Our blog

 Capture, convince, and close.  Those three words define the goal of every email: capture your audience, convince them of your message, and close the sale.  But it's difficult to do this if your email is sub-par.  Here at Whereoware, we use a checklist to review every email we create, in order to assess its overall effectiveness.  In doing so, we consider things like:  

• Is the Sender name recognizable and trustworthy?
• Has the preview pane been optimized?
• What about the call to action - is it informative? Clickable?

Sound like something you could use?  We've created a handy .PDF copy of our checklist complete with explanations and definitions. Feel free to check it out for yourself; it's never too late to start optimizing your emails!

Here at Whereoware, we’ve been signing clients, releasing websites, and churning out new campaigns like it’s our job (which, technically, it is!). In fact, it’s seems like it’s been a non-stop ride since Q1 started, and here we are, already a third of the way through Q2. Before we put up any further blog posts, however, we’d like to pause to take stock of where this year has brought us so far.

This week, we welcome a guest post from one of our Senior Online Marketing Managers, Dan Caro. Dan is Silverpop Certified and is in charge of designing and optimizing email campaigns for many Whereoware clients. Here, he discusses the ins and outs of the Silverpop preferences center feature, why you should set one up for yourself, and how to go about doing just that! Let’s take a closer look.

Did our recent post on reasons to integrate Salesforce + marketing automation get you jazzed up and ready to implement this for your own company? Great! We’re going to walk you through the steps you need to take to make this a reality.

This week, we welcome a guest post from one of our Web Marketing Managers, Peter Bergen. Peter is a Certified Salesforce Administrator and is also Silverpop Certified. Here, he walks us through Silverpop’s Contact Insight feature, sharing what it does, why it works, and what a difference it can make for your marketing.

If you’re looking to optimize your lead generation and follow-up processes, combining Salesforce.com (SFDC) and a marketing automation platform will yield big dividends.

SFDC allows your sales reps to keep track of prospects easily, organizing leads and following along as they move from prospects to purchasers. Marketing automation tools provide you with a place to input leads, and then help you use that information to nurture via behavior-triggered mailings.

By integrating the two, however, your company can leverage a far more powerful tool than if you worked with just one or the other separately.

This week, we welcome a guest post from one of our Web Marketing Managers, Jared Ruppert. Jared is Silverpop Certified and in charge of designing and optimizing email campaigns for many Whereoware clients. Here, he explains the benefits of Silverpop’s A/B testing and Send Time Optimization (STO) features…and shares a nifty little trick for making the two work together!

Whereoware recently won Silverpop’s Agency award in the first Crawl, Walk, Run Engage Programs competition, working on behalf of PaperStyle.com. The winning program was an innovative wedding campaign comprised of a series of emails that followed a bride and/or her friends through wedding events, offering Paper Style products to match their needs along the way.  

Read on to find out more about this award-winning campaign.

Whereoware recently developed an innovative Closeout campaign for Gift & Home company Creative Co-Op, which found great success with its highly personalized nature.  Retailers were shown particular items of interest to them, at a time when they most likely needed to restock.  The Creative Co-Op closeout campaign has resulted in revenue increases across the board.

As 2012 draws to a close, we’ve enjoyed taking a look back at some of our most read + circulated blog posts from the past year. Some are no-brainers: with more marketers setting up automated campaigns, more consumers searching sites on mobile devices, and more companies rising to meet those demands, it’s inevitable that these types of information would be widely disseminated.

However, some posts came as a surprise – one of our most read blogs was even a light-hearted interview with one of our Marketing Managers (we’re trying not to let it go to her head)!

Whatever the reason for the traffic, we’re grateful to each + every one of our readers for keeping us excited about these topics, and for inspiring us to continue writing into the New Year and beyond. Here’s a round-up of our top 5 blog posts from 2012 - hopefully you’ll enjoy the re-read as much as we did!

Quality control is a tricky business, no matter what industry you’re in. Here at Whereoware, we’ve developed a thorough email checking process, centered around a unique checklist that is consulted twice before every single email is sent.

