Kimber Cook: Hi, I’m Kimber, Internet Marketing Specialists at Masterlink Interactive. I’m going to talk to you today about email marketing. Specifically, we want to answer the question with the rise of social media popularity, does email marketing still matter?

The fact is, yes email marketing does still matter, it’s very important, email is not dead. Even with the rise of social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter. Though Facebook and Twitter have experienced so much growth lately, that we tend to talk a lot about social media. The fact is that everyone still uses email. Facebook, one of the most popular social media sites currently has over 500 million active users and that’s a big number. The number of worldwide email accounts is projected to increase from over 2.9 billion in 2010 to over 3.8 billion in 2014 and that’s a lot more users that you could be reaching. 75% of all email accounts belong to consumers. These are your customers and they need to be reached. Email has a phenomenal reach. Even if I check my Facebook account every day, if your company’s message is not in my new stream at the moment I log on, I’m going to miss it. But I see every unread email in my email box even if I don’t log into my email every day. With the rise in popularity of smartphones, email marketing can become even more popular. Personally, my phone alerts me every time I get an email message. Now that’s pretty powerful.

If you’d like to talk about email marketing or if you have any questions for us know, we’re here to help. Thanks.

As we mentioned last week, email marketing is still one of the best, most-targeted and effective ways to reach customers. Nearly ten percent of time spent online in America is spent checking email, so email should be an important part of your company’s Internet marketing strategy.

But if you do it poorly—and we’ve all gotten mail from companies who do—you’ll end up with frustrated customers and emails in the spambox.

So here’s a quick checklist to run through before your next email blast:

1. Make the subject line glitter
Is it catchy? Does it draw people in? Is it confusing? Does it give away all the basic information about a product or deal without giving you the chance sell it? More than anything else, your subject line will dictate whether or not the email is met with curiosity and click-thrus. You wouldn’t send off copy without reading it through several times and soliciting feedback—why do that with the subject line? Read it from a customers perspective first.

2. Create compelling, error-free content
Email content isn’t expected to be as flawless, polished and professional as what’s on your website, but it’s still a representation of your company. At best, poor content will just fail to do the job of drawing visitors into your site. At worst, it will keep them from opening such emails in the future, and cast doubt on your company’s overall capabilities—even ones that have nothing to do with writing.

3. Double check the links

Similarly, there’s little more dismaying to a customer who went to the effort to read the email to end up with a dead link. Try them out one-by-one.

We recommend going a step further and even tagging your links with Google Analytics URL Builder to better track your campaign’s effectiveness in Google Analytics.

4.  Test for email client and browser compatibility
Unfortunately, not all email clients are created equal. And even if the gist of your email will come through to most clients, little bugs or visible incompatibilities can be distracting and undermine your message. Furthermore, the rapid rise of smart phones adds another layer of potential problems.

A photo in the wrong place. An unsupported font. There’s just no reason to risk it—try out the email in all the major clients before sending it onward.

5.  Check the plain text
For readers with slow connections or in situations that don’t display HTML, a plain text version of the email can still do the job. The plain text version is often ignored, so make sure it’s clean and properly formatted.

6. Make it easy to unsubscribe

Even the best email marketing campaigns won’t find a captive audience in everybody—even among willing and repeat customers. Make it easy (with a smile) to opt out and unsubscribe. Follow it through with a friendly response, and you’ll maintain good standing with someone who’s still likely to use your products or services in the future.

In fact, the Federal Trade Commission insists upon it, and will actually fine companies who don’t make it easy to unsubscribe from their emails.

7. Plan Comprehensively

Getting visitors to your site is, quite obviously, only the first step. But if your site is incomplete, poorly done, or ultimately misleading about what the email campaign claimed, you’ll just end up with a bunch of disillusioned customers who won’t bother to stop by again.

