There’s a new development in email marketing that could have a negative impact on the deliverability of your messages.

An increasing number of Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) are now monitoring engagement statistics to determine where your email will land in a recipient’s inbox. This protects the deliverability of emails that are consistently wanted, segmenting them from email with low engagement statistics.

What does this mean for you?

If the emails you are distributing are acquiring a high number of known opens and click throughs, for example then the ISP will send your email into the recipient’s inbox. On the other hand if your email activity is suffering from high bounce rates and minimal known opens then the ISP’s are more likely to file your email in the junk folder.

To improve your email deliverability, we recommend the following actions:

1. Boost click-throughs

One of, if not the most telling sign of positive engagement is someone clicking through from one of your emails. Even users clicking on the ‘view in browser’ link will improve your reputation with ISP’s. As a result it has become quite common for companies to flood their emails with links however this can look too over facing to the recipient.

One way to avoid this is to distribute single call to action emails broken down into three sections, all ending with a link to the relevant content on your website:

• A sentence summarising the content.

• Followed by a Bulleted List highlighting the benefits to add more incentive to those who require a bit more encouragement.

• Finally, the full blurb providing a detailed explanation of the benefits that await them by clicking through.

2. Boost ‘not junk’ responses

One of the ISP’s measurements of engagement is to monitor which emails are moved from the junk folder to a recipient’s inbox. This is a real vote of confidence in your email reputation and will help increase deliverability of your whole campaign. It is quite common for companies to ask people to sign up for email content on their website, during this process you should include details of the address your emails will be coming from and even the subject line, preferably on the sign up landing page and the welcome email. This should provide enough motivation for the new sign up to search their junk box, if the welcome email has not already landed in their inbox.

3. Segment your email communications

In response to the ISP monitoring, many companies are starting to segment their email lists by the level of engagement. This allows you to cater the email content to each segment, therefore increasing the relevance. The email marketing industry has identified 3 levels of engagement:

• The Zombies

• The Fence Dwellers

• The Converted

Here is our advice on how to tackle each segment:

The Zombies – Those who have not opened one of your emails for over 6 months. These have most likely abandoned their email accounts, perhaps they have moved job and the address hasn’t been shut down. If they do still exist you will tend to have very little rapport and therefore it would be best to remove them from your email list. If this sounds a little bit dramatic maybe try sending them one last email with a sensational subject line.

The Fence Dwellers – These people are regularly opening your emails and reading your content but don’t feel the need to click through very often. A little more encouragement is required to get them to jump down from the fence and engage in your emails. Content is key, perhaps make the call to action a little softer, a little more fun and elaborate.

The Converted – People who always open and nearly always click through, without even thinking about it. The converted really like you, so let them help you convert others. Make it easy for them to socially share your content (Twitter, Facebook icons, ‘tell a friend’ buttons), it’s more likely to go viral and send newcomers to your website.

A little segmentation can really bring your emails to life.

The lucky winners who will receive an IPod touch are:

• Simon Mabb: Romeros Insurance Brokers
• Phil Worthington: Lucas Fettes and Partners
• Richard Senior: Heath Lambert Limited
• Stuart Williams: Cowens Insurance Brokers

Congratulations to you all we hope you enjoy the IPod’s and find your marketing consultation’s valuable.

1. The golden rule – Don’t just do social networking for the sake of social networking: To effectively implement your social media activity you first need to think about a set of objectives you wish to achieve. Are you trying to find potential customers? Build loyalty among the ones you already have? Or improve your brand image?

2. Create useful content that adds value to your customers and that others will find interesting: This will not only demonstrate your expertise but also show you understand your customer’s needs. Tweeting about pressing issues affecting your industry will generate more interest than your love of Starbucks.

3. Be on your best behaviour! Think hard about actions that could cause a negative reaction within the social arena. Preventative behaviour can be frustrating but it’s a good thing on the whole, live your life as if your mother is watching.

4. Keep your profile up to date: Users will see straight through your marketing efforts if the last blog you posted was on April 30th…2009!

5. Customize your landing pages: Don’t stick with the generic default layout, the tools are there for a reason – use them.