Curious to find out what else is included in the Whereoware checklist? Grab our one-page .pdf and see for yourself!

Mistakes happen. We’ve all made them. Some, like spelling errors in internal memos, are more private and less critical. Other mistakes, however, might be made in very public forums. These include email campaigns sent to thousands of customers with broken images or links, sale dates that have passed, or misinformation about products or services. “To err is human” – you understand that, and we understand that. But how do you recover when you’ve made a mistake? Let’s take a look at some examples from real companies...

Here at Whereoware, we deal with all sides of B2B business - sales, marketing, development, and more – and a big portion of that business deals with lead generation. Since this area is such a hot topic for most B2B companies, we all know how important demand generation programs can be.

Have you ever wondered which demand-gen channels your peers find most successful? Will they be spending more or less on leads next year, and for what channels? These aren’t questions that have easy answers, but our friends over at the research firm Software Advice have recently launched a survey to tackle this very important area of marketing. If you are a B2B marketer, you’re invited to participate. We geeks love data, so of course, we’re chomping at the bit for this one!

Back in August, Responsys Inc published their 2012 Look Book, highlighting their favorite email creative from the past year. The choices were excellent, including thought-provoking fundraising emails (Royal National Institute of Blind People), entertainment emails populated with dynamic content (Sky), personalized + event-triggered e-commerce emails (Pizza Express), and many more.

We found ourselves particularly drawn to one of the emails, which had actually made the rounds here at Whereoware back when it was originally sent to subscribers in April 2012. The email came from Brooks Brothers and was part of an effort to promote a new line of polo shirts. While the topic in and of itself might have been take-or-leave-it, Brooks Brothers went above and beyond with a creative concept which teased readers with the idea of a $2000 polo shirt that in fact turned out to be a little something more.

In this blog post, we’re breaking down the Brooks Brothers email, figuring out what works, what could be improved, and why it merited inclusion in the Responsys 2012 Look Book.

Were you a pro at ‘Go Fish’ as a child? The game is a great model for sales: after all, when a tradeshow is over, you want to be the one left holding the most business cards. But if you don’t have time to turn all those cards into prospects, racking up contacts won’t put you any closer to securing sales.

Marketing automation provides a solution. It streamlines sales activity, allowing reps to focus their time on only the most promising leads. But how effective is marketing automation at converting these leads into customers?

This week, we have a guest post from Whereoware Web Marketing Manager, Peter Bergen. Recently, Peter’s A/B test for Paragon won Honorable Mention in the B2B Email Blast Templates category during Which Test Won’s 2012 Email Test Awards. This test was also added to the 2012 Email Tests Hall of Fame. Here, he breaks down his experiment, and shares secrets to making A/B tests work for you.

This week, we have a guest post from Whereoware Online Marketing Manager, Faith Albers. As point person for several client accounts, she has sent plenty of emails in her day. Here, she shares some tips on how to send emails like a professional...

There are a variety of email domains out there - which do you use? You may have stuck with your original, housed at aol.com or Hotmail.com. Or maybe you are more of a Gmail.com person, known as the domain of ‘techies’ and academia. Stereotypes abound for a whole range of other email providers. If you’re reading this in the office, there’s a good bet that you’re using an Outlook account…or perhaps you’re solely Apple-focused, and cherish your mac.com or me.com address.

Whatever the platform, marketing automation experts are taking its features into account and actively marketing towards you. Tailoring campaigns to reflect particular email platforms can make a world of difference.

With the large numbers of companies employing email marketing campaigns nowadays, it’s become more and more difficult to make your message stand out to customers. Having them visually jump out is a good start. We’ve talked about innovative designs such as side-scrolling emails, but that kind of ingenuity is only effective once customers open your email. What if you could catch their attention beforehand?