If you plan out your entire email campaign from the start (which products you’ll promote, how they connect together, and how often you’ll be emailing to maximize efficiency for each one), and if it fits into a larger, thorough web marketing and e-commerce strategy, the email successes should only enhance your other goals.

Of course, at Masterlink, we’re happy to do all this for you—and are happy to boast of an industry-leading success rate in our email marketing campaigns. Contact our Dallas email marketing experts to get started.

Social media marketing is exciting, ever-evolving, an unprecedented blend of personal and global scales, and seemingly unlimited in its potential knock the earth right off its axis. But email marketing is still more important to most small businesses, and needs to stay central in your Internet marketing strategy.

According to Web Pro News: “93% of people have a daily opt-in relationship with at least one consumer brand. 15% on Facebook. 4% on Twitter.”

So let’s take a look at some of the inherent advantages:

Market Value

The current marketplace shows that email is still just as highly-valued as social media. According to Forrester Research, American companies will spend $1.676 billion on email in 2012, compared to $1.649 billion on social media. So even if social media marketing has quickly gained traction, email marketing is still the bread and butter.

Choice

Like social media, email-marketing is an opt-in service. This means that your emails are going to people who want to receive them. But since email tends to be a more private, valued space than social media (say, compared to who you publicly “follow” on Twitter or “like” on Facebook), those opt-ins occupy even more advantageous real estate.

Statistical awareness

Similarly, these opt-ins provide excellent statistics for how many potential customers you’re reaching. Email marketing also allows for the ability to track how many people actually open the marketing emails sent to them, and how many people click through into your website. Emails forwarded to friends and colleagues could also be tracked.

Reliability

Unlike the perpetually in-flux nature social media marketing, email far more staid. It works perfectly well at getting people messages, and there’s little room for improvement or drastic change.

Take Google Mail, for example. Sure, the company keeps adding all sorts of nifty bells and whistles that can either add to the experience (if you like them) or entirely leave it unchanged (if you don’t). But when Google tried to completely reinvent email through their (incredible, yet unnecessary) Google Wave service—which it billed as “email if it were invented today”—the program flopped. There was just little need to improve an already good thing.

Importance

There’s still something a little bit sacred about the email box. I only opt-in to things I really want to know about. I don’t like it cluttered up with unread emails or stuff I don’t care about.

Why?

Because it has my attention. I’ll see every single email that lands in my inbox. Even on a day where I’m following Twitter or Facebook, I’ll still miss at least 30 percent of content that comes through those platforms. But I’ll see all of my email—and you can imagine why this matters to marketing.

According to a Nielsen study, 8.3 percent of all online time is spent checking email. According to Web Pro News, 74 percent of people said they felt pressure to respond to an email the same day they received it, compared to only 52 percent for Facebook messages, and only 26 percent for Twitter direct messages. Email simply matters more.
And at Masterlink, we’re helping pioneer the email marketing field. We boast a 95 percent delivery rate (vs. the 80 percent industry-wide standard), thanks in part to an innovative, customizable suite of services like:

• Tracking ability or statistics like click-thru rates and open rates.

• White listings with Internet service providers that, when combined, account for more than 70 percent of the consumer-level email market.

• Fully-customizable fields for personal information about each contact, including important personal touches like birthdays, account management histories, and zip codes.

• Segmentation ability, which lets you email follow-up messages to your clients and customers, based specifically on how they responded to the first email.

Contact our Dallas email marketing experts for more information.

It’s not quite a return to the Pony Express, but email marketing can be an oft-overlooked (but uniquely excellent) way to engage with customers.

We spend a lot of time here on the Masterlink blog dissecting and analyzing the latest social media marketing trends—all those fun and innovative (and usually free) ways new social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow small businesses to connect with customers and promote products and services. Social media is constantly changing, and the possibilities simply seem endless.

But perhaps the best way to connect with customers is still the old, trusty method (okay fine—the relatively old, but still dazzlingly modern and efficient method): e-mail marketing.

