Most users of email marketing software will experience at some point that their emails can reach their subscribers’ inboxes faster or slower than with previous sends which is the reason that we often are asked how long it takes for an email to be delivered.

 To provide the answers, we asked our delivery expert, Sean Swanepoel who advised us ….. ‘The speed of our sending is dictated by how fast the recipient server can accept . Because of these limitations, caused by network issues, full mailboxes and invalid addresses, there is a strain created by retrying. Without those, delivery would be almost ‘light speed’! ‘

As Shawn highlights and as we have stated in past blog articles emails go through many steps to reach their target consequently affecting the delivery time of your campaign and here we list a few of them :

•    How busy the ISP (Internet Service Provider) is
•    How fast the recipient email server is able to accept it
•    The anti-spam techniques employed by the recipient server to block SPAM from getting through to the recipient.

As with all other services, ISPs have their peak periods and slow periods and it is at the really busy periods that email sends are likely to be delayed. It may be useful to keep this in mind when planning your sends.

How fast the recipient Server can accept the incoming email

Every email is dispatched from the sending server to the recipient server.  It is not, however simply a matter of getting from one end to the other.  With Spam being everyone’s major annoyance, ISPs are being ultra-serious in their attempts to ensure that their users don’t receive hundreds and thousands of SPAM messages to their in boxes, so they set up certain rules that every email must go through in order to be delivered to the inboxes of that particular ISP’s clients.  The settings can vary widely from each ISP although they will all usually include a limit on the number of recipients for each message or connection, or a rate limit, such as a limit on the number of messages permitted to be sent out over a certain period of time.  This is their outline of how many emails they are willing to accept over a given period.
If your sends do not comply with these specifications, your emails are more likely to bounce.  This is not a big worry however, because bulk email service providers call upon the assistance of Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) whose task it is to arrange their sends according to the various specific limitations of each individual ISP, thus ensuring that their sends are in compliance with these regulations.

Anti-spamming techniques

ISPs apply a wide range of anti-spamming techniques as a strategy to combat spam.  (Sean suggests that you read more about them here).  A common example of this is Grey Listing; This is when emails are required to retry over a specific period of time before they will be accepted by the ISP.  This is a really efficient anti-spamming device, as spammers do not generally retry sending their messages.  However, it does have an impact on you, as your legitimate bulk emails also have to undergo this process before they can be  delivered.

So there you have it - predicting an exact delivery time is a highly technical ‘piece of string’  – and, as there are so many factors involved, nearly as impossible to estimate. However, As members of ReturnPath, the EEC and Truste, GraphicMail does try to ensure timely delivery.  To find out more about deliverability issues, read this blog article or watch our video.

Many email service providers can supply you with reports on all the campaigns that you send – these are available to Graphicmail clients free of charge. Our comprehensive email marketing report allows you to track all this :

• How many emails were sent
• How many were actually delivered successfully
• Why the unsuccessful ones failed to be delivered
• WHO opened the email ( not just numbers )
• Which links those readers clicked on
• Which of them forwarded it to a friend
• Which of those unsubscribed
• Which were treated as spam

 As well as a standard listing, it also displays the information in a graph

As we are regularly providing you with hints, tips & features which we hope you will use to enhance your email campaigns, we thought you may be interested to see a case study from a major media company who optimised the entertainment email that they send out every week, with a series of small changes that they found showed incremental lifts in key metrics, including four tactics that were aimed at simplifying the overall template look and clarifying the calls-to-action. 

•    They reduced the number of articles in the newsletter.
•    They moved the images and the calls to action so that they displayed above the email fold.
•    They added a navigation bar so that it appeared at the top of their newsletter.
•    They applied A/B split testing so that they could test the effectiveness of differing subject lines – one against the other.

If you would like to see how they implemented these changes and the results that were yielded for their campaign click here. Once you have done that, why not try implementing some of the changes yourself using the GraphicMail tools and features? 

Here are some ideas to help and inspire you:

•    Conduct A/B split tests
•    Read the blog article on forward-thinking email design
•    Create a call to action by adding social widgets
•    Learn how to become an email marketing pro

 Click here to read the full article

It’s been 10 years since email marketing came on the scene, popularised by the growth of online communication. It was a very different entity back then with mass emails being sent out on the on the expectation that ‘with all these, someone is bound to reply!’ only to find that they were easily sidelined into spam boxes.

In the intervening period of trial and error, message based marketing efficiency has greatly increased with respondents being much more thoughtful. Email marketing has consequently become a highly valued way to reach consumers.

Some of the changes in the email marketing industry can be read in this article by Wendy Roth which will, no doubt yield you some big results when allied to the following tips from the past 10 years :

1.    The way to measure success is by the activity of your mailing list and NOT the number of subscribers. So the thing to consider is how productive your list is - not how large it is.

2.    Every messages should be personalised. You will find that recipients respond to a personal message - so always use targeted e-mails as this will encourage interaction. Invite feedback from your subscribers and ensure that you always act upon that feedback to create a dialogue with your readers.

3.    Be respectful of the wishes of internet service providers. Be responsible when e-mailing – honor all recipient requests, act on complaints, obtain addresses in an honest and fair way. If you do these things, ISPs will respond by being more likely to cooperate with your email marketing campaigns.

4.    Always remember that there are many different ways of viewing email. There are many different users with many different browsers. There are also a myriad of personalised settings - some of those do not allow graphics, some of them peak at your newsletter through their preview pane, some will disable HTML. It’s a good idea to keep this in mind when creating and delivering your message.