6. Don’t forget about website and search engine optimisation: This can work not only for your website but also your social media accounts.

7. Use your own content: Don’t overuse links and widgets to other companies content. You want people looking at your content!

8. Expand your network: Connect with peers and Industry Authorities; this can help you raise awareness by jumping on the shoulders of some of the “Big Boys”. Authorities will generally follow you back and in a lot of cases republish your content (for example, retweet) not only endorsing you but also highlighting your company as a valuable resource. Don’t forget this works both ways, treat those as you wish to be tweeted.

9. Provide links to your social media on everything you distribute: Make everyone aware of the various ways they can contact you. People may not always read what you’re saying but they’ll repeatedly see your logo if nothing else. When the time comes, they’ll know who to turn too.

10. Make your social site a necessity: Use social media to announce exclusive deals and offers only available through your social media channels.

11. Be courteous: Follow those that follow you, they need followers as much as you do. You never know what it may lead too.

12. Take advantage of the tools on offer: Hash tags, URL’s, likes and @mentions are a great way to increase the exposure of your communications to a far greater audience.

13. Encourage employees to interact with current and potential customers: Boost worker participation in social media. Build a rapport and get to know your customers, they’ll be more likely to offer feedback this way and recommend you to their peers.

Promoting your site’s address on all your company’s literature is a good start, but you’ll still be missing out on large numbers of potential visitors who don’t know anything about your business. If you are really serious about driving traffic to your site, you need to get to grips with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

The basics of SEO aren’t that difficult to get grasp. Search Engine Optimisation is really just about 3 things:

• Submission – telling the search engines your site exists.
• Increasing visibility – helping them understand what it’s all about
• Building trust: getting them to trust your site over and above your competitors.

Of course, this post doesn’t cover everything to do with SEO, but it should give you a good introduction. Let’s start by looking at submission.

Stage 1: Submission

It’s worth checking first to see that search engines know you exist – do a search for your company and see what happens.

If there’s no sign of your site on Google, you’ll need to submit your site at www.google.com/addurl.html. While it’s definitely worth doing this, it can take Google a few weeks to action these new site submissions.

To speed the process up of being listed, get a link on an established website. Google can then follow this link to your website and then you’ll be up and running much sooner.

If finding your website was a struggle, it’s time to make it more visible.

Stage 2: Increasing visibility

Once Google knows your website exists, it will periodically visit it using its Googlebot to build up a picture of what it’s all about. So what is this mysterious Googlebot?

Understanding Googlebot

In simple terms, Googlebot is an application that automatically scans your site. It follows all the internal links it can find on your site to crawl each page looking for clues on what your website is about. It then stores all this information in its databases ready to spring into action when someone does a search.

Increasing your site’s visibility is all about choosing the best keywords and phrases that potential users will type into Google to find your site. You need to make sure the Googlebot can find them during its crawl.

When it’s crawling through your site, Googlebot is particularly looking for key words and phrases in the following on each page:

• The URL.
• The content
• The code behind the page

Now you understand what the Googlebot it’s up to, you need to start thinking like it, but with one important caveat. If it suspects you’re trying to trick it into thinking your site’s something it’s not, you’ll be labelled as a spammer and be heavily penalised.

Choosing your keywords – research

To decide on the best keywords to use, you need to do some research.

Start by listing all the search phrases you think people would use to find your site. Once you’ve got this list of phrases, you need to expand your list further to include the searches actually being used by Google users.

The best way to do this is to use Google’s own Keywords Tool which you can find at http://tinyurl.com/2cvvx8.

Google’s keyword tool allows you to enter one of your search phrases and see the real-life searches related to it. Enter each of your search terms and see what it brings back. For example, “cheap car insurance” returned related searches including “cheap car insurance quote”.

What’s more, the keyword tool also provides you with the monthly search volumes for each phrase. This is really valuable information to help you select the best keywords to use.

Choosing your keywords – selection

Unfortunately, you can’t include all the keywords on your list as it will dilute your results. You need to be selective and decide from all the potential keywords which are the ten best ones. Also, this isn’t just a matter of picking the terms with the highest volume of searches, because that’s what everyone else is doing. You need to set yourself apart and start thinking strategically.