The reason is simple: for all the excitement they bring, only a small slice of consumers actively use platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google’s latest innovation o’ the day. Even Facebook, for all its hundreds of millions of users, is still being slowly adopted by older generations. And the percentage of people who use these as ways to connect with brands and businesses is much smaller still.

But just about everyone uses email.

In fact, in many ways email is actually a more personal way to connect with customers, compared to the “open” information-sharing platforms of social media marketing. And since email is not a specific brand of platform (in the way that some people update their statuses via Twitter, while others only use Facebook, etc.), email marketing doesn’t need to target specific email providers. One email address is as viable a target for a marketing campaign as the next.

Marketing expert Chris Brogan, speaking with Web Pro News at the Inbound Marketing Summit, had it just about right:

“I’ve got a stat like that for consumer brands,” said Brogan. “93% of people have a daily opt-in relationship with at least one consumer brand. 15% on Facebook. 4% on Twitter.”

“93% of people say, ‘I would like to get mail from this company every day…15% Facebook. 4% Twitter,” Brogan reiterated. “…and there’s no age skew in that. It starts at age 13, I think, in the study. And it’s young people just the same…maybe don’t want to be friends with Coke, but they do necessarily want the deals…”

“Send me an email, and tell me, you know, if I can get a deal on Mello Yello this week…” Mike agreed.

At Masterlink, our MasterMail service allows clients to maintain what we call a “High tech – High touch” relationship with their clients and customers. We help our clients both solidify existing client and customer relationships, as well as build new ones. And in addition to email marketing functions, MasterMail can be used for list management, newsletters, surveys, and promotions.

We boast industry-leading results like a 95 percent delivery rate (the industry standard is only 80 percent), thanks to a full suite of cutting edge, customizable features like:

• The ability to track statistics like click-thru rates and open rates.
• White listings with ISPs that combine to represent more than 70 percent of the consumer-level email market.
• Up to 99 fully-customizable fields for personal information for each contact, including important personal touches like birthdays, account management histories, and zip codes.
• Segmentation ability, which lets you email follow-up messages to your clients and customers, based specifically on how they responded to the first email.

Contact one of our Dallas email marketing experts for more information.

Hey guys. I wanted to get a top five or a top ten list out since I love lists, but in memory of July 4th I’ll do a top four. I’ll be quick so that everyone can prepare to have drinks while handling excessively large amounts of explosives. You know, because that’s what the Founding Fathers would have wanted us to do, right?

1. The wrong email – How many times have we sent a great email, and we realized it was sent to the wrong person? How about a simple typo that changed the meaning of the whole blast? It is simple to send out a short apology paragraph. Just make sure to include the original ‘intended’ email. Oh, beg humbly for forgiveness for the SPAM. As much as I don’t like trying to decipher another person’s goof I really don’t get nervous about SPAM when I see another one from them quickly. Help set aside your recipients’ fears.

2. Lame or spammy subject – Email blasts are opportunities to keep in touch your client list. Abusing that privilege is counter-productive. Lame subject lines are not only a waste of your time, since they probably won’t be read, they’re also just as likely to get your client to unsubscribe. A lot of emails are vying for your users’ short attention spans; you have to stand out from the crowd. Spammy subject lines are guaranteed to get your emails blocked and possibly get you flagged in the future.

3. No alternative to images – I’ve seen many great emails sent to me that looked awful simply because my mail client wouldn’t automatically show images. Once I allowed the images from the particular emails they looked great. If your layout doesn’t look decent without images, create a text alternative at least or try another layout. Send yourself tests to different email clients to see possible examples.

4. Non-attention grabbing – Don’t make your readers scroll to see what the email is about. If you have an offer, tell them at the beginning. Put the headline right at the top. Many users only see the first few lines of an email in a preview pane, and they use this to find out whether they want to open the email fully. The subject alone is not enough. If you’re offering 10% off then let them know right away. They’re more likely to keep reading to find out how to get the 10% off from that point.