Listrak: One To One Newsletter
"One to One" discusses email marketing intelligence and best practices for permission-based marketers. Each edition explores aspects of response-based modeling, segmentation, real-time reporting, testing, and message composition.
4 Simple Rules for Improving Your Email Marketing Performance
The other day a friend of mine asked me, “What is the best way to increase the performance of my email marketing efforts?” The proper response to this question would take an in-depth analysis of my friend’s acquisition, subscription management, content mix, offers and campaign deployment frequency and timing. Since we were short on time I offered her a quick set of suggestions that has helped provide immediate improvements in open, read and click through rates for many Listrak™ customers.
My set of suggestions surrounds the use of the subject line. I feel that now more than ever email recipients are using the subject line to determine whether or not they will open a message. Due to the increasing volume of email received in recipients’ inboxes, we feel that recipients are using the subject line to “window shop.” By this we mean that while your recipients may be happy to receive your permission based emails, if the subject line does not speak directly to their preference they will either delete your message or move on to the next message in their inbox.
The key to speaking directly to your recipients via the subject line comes down to 4 simple rules.
- Get personal, grab attention – Your job is to cut through the clutter. One of the best ways to do this is to personalize your subject line with your recipients’ name. Believe it or not, subject lines that include a recipient’s first name will out perform those without a first name. Don’t believe me? Test your campaigns to prove me wrong.
- State your offer, spark interest – If you have an offer proclaim it in your subject line. If recipients are basing their decision to open your message based on the subject line there is no reason to hide your most compelling offer in your body copy.
- State your brand – Once you can get your recipients’ attention and spark their interest you will want to leverage the trust they have in your brand to have them open the message.
- Set a time limit – Since much about email marketing is about creating impulse decisions; you will want to capitalize on your recipients impulses by giving your subject line a time limit or expiration. An example of this is that the phrase “last chance” will most always outperform “one week left.”
Once you put all of these elements together your subject
lines will look like this:
- Ross, last chance to save 25% at Widgets.com
- Ross, two days left for free shipping at Widgets.com
If you’re concerned about the performance of your email marketing campaigns, I challenge you to test my suggestions. I think you’ll find that the suggestions outlined above will breathe some new life into your email campaigns and will generate positive results.
Listrak Accolades
Earlier this month we were honored to receive the Growth Company of the Year Award from The Technology Council of Central Pennsylvania.
The award was announced on March 3, 2005 at the Technology Council of Central Pennsylvania’s 13th Annual Awards Gala. Listrak™ was chosen from three finalists in the "Growth Company of the Year" category. To qualify as Growth Company of the Year, Listrak™ was required to demonstrate significant growth in revenue, products and services and/or number of employees over the past year.
Domain Alias Feature Helping Deliverability for Listrak™ Customers
From a deliverability and trust perspective it’s important for your email campaigns to appear as if they came from you – not Listrak™. To achieve the highest rates of deliverability and trust Listrak™ includes a set of features to brand your email campaigns using your own domain name in the click-through and tracking links. Listrak™ customers now have their choice of two branding features, Domain Alias or URL Branding. Domain Alias is our newest and best form of Listrak™ customer branding. We recommend that all Listrak™ users use the Domain Alias feature. URL Branding is an older form of customer branding and while still adequate does not provide the full feature set needed to achieve maximum deliverability and trust in email marketing campaigns.
The Domain Alias feature is used to hide any Listrak™ tracking links, alternate browser links, pass-a-long links and unsubscribe links within your email campaigns. When using the Domain Alias feature your URL will appear in the links instead of the default http://tt.lt0.net Listrak™ tracking links.
Your Domain Alias is a fully qualified domain name that points to our tracking server, customers.listrak.com. Your Domain Alias can be any fully qualified domain name of your choice. For example, if your domain name is "acme.com" you could use any of the following Domain Aliases:
email.acme.com
em.acme.com
content.acme.com
In order to use a Domain Alias you must have your IT department, ISP or web hosting company setup a DNS “CNAME” Record that points to customers.listrak.com. Once you have setup your DNS “CNAME” record please input your fully qualified domain name into the Domain Alias input box.
Editorial Note:
Implementing a Domain Alias and using
it in all your email campaigns is the single most important thing
you can do increase your deliverability in 2005. We highly recommend
using it and are here to help you implement it should you need
assistance.
Private Label Listrak Now Available
Starting April 1, 2005, we will be offering a private label version of the Listrak™ application to our partners. Our private label version allows our partners to brand the Listrak™ application using their logo and branding elements. This new opportunity is great for advertising agencies, marketing firms or any other firm that would like to extend their interactive marketing offering to include a branded version of the Listrak™ ASP for email marketing.
For further information, please contact John Lozzi at 717-627-4528 x308.
User Manager Now Available
Listrak™ users with Profiling/Professional level accounts and higher will now see a new option under the “Home/Control Panel” menu bar. We have completed a feature upgrade that now allows Listrak™ users to setup multiple users and define various access levels for each user. This new feature is available for all Profiling/Professional level accounts at no extra cost.
New Listrak Features
This quarter we were pleased to have released several new enhancements to the Listrak™ product. Our R&D pipeline is very full and we’re looking forward to releasing several unique and innovative new products in second quarter of 2005. The following list of new features has been released in the first quarter of 2005. Should you have any questions about these new features please contact support@listrak.com.
- User Manager
- Private Label Version
- Domain Alias feature
- Sender Policy Framework support
- Ability to change an email address
- Ability to customize pass-a-long text
- Ability to control bounce count grace period
- Current Bounce Count Reset after User Activity
- Enhanced Search
- Account Settings Page
