium of email to spread their message online. Thanks to Mike for taking the time out of his busy schedule to do this interview.
Inbox Warriors Bio
Inbox Warriors Limited, is a new kind of email marketing business, launched in 2007.
Inbox Warriors are dedicated to helping clients achieve high deliverability for their email marketing campaigns. We have a team of dedicated professional email marketers with the principals, Mike Parry and Tony Macpherson sharing 22 years experience in the market place. In 2010, Inbox Warriors launched www.6-degrees.co.uk as a marketing hub, supporting all elements of online marketing.
We asked Mike some common email marketing questions we get asked at our courses and in particular during the email marketing module, and he answered them for us.
How important/effective is email marketing compared with social media, press releases, PPC and other online marketing strategies?
In my opinion email is an increasingly important part of the marketing mix. Clients spend vast sums of money on acquisition using the above methods and email gives them the opportunity to capture those eyeballs and market to them relatively cheaply
What is the difference between a hard and soft bounce?
On the surface, very little, they both mean your email wasn’t delivered to the intended target however, technically they can mean very different things.
A hard bounce is a permanently undeliverable email address, generally domain doesn’t exist, typos or someone has changed their email address and these should be removed immediately in order to keep your ISP reputation as clean as possible.
A soft bounce indicates a temporary problem but can often be more sinister than a hard bounce in as much as a particular ISP may be bouncing your emails because of SPAM complaints. To caveat all of this different mail servers may interpret bounces differently so one may interpret this as a hard bounce. The long and short of all of this is clean, responsive data is key to good delivery
What are the major things spam control filters look for and how can you avoid being stopped by these filters?
SPAM filtering is much more prevalent in B2B email and they are looking for things like swearing, SHOUTING, Code errors, Obfuscation, image to copy imbalances. To avoid being filtered out you should run your emails through something like SPAM assassin and make relevant changes. At a B2C level you are much more likely to be filtered out because of a lack of user engagement and complaints, rather than by copy or content
What are the five best ways to recruit new email subscribers?
- Prevalent sign up forms, “make it easy for me to give you my email address” (see http://www.goodsurgeonguide.co.uk/ for one of the best).
- Siteside competitions.
- Friend Get Friend, via traditional viral or Facebook/Twitter email placement.
- Siteside downstream pop unders with an email sign up prompt.
- Brand level opt in using 3rd party competition sites
What time of day and week would you recommend sending out emails?
Unless you have time sensitive offers then I don’t think there is a good/bad time any longer, let common sense prevail but we as users are so attached to our email via smart phones, wireless broadband just about everywhere that time of send has become almost irrelevant excepting where you are sending a regular weekly communication, that I think should go at the same time, same day each week
Is it worthwhile doing list clean ups, by removing in-active subscribers?
Yes, in-active subscribers can cause a number of issues,
- There is a cost implication of mailing them.
- They could contain SPAM traps which in turn will get you blocked by the ISP.
- They will drag your user engagement %’s down which in turn will impact your delivery.
Have you seen any particularly successful email marketing campaigns and why were they so successful?
Richer Sounds, www.richersounds.com are regularly our most successful email broadcasting campaigns having particularly high open rates and click rates.
Why are these so successful? Richer Sounds have a good relationship with their data, they capture all their data themselves either instore or siteside, they keep the file very clean, they have a low bounce rate, they send relevant targeted offers and they are consistent with their send times and dates.
Should you use images in your email marketing campaign?
A sweeping generalisation but yes, if you have relevant images then you should use them but there is a balance that should be taken into consideration that you don’t make the whole email images. Use relevant punchy copy and keep that above the fold. Most email clients wont download images by default and as such if you just rely on the image to make the sale you are restricting your chances.
Do you see much interaction with social sharing icons within emails/email marketing campaigns?
Some, but it is an increasing medium, I see it as a growth opportunity for marketers especially in the b2c environment.
Summary
Thanks to Mike for doing this interview, if you want to find out more about email marketing and become an expert in the subject then I recommend taking one of our courses and once you have completed our course you can think about using Inbox Warriors as your service providers.