5.    There are a plethora of Smart-phones giving the ability for their owners to check their e-mail from almost any location and as these download and display messages much differently from computers, it is wise to design your e-mails accordingly.

6.    Before you send your message, give some thought to what you want to achieve -  the purpose of the message!  Make your subscribers appreciate the value of belonging to your mailing list.

7.    Target each of your customers! Gather data on every e-mail recipient then tailor your messages to fit those preferences.

8.    Measure success not by the number of people who have read your message, but their reactions after reading it. Do they just delete the message, or do they take some time and maybe click through to your website? gaining the involvement of your recipients is paramount.

9.    Involve yourself in social media - but do it productively give your readers some incentive to become followers.  Why should they follow you on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook? Offer discounts, downloadable coupons, special offers or breaking news to the ones who show their loyalty through social media.

10.    Ensure that all of your marketing channels are working in cooperation. The most rewarding marketing departments are run like well-oiled machines with all e-mailings, websites, printed material and broadcast marketers working in unison. Coordination leads to greater profitability!

Design means far more than just the visual

I’m sure you will agree that companies send out emails with the object of marketing their company.  They then get a designer to create the email without consulting the marketing guys. So we recommend that they (and you ) get those two people together and, with their different ideas, pull together to create a newsletter that is not only visually appealing but one that is targeted to your readers.

The visual:

Whilst looks are important, they are not the be-all and end-all. Looks are only important to recipients who OPEN your email. More important is what they see before they reveal your email - the [from] and [subject] lines that display in their inbox!   If it doesn’t appeal they may not reveal – in fact they may delete it altogether.

When designing your newsletter we recommend that you consider the reader – what you think is current, exciting or easy to use, may not be their opinion. It’s important to consider what makes them tick. Getting that right is the difference between having your email read in detail or assigned summarily to the deleted items folder.

Best Practice:

It’s always best to follow industry best practice with all your marketing campaigns, but as these are guidelines, not rules, you may find yourself on an odd occasion wanting to do something really different with your design. Who knows…… maybe it will grab the attention of your readers and make them think that you have the best design team around. And even if it generates a drop in readership you’ll notice that in your stats as well and maybe go back to the ‘old’ design. Handy things those stats!

Here’s a handy article by email marketing guru Mark Brownlow who recommends taking a further look at changing that rule book – it’s well worth a read.

 
Targeting:

For an email marketing campaign to be effective we need to research our subscribers to discover what is of interest to them. Questionnaires and A/B split testing both help in the research but the best way is to contact them directly; talk to them and bear in mind as they answer, that they are not email marketers and their answers may be geared toward pleasing you rather than giving you honest appraisal

The BIG Picture:

In an ideal world our subscribers open, read and are driven to action and click the links. It’s important then, that the landing page destination reflects the same high visual standard that you’ve set in your newsletter. This attention will enhance your company image and encourage your readers to become customers as they come to appreciate the entire experience.

On the point of experiences, we’ve repeatedly mentioned social media integration – and you’ve no doubt been seeing more about it in other media. If you are now, or are thinking about using social media it’s important to remind yourself that not everything that you share is relevant to your emails and also how clear is your call to action in your email going to be. Taking time to decide on such things as the placing and prominence of the social media icons in order to reflect your presence there.

These are only a small number of pointers to help maximise the impact of your newsletters.  Keep them in your mind when designing future newsletters.

Whilst this may have given you more to think about regarding the creation of your newsletter, the actual design need not be so time consuming  - check out our super drag-and-drop editor.

Take a few minutes to check out our template library .  From classic to trendy -  from sophisticated to funky. Check them out, you’ll find one for every industry or occasion.

Are you experiencing problems with your deliverability?  If so, the header can often shed some light on the issue. The header is basically a tracking record of all the route the email you sent took and all the stops it made along the way to get to the inbox.

Just like sending something across the country by post emails also need to stop off at various points, the headers show you this exact route and reveal these stops. They also show the details of the sender and the recipients. Headers also reveal more about the different ISP's through the information they chose to include

Every email landing in an inbox is given a header. So why haven't you seen one? This is more than likely because each email client (that's the service or program you use to read you emails - like Outlook, Hotmail, Googlemail etc) hides these headers in a different way. They are hidden from view because unless you're an email marketer trying to find out more about your email deliverability, the header is not that interesting to see. So with each email client hiding them differently and being tricky to find we thought we'd ask our own deliverability guru, Shaun Swanepoel, to assist you in the search.  True to form, he immediately pointed us in the direction of this guide to finding the headers in popular email services, clients or programs. 

If you’re still in the dark as to what deliverability is or how it works, you can watch our YouTube video.

We are regularly told that one of the very best features of Graphicmail are the free, comprehensive reports available in our reports and statistics as it allows users to track & optimise their email campaigns. Now, guess what……? Our Development Team have been burning that midnight oil again and the fruits of their efforts means that you can now monitor the performance of your SMS/Text campaigns as well!

The SMS delivery statistics are very similar to the reports and statistics currently available to analyse email sends. So now, each time you send a mass SMS/mobile text message, you will be able to access a report to show you how many of your SMS sends were sent, how many are pending, how many were delivered and how many bounced. It also supplied a reason when your SMS doesn’t get through. It's just one other reason to use Graphicmail to ensure that your communications and campaigns work for you.