Holiday Email Campaigns – Tips 5 and 6

By: Megan

August 30th, 2010

Last week’s tips discussed setting your deployment schedule and pre-holiday messaging.  And the first two tips discussed  the phases of the holiday season and the importance of reviewing last year’s campaigns.  Here are this week’s tips:

Tip 5 – Pay attention to basic best practices
The holidays are the busiest time of year and you’ve probably tripled, quadrupled, or more, the number of emails you’re sending.  But that’s no excuse to let basic best practices slip.  Don’t rush through creation and miss important aspects like ALT tags, broken images and links, and other inaccuracies. Pay close attention to:

  • Subject lines – stand out in a crowded inbox with clever, unique subject lines.  Be sure to mention offers and discounts 
  • CTA – use a single, clear call-to-action in your messages – resist the urge to pack your emails with too many products, offers, and alerts
  • Headers/footers – use holiday-inspired headers and footers that link to gift centers, customer service, shipping rates, and delivery calendars
  • Deliverability – monitor bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes as the increase in the number of deployments can cause these numbers to spike and may damage your reputation
  • Update automated campaigns -  if you’re running any automated drip campaigns, review the creative and messaging to give it a holiday flair
  • Take the time to test – email provides almost instant results, so take the time to perform tests, but run the majority of your tests in Q3 so you’re well prepared

Tip 6 – Design effective landing pages
Getting a customer to click on a link in your message is only half the battle.  Getting them to make a purchase is your true goal.  Landing pages must be designed to entice and encourage a sale, and must make it very easy for the customer to complete the purchase.  Just like your emails, your landing pages should be direct and focus on the product linked from the email.  If you require your customers to search for the item, you’ll lose them.  Also, be sure to include links to Live Chat and/or a phone number to reach customer support so your customers have alternative purchasing options.  You can also reduce shopping cart abandonment rates by offering shipping information and delivery schedules up front.

If you have any questions, please contact us online, email info@listrak.com,  or call 877.362.4556.

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Email Marketing Today: Episode 41 – 12 Topics, 60 Seconds

By: Brian Shoff

May 28th, 2010

Ross, Brent, and Brandon hit the digital airwaves for an exciting episode of Email Marketing Today that you don’t want to miss. 12 topics, 60 seconds. They cover everything from Internet privacy to email optimization – all of the hot topics in our industry are discussed in this podcast. Download now.

Download the MP3:
Email Marketing Today: Episode 41 – 12 Topics, 60 Seconds

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How to Pass a Hidden Signup Source into Your Listrak List

By: Brent Shroyer

April 21st, 2010

After my post on “How to Add an Email Sign Up to Facebook & Send a Welcome Series” I received a few questions on how you could track the subscription source back to Facebook.  This is definitely possible and fairly easy to do if you don’t mind editing a bit of HTML. 

I’ll walk through the steps to do this for our Facebook example, but you could use this to easily identify the subscription source for any Listrak list signup code.

  • First we need to create the profile attribute to use.
    • Select the list that you would like to create the subscription code for.
    • Go to Contacts > Profiling > Create New Header
    • Give the header a title… I’ll call it “Subscription Source”.
    • Add an attribute called “Facebook” and change the Data Type to “Check Box”

    • Click the “Save Changes” button.
  • Next, we’ll need to generate the form code.
    • Go to Support & Information > Code Support > Subscribe Contact Form.
    • Select our “Subscription Source” from the “Select Profile Headers To Include” area.  This will add the attributes from this profile header to our form.
    • Change the “After submission, redirect to” to the URL of our confirmation page.
    • To kick off the welcome series we’ll need to also check our Facebook Signup External Event from the “Execute External Events” area. (See the previous post for more information on this.)

    • Click the “Show Code” button.
  • Now that we have the generated form code, we’ll need to edit it to use the hidden input to pass the subscription source.
    • Find the area in the code with our checkbox input. 

    • Delete everything between <label> and </label>.
    • This should leave you with our hidden checkbox code.  Change the value from “off” to “on”

    • From here you can modify the HTML of the form to fit your needs.  To complete the Facebook Signup, see the previous post.

If you need assistance, contact support@listrak.com and they can help you with this process.

It is always a good idea to capture the subscription source so that you can use it later in both reporting and segmentation of your email contacts.

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Email Marketing Today: Episode 40 – Back to the Future

By: Brian Shoff

April 19th, 2010

Ross, Brent, and Brandon discuss Listrak’s latest whitepaper “Applying Classic RFM Metrics to Increase the ROI of your Email Marketing Messages” in this episode of Email Marketing Today. RFM has been used by direct marketers forever, but email’s low cost has prevented senders from measuring subscribers’ recency, frequency, and monetary value until now. Now, email marketers have to engage each and every subscriber with messages that are relevant to where they are in the buying cycle – tune into this episode to learn how! Download now.

Download the MP3:
Email Marketing Today: Episode 40 – Back to the Future

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