Campaign results now in real-time!

If you haven’t already noticed, the campaign statistics page has had a bit of an overhaul!  Firstly the General statistics are now updated in real-time! The main stats screen looks like this:

 

Secondly we have now broken the sections of statistics in to 3 sections “General” “Links” and “Individual” this means the statistics area is a lot clearer with less to take in on one page.

New editor on the way

After much feedback on the existing email editor tool, we are currently implementing a new product. The new product should significantly improve the time it takes to upload and manage images as well as prepare Qmailer for some exiting new features we have in the pipeline.

Watch this space!

Avoiding Spam filters

Will the message be caught by spam filters?

There are many different spam filters for many different mail services. The key players to watch for are Microsoft Outlook, any of the web based email software Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail etc and perhaps custom mail filters installed specifically for customers like SpamAssassin. Most spam filters use a variety of different rules to determine if a message is legitimate or spam and it goes a lot further than just searching for “Viagra” or similar.

Some basic rules to follow:

1. Use images sparingly and never use them to include text. Most spam filters check images for text as this is a well known way to try to get a spam message through.
2. Avoid obvious spammy content like “buy now” “free this and that” etc. No one word in sales terms will get you marked down as spam but filters look at the message as a whole and work out relevance. Certainly avoid keywords that relate to any sexual aid, weight loss or pornography.
3. Include plenty of text content. Often spam filters will assess a message based on how much real text content there is compared to images. The lower the text to image ratio the more likely it is to be marked as spam.
4. Be careful where you obtain your lists. If you have obtained an email list from a disreputable source, firstly you are in breach of your agreement with QMailer and may not use it. Secondly it is likely to contain false email addresses by some of the big mail companies like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail. They monitor these accounts and mark us down based on how many times we send to them. This can get us banned entirely and we WILL take legal action against you as the sender.
5. Spam filters don’t work on a single element. They weigh up negative and sometimes positive factors based on the above (and more) elements until your message will tally up with an overall score. If that score breaches the figure used to define a spam message, your email will be marked as spam and treated accordingly. Just because you may be marked up for one element does not mean your message will be treated as spam. The best method is to keep testing. Get yourself an email account with each of the big players mentioned above, also if you can get yourself a copy of Microsoft Outlook and send your message to yourself first. If it comes through on some or all of the email accounts that you wanted then you can send. If not, tweak your message based on the above criteria and try again. Create yourself a test group and add the test email addresses into it. Then send a campaign to that group. Its easy to resend by clicking the re-send button next to each address on the main statistics page.

Are you going to be able to learn from the campaign?

One of the most powerful elements of an email campaign is the ability to track link visits. While the main statistics will give you a good idea of the overall campaign you can be more specific as to which links were clicked by clicking the “Link” option from the “Statistics Types” at the top of the page. This page breaks down which links were clicked and how often. This information can be gold dust if used correctly. Consider breaking up your message into subsections each with their own individual link. Each link can even go to the same place. Just make sure they are subtly different. One way is to add an anchor to your link for example:

http://www.google.co.uk/dummy.html#section1

or

http://www.google.co.uk/dummy.html#section2

Unless you have set up your page to handle anchors it will make no difference once they click the link, they will still end up on the same page. The clever bit is that QMailer will treat them as different links. This means that when you review your statistics you will be able differentiate between each link clicked. Therefore you will know which parts of your message are most popular. This gives you the ability to tailor subsequent messages based on your audience feedback. Its a bit like a marketing email and survey in one!

Is the message a benefit?

Is there anything in this message that the recipient would not already be entitled to by other means? Are you giving the recipient any kind of discount by being a member of your loyalty group? These type of schemes and incentives can pull in more responses. Try a loyalty club scheme or similar.

Personalise your message

QMailer allows you to personalise messages in the same style as a mail merge. You simply include in your text the names of the contact information fields against an address record. The following fields are available:

[[email-address]], [[first-name]], [[last-name]], [[company]], [[address-1]], [[address-1]], [[town-city]], [[county]], [[postcode]], [[country]], [[telephone]], [[fax]], [[mobile]], [[spare1]], [[spare2]]

So if for example you have populated the first-name field in your address list you could start your message:

Dear [[first-name]],

Therefore you are instantly creating a personalised email to each of your recipients. Our experience shows that this can increase the click through rate of your campaign considerably.

Don’t hard sell

With a few small exceptions it is not advisable to go for an all out sell email. If your recipient feels like they are receiving a Spam from you then they may well delete it or worse still unsubscribe from your list. Rather than an obvious single message email “Amazing product from ACME, click here to buy”, try the softly softly approach. A really good method is the Newsletter message. Try to consider what your audience is interested in and make some effort to give them some information they may consider useful. If your product or service related to a specific industry then why not put together an industry newsletter? Within this message (as long as its reasonably subtle) you can include links to related products or services to the newsletter items within. This approach will return a far more loyal readership than a hard sell email.

Consider your audience (don’t burn your list!)

This may sound obvious but forming your message and putting in front of the right audience makes a big difference. Are your audience expecting the type of message you are about to send? What would happen for example if you were to cold call them with the same message? If you are selling something in this message is it something that all or only some of your audience may be interested in. Remember the golden rule “Don’t irritate your subscribers!”. If you are considering sending a marketing message to a large number of users is it relevant enough for their interests? If it is only relevant for a small number then you run the risk of burning your list by encouraging your recipients to unsubscribe because they consider your messaged not relevant to their interests.

Remember once a user unsubscribe’s you cannot legally get them back.

You will of course lose an amount of subscribers anyway but there is no sense in pushing them out with off-topic messages. Because it is very easy to reach a wide audience with email it can often be tempting to flood them with messages on the basis that a small percentage will take up the offer. This really is spamming by any other name opt-in list or not and your customers will feel the same way so be careful. If you feel your list is too generic then why not split them in to groups. Setup different groups for people by different interests or sectors that relate more specifically to certain niches. That way you can target your customers better, get a higher Send to Click ratio and reduce the number of unsubscriptions.

About Qmailer

Qmailer allows you to create rich, responsive emails without installing any extra software on your computer. It couldn’t be easier to manage your mailing lists, allow users to subscribe or unsubscribe, build and send emails at the click of a button. What’s more, from the moment you hit send you can monitor the success of your campaign in real-time!

Our easy to use campaign screens give you up to the minute results based on key status tics such as number of successful reads and clicks.

E-newsletters are easily the most responsive form of marketing at your disposal. With each campaign you get instant clear statistics and responses allowing you to further tailor your message to your customers and constantly improve conversions.

Its so easy to manage your emails, you can be up and running in seconds!