To get the best results, you need to base your selection on striking the balance between the search demand for your keywords versus the number of sites competing for it. Finding a niche that you can dominate will generate more visitors than being lost down the rankings of a popular term.

It’s now time to put these phrases in all the right places.

Using your keywords: page URLs

Your page’s URL is a good indicator of its content for search engines.

This makes sense – if you wanted to tell the world about “car insurance”, the first thing you’d do is go out and buy a domain like www.carinsurance.com (sorry that’s already gone).

Now the chances are that your site’s domain will be your company’s name. But this shouldn’t stop you picking your most attractive keyword and optimising the full URL of each page like this:

www.someinsurancebroker.co.uk/carinsurance

Always avoid generic names such as “page2.html” in your URLs – it’s just a wasted opportunity.

Using your keywords: page content

So the search engines now have an idea of what your site is all about. Next, they start to look for more clues. And the best place to find these clues is within the content of each page, especially within headings and the body text.

The search engines scan through your content trying to pick out the most important words on the page. They then score each word based on how early and how regularly it appears. With this in mind, work your chosen keywords into the headings and first parts of your body text.

You need to be very careful not to make the search engines think you’re trying to trick them. If you repeat certain phrases again and again all you’re going to do is trigger spam filters and you’ll be penalised.

Using your keywords: Page Code

Behind your site sits the code that tells your browser how to display each page. The final part of making your site more visible is to optimise this code with your keywords.

But don’t worry if all this talk of code sounds too technical. This is where Ignition can help you out.

Page title

Of the 3 elements of code optimisation, page title is definitely the one to concentrate on.

Google gives far more weighting to what appears in the page title than it does to either description or keywords. It’s therefore prime real estate to place your most attractive keywords.

Moreover, Google uses the text in your page title when it lists your site in its search results. This makes it very useful to entice visitors into your site.

Page description and keywords

Page description and keywords have much less value to Google, probably because it’s been the most abused area of Search Engine Optimisation in the past. However, they do still have some relevance for other Search Engines, so it’s worth including them. As with Page titles, make sure they include your most attractive keywords.

Stage 3: Building trust:

The third and final stage of web optimisation is vital to getting high up in the search listings – building Google’s trust in your site.

Even if you’ve done a great job on stages 1 and 2, the best you can hope for is to be in contention to appear in Google’s search results. But, with millions of sites out there, your site could get easily lost.

Remember that Google’s aim is to provide it’s users with the most relevant content for their searches. So when you do a search on Google, it ranks the results by the level of confidence it has in each page’s relevance to your search.

So how does Google come to a decision on how much trust it has in your site?

The simple answer is that it counts the number of external links into your site. The more links it counts, the more confidence it has.

Google uses this link count to give each page a score out of 10 – this is the all important Google Page rank. Popular sites such as the BBC achieve scores like 9/10.

But it’s not just a simple equation of more links = higher page rank. Google goes a step further and looks at the quality and relevance of each link to decide how reliable and appropriate they are. So a link from the BBC page talking about insurance will be given far higher weighting than links from 1/10 page rank sites that have nothing to do with insurance. It’s therefore really important to get good quality links from content that’s relevant to yours.

Another way to get good links is by contributing to public forums and to write interesting blog posts (like this one) and, hopefully, have the world link to it just because they like it.

Summary

If you’ve followed the simple steps in this blog, you’ll go a long way to improving the promotion of your website. To summaries, here are 5 rules to help you on your way:

• Be Patient. Don’t expect the changes you’ve made to your site to appear on Google straight away – remember that the Googlebot will only visit your site every few weeks, if you’re lucky.
• Build those links to boost your page rank scores – keep them relevant and avoid the paid listings, otherwise  the search engines will think you’re trying to artificially increase your ranking.
• Be consistent – whatever keywords you decide to compete on, use them consistently across all the different elements of your pages.
• Be relevant – You’ll be found out and penalised if you use keywords that aren’t relevant to your site.
• Experiment – The weighting Google gives to different elements of SEO are constantly changing so keep experimenting and tweaking to find out what works best for your site.

