Bounces from old email addresses are never a good look: not only do they detract from your campaign results – they have the potential to downgrade your reputation with email services. Providers like Gmail don’t like receiving lots of mail sent to invalid accounts, and this can result in your carefully crafted communications being banished to the Spam or Junk Mail box.
If you use a reputable email service provider it should automatically monitor and manage any bounced addresses – perhaps by removing them from the “send” list after three failed attempts – but rather than completely ending the relationship and removing gone-no-address or “GNA” customers from your database for good, it’s worth trying a few approaches to get back in touch. After all, retaining customers who are engaged with your email programme is a whole lot easier than acquiring new email addresses, not to mention a whole lot kinder to your budget!
Here are three simple ways to attempt to reunite with your database exes, instead of breaking up for good:
1) If you can, flag bounced addresses in your CRM or loyalty system and get your front line team to politely request new contact details when that customer next makes a purchase in store or phones your call centre.
2) Where you have mobile numbers for customers, text GNAs with a simple request for their new email address. This can be made a whole lot easier than it sounds via an automated programme that’s set up to send a text every time an email does bounce.
3) Consider running a regular direct mail (DM) campaign that invites those with bounced email addresses to update their details online or via TXT.
Of course, in an ideal world, all your customers would be so highly engaged by your relevant, timely communications that they’d make a point of keeping you updated with their details. But the reality is that people do swap jobs, move countries and change email address and in any year you can expect a 3 – 6 % churn in your database. That’s why it’s important to also have a plan in place to continually attract new subscribers. Check out my previous blog for some ideas on keeping your opt-in list well stocked and refreshed.
The world of marketing is changing so rapidly it can be hard to know which new opportunities to back and which to observe more cautiously from the sidelines.
QR Codes are one of those recent arrivals that have yet to gain real traction in New Zealand, but if overseas uptake is any indication, we’re likely to be seeing a lot more of them.
On the face of it, there is plenty to like about these little black boxes: in our always-on, always-connected world, QR Codes help deliver on customers’ expectations for immediacy of purchase or contact, and for marketers they also overcome the dilemma of how to make traditional static media instantly interactive and engaging.
Continue reading →
More and more New Zealanders are choosing to use smartphones and tablets, and that’s producing some interesting opportunities for marketers.
Aggregated results from campaigns deployed through our Engage platform in December and January showed that around 15% of our clients’ emails were opened by customers on the go. That’s up from just 5% at the same time last year. For some clients the figure was even higher – with up to 25% of their emails being read on mobile devices.
With the recent drop in both the cost of handsets and the price of data plans, the number of Kiwis using smartphones is set to increase even further. But before you rush to redesign all your email templates – and risk throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water – there are some simple adjustments you can make to ensure your emails are optimised for mobile, while also providing an engaging experience for recipients who prefer to do things at their desktop. Continue reading →
In almost every business there’s an unsung hero – someone who works away quietly and diligently, achieving results without any fuss, and often slipping under the radar.
In our case, that silent genius in the corner is not a person but a marketing tool – a piece of functionality called Share-to-Social that we added to our Engage platform last year.
With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can add this feature to your email or other online promotions to dramatically increase their reach. I thought it was about time we outed this backroom over-achiever and encouraged more of you to use it more often.
Forward to a friend 2.0
In essence, Share-to-Social is a modern update of the old “forward to a friend” email function. By adding a Share-to-Social button to selected content in your emails, you enable recipients to share that promotion or offer with their social networks, quickly and easily magnifying your reach for that campaign with no additional investment of time or resource.
Make your brand social but not invasive
Many consumers have become resistant to brand promotions they perceive as invading their social media space, but the beauty of this function is that it’s not a digital cold call – it’s an introduction made courtesy of a friend and therefore much more likely to be well-received by your target audience. It also restores some level of content control to marketers – you choose what people see when they click through; a copy of the email, a survey or event, a website or even a custom page you create. Continue reading →
One of the huge advantages of digital communications is undoubtedly the ability to test and then adapt your approach based on audience response.
Internationally, marketers often won’t deploy a campaign without first checking that they’ve chosen the optimal subject line, messaging, calls to action, layout and images by sending it to a random segment of their multi-million-member database, and monitoring the reaction. Continue reading →
Started your New Year’s campaign to get fit?
If that all sounds a bit too much like hard work, you could always focus on fighting the flab in your customer database instead.
Here are three top tips for getting – and keeping – your subscriber list in peak performance shape.
Continue reading →
Want to make 2012 your best year yet?
Here are our top tips for getting the most out of your customer engagement programmes for the next 12 months:
1. If you’re not already tracking the engagement level of your customers, now’s the time to start
Customer engagement is all about building relationships – and like any relationship it pays to keep an eye on how the other partner is feeling: do you need to spend more time with them or less? Are you giving them good reasons to notice and interact with you or are you turning them off? Continue reading →
The battle of the iPhone versus other smartphone platforms may be hotting up overseas, but it seems in New Zealand we just can’t get enough of Apple.
As part of our new in-depth reporting feature Insight, we’ve been looking at the devices Kiwis use to read the millions of emails deployed via our Engage platform each day, and while it’s still too early to draw statistically significant conclusions there are some interesting trends emerging. Continue reading →
A few months ago I blogged about the concept of marketing automation as a valuable tool for customer engagement.
But there’s nothing like a real case study to help bring buzz words to life, so I thought I’d share some work we’ve been doing with Harvey World Travel who place a huge emphasis on keeping in touch with their thousands of customers.
Late last year, they began managing all their email communications using our Engage platform and since that’s been running smoothly with great uptake, we agreed that it was time to take the next step and focus on further enhancing the end-to-end experience for their customers.
The result is a really great example of a multi-channel automated customer on-boarding and engagement programme, and the marketing team has kindly agreed to let me share it with you here. Continue reading →
We all know that “Content is king” so how do you make sure yours rules?
The Marketing Association’s new Copy Essentials Digital course could be a good place to start. It promises to help you learn to write more effectively for the web, email, banner ads and search.
When: Wednesday 16 November, 8.30am – 5.30pm
Where: University of Auckland Business School, The Owen G Glenn Building, Auckland
Check out the Marketing Association site for more information.
In the meantime, here are a few of my favourite online writing tips: Continue reading →
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