 
Hopefully this blog should have helped demystify Search Engine Optimisation. Investing in SEO can definitely pay dividends if done properly. If you think you need help, why not give Ignition a call.

Now take a closer look at all the emails you receive, especially all the ones that end up in deleted items.  You’ll see the majority are really poorly executed. So how do you make sure your email campaign doesn’t become one of them?

Here, in the first of a series of blogs, I’ll talk about the stages you need to go through to make sure your emails are the ones that get read.

Planning
The planning stage is the most critical part of any marketing campaign. It ensures you’ve thought about all the elements you need to make your campaign a success.
In terms of email marketing, before you even start to thinking about what your email looks like, you need to ask yourself five key questions:

• What do you want to say?
• Who is going to read it?
• What will they get from what they read?
• What do they do after they’ve read it?
• What do you do in response?

Having the answers to these questions will allow you to formulate an effective email marketing plan. So let’s think about each one in more detail:

What do you want to say?
Marketing emails aren’t the place to write a novel, so what are the key messages you need to get across? There’s also a killer question to ask: is email the best way to get these messages across?

Who is going to read it?
Knowing who your audience is will help you build the right mailing list and tailor your message to their needs.  This is really important because sending the wrong content to the wrong people will only alienate.

What will they get from what they read?
Let’s be realistic, your audience isn’t waiting with bated breath for your email. You need to find a way of grabbing their attention and maintaining interest through content that they genuinely value. 

What do they do after they’ve read it?
So your audience like what they read; what do you want them to do next and how do you get them to do it? Think carefully about your call to action.

What do you do in response?
You’ve got your message right and people respond to your email. Will you build on the momentum and send them further emails? Maybe you’ll phone them up? Whatever you decide to do, it’s best to have a plan in place before you’ve pressed send and the emails start to land in inboxes.

So that’s the planning stage of your campaign done. In my next blog on email marketing I will look at how you start to put your plan into action by creating targeted and relevant content.

Thanks for reading.
MIKE

Mike McNabb
Client Services Executive

I can’t put my finger on why. Maybe it’s because we’re sharing stand D2 with AXA and catching up with our clients who’ll be attending the event. Or, maybe it’s because our new addition to the team will be with us.

Yes, that’s right; come and see us and you’ll be able to meet Flo, our new frog!

Flo brings with her a wealth of practical marketing experience having spent many years in the marketing pond – we are sure you’ll love to meet her.

Oh, and by the way, Flo’s first contribution to Ignition is to offer you 15% off any Ignition service plus a free ½ day marketing consultancy*, if you book an appointment with one of the Ignition team during the BIBA Conference & Exhibition.

Not only that, but by booking an appointment during the event you will also be entered into a prize draw to WIN one of 4 iPod Touches!

Flo is really looking forward to seeing you on stand D2! See you there.

*please see our website for terms and conditions.

Most businesses, no matter what industry they’re in passively collect data that, when analysed can provide deep insight. More and more businesses are getting smarter about how they collect and manage their data, and quite rightly are giving analyses a prominent place in their decision-making processes.

But becoming a data-driven or even efficient business isn’t easy. There are plenty of pitfalls that can turn data into a liability and even result in decisions being made without the facts being known.

Here are five rules for data-driven businesses looking to avoid those pitfalls.

 1) Too much data is harmful

More and more businesses have recognised the importance of collecting data and analysing it to drive important decisions. That’s a good thing. But many can make the mistake of collecting every bit of data they can find. This is not only distracting; it can reduce the quality of data-driven decisions because those decisions are only as sound as the analysis they’re based on. When too much data is collected, there’s a greater likelihood that the wrong analysis will be performed.

 2) KPI metrics derived from data should be tied to goals

Sure, knowing, for instance, what your company spends, on average, acquiring each new customer is a good thing to know. But how much should you be spending acquiring each new customer? Chances are that’s a lot more important, which is why, in many if not most cases, metrics should be associated with goals.

 3) Context helps

Context is your friend, so use it when setting goals. Using the customer acquisition example: what is the average cost of customer acquisition in your market? Are you above or below that? Are you getting what you want from your activity? What reduction in customer acquisition costs would boost income by 10%?

By adding context to your equation, you can make sure that the goals you’ve tied to KPI metrics are meaningful to your business.

 4) What happened then, will not necessarily happen now

Data is inherently limited to yesterday and today – therefore applying predictive analytics which applied yesterday to today’s data – does not necessarily mean the future will follow the same historical performance. No matter how sophisticated your data is or how you have performed previously, predictions are simply educated guess work.

Data-driven business that use data to make educated decisions; should not naively believe that data is a crystal ball.

 5) Don’t dismiss the qualitative

Hard data is wonderful, but if you’re only paying attention to the hard data, you’re missing out on a huge part of the big picture. How do your customers relate to your products and services? What is most important to your stakeholders? These are questions that can help guide a business down the right path, but the most important aspects of the answers to these kinds of questions won’t always be provided by numbers that can be crunched.

You will be able to find out more about us by coming to visiting us – on stand 27.

Even if you don’t want to come and talk about marketing, at least come and see the latest addition to our team.

Good PR recognises that the best ‘PR plan’, needs to be representative of good products/services or else it will only harm your reputation.

Good PR is not just about the over-glorified launch.

Good PR helps build and sustain a groundswell of brand support – changing consumer behaviors via a steady stream of relevant and candid communication to ‘industry’, ‘media’ and ‘consumers’.

Good PR celebrates the client’s customers in an inclusive, non-exploitive way.

Good PR welcomes the input of neutrals and critics, and adapts strategy accordingly.

Good PR is proactive in idea generation and responsive in a crisis. 

Good PR is measurable.  (And yet also hard to measure, since most clients want to measure different things.)

Good PR leverages pre-existing relationships with influential people – relationships built on trust and credibility earned over years of service.

Good PR doesn’t need to know the editors of particular media.  Even though such relationships can come in handy, good PR almost always ‘gets ink’ or ‘digitalised’ because a good story has been well-told to the right people.

If you search the web the consensus amongst the digital marketing world is that Tuesday is the day.

We decided to test this theory by looking through all the stats of all the B2B email campaigns sent through our C3 marketing system.

The average you could expect from an email campaign is 25.8% of emails sent being opened. If you look at the stats on a day-by-day basis there is some fluctuation around this average:

You’ll see that Tuesday does have an above average open rate, but Friday has a higher average at 27.9%. Interestingly Thursdays have the lowest average open rate at just 23.8%.

Does this mean that your email marketing mantra should be “Send on a Friday and avoid Thursdays”?

Well our answer to that question is “NO!”

There really isn’t enough of a difference between the average open days to make this a planning strategy. In addition, at Ignition we don’t put too much emphasis on opens. It’s too unreliable. Just because your email has been opened doesn’t mean that it’s been read.

For us, the killer stat in email marketing is click through rates as it shows the level of engagement your audience have had with the email. If they’ve clicked on a link in your email it means that they’ve read the content enough to find the link and they’ve found the content of interest to want to click through.

The average click through rate for B2B marketing is 10.6% of opened emails. If you look at the stats on a day-by-day basis the results are far more varied.

The old favourite send day of Tuesday performs well above average at 15.2% of opened emails, but the surprise winner is Thursday with an 18.8% click through rate. Remember we’d written Thursday off as the ideal send day based purely on opens. It turns out to be the clear winner for levels of engagement.

Interestingly Friday, while having the highest open rate, has a below average click through rate. The clear loser is Monday with an average click through rate of 5.1% of opened emails. It seems very few of us take the time to open and read an email on a Monday.

So it looks like Thursdays and Tuesdays are the best days to send emails if you want your audience to properly engage with them and you should avoid Mondays like the plague!

Do we recommend this as a rule never to broken? The answer is No! If you’ve got important news alert, it’s better to send it on a Monday and for it to be timely rather than wait for Tuesday just to get more people to read it. But if you’ve got regular news emails, it’s probably best to go for a Tuesday or Friday.