 What is a side-scrolling email? As the name might imply, this format is a horizontally designed email that requires the user to scroll sideways to view more content as opposed to scrolling down.  Why we like them: Want to jazz your email up a bit? A side-scrolling email is the perfect way to do that. Many people have never seen it before, compelling them to look because of the novelty factor (at least the first time you try the design). This means that your email will stand out in the inbox...

Have you ever seen an animated GIF used in an email campaign? It’s quite possible that you haven’t; most companies use them sparingly, and with good reason. While animation can help your email pop – movement both attracts the eye and allows you to showcase more in one space (and above the fold!) – animated GIFs can raise some problems when incorporated into email campaigns.

So, how can you ensure that your animated GIFs are up to snuff?

A “pre”header element comes before anything else in the email, immediately before the nav bar (for information on nav bars, see previous post Marketing automation tip: do email navigation bars help or hurt?). Its key purpose is to summarize the main point of the email, so that if the images are not displayed, customers know what your email is trying to say.

"What is the best time to send emails?"

"How do you know?"

The internet is peppered with blog posts all attempting to answer these same questions. One company may think the prime time for email sends is 8 am, while another may say it’s 11 pm.

So which is it?

The problem is that all of these companies have different types of audiences, so it is difficult to nail down the optimal time based upon another company’s successes.

With the new year approaching, now is a great time to brush up your email creative. Try out our top five creative tweaks to get your email ready for 2012.

Your inbox is likely awash with holiday emails, but as 2012 approaches, marketers are already gearing up for their next targeted campaigns. Don’t fall behind the pack - here are some trends to watch that’ll keep you in the game.

Social media marketing is on fire right now. It seems like every advertisement, commercial, or email refers the customer to a Facebook or twitter page with a promise of special offers or other enticements. Why is this? Perhaps it’s because the speed of social media enables users to take advantage of viral marketing. Perhaps marketers appreciate the immediacy of the medium, which allows brands to be at the top of customers’ minds for an extended period of time. Or could it be that people like to communicate on a more personal level rather than receiving just a list of sales and dates?

Before we can talk about pros and cons of using navigation bars in marketing automation, we must first clarify what they are. The nav bar is the area immediately after the preheader in an email. It usually contains multiple links to different areas of your site for navigational purposes, hence the name.

Pros

There are some obvious advantages to having these categories front and center in an email. Any time marketers can direct potential purchasers to their specific goals – to “kitchen goods,” for example, rather than the homepage in general – they put them that much closer to making a purchase, and lower bounce rates. Nav bars also mean that even specific emails which hold no appeal to a particular customer still have a chance of gaining click-throughs or even conversions, since they are reminded of other things offered by the same brand...

"Hello Account #XYZ, thank you for clicking/calling/writing..."

Form emails and letters are a personal pet peeve for many people. The format is rote and clearly interchangeable among recipients. Even referencing a specific topic of interest would go a long way towards winning them over. But in the modern world how can a company possibly do this with so many clients and so little time? As paradoxical as it may seem, using automation to personalize services actually does make logical sense.

“Can you hear me now?”

It’s a joke that’s funny in mobile phone ads, because with phones, there’s an easy answer: either you hear someone, or you don’t. With email, the line can be less distinct. Colors and a great layout may spur click-throughs (they “hear” you), while lines and lines of incomprehensible prose may halt any chance at revenue, but if you don’t have a call-to-action, it’s difficult for customers to know what to do next.

More and more we are seeing social media and email marketing converge. It makes sense. Both channels can work together to extend your reach, create meaningful conversation with customers and increase conversions.

The three ways

1. Include your social media channels in the header of your email. Many email platforms have made this super simple with plugins. Even if your email platform doesn’t have a plugin, it is easy to find free social media icons to add to your email header (hint: just Google free social media icons). Once you add them to your header, don’t forget to link them to your social media platforms.
   
    

What you will learn:

Discover the powerful stats for abandoned cart emails that prove they work. Learn how to put the campaigns together including: timing, messaging and frequency. Plus, see some real life examples.

Cart abandonment defined:

Cart abandonment occurs when a shopper adds an item to their cart, but does not complete the purchase. According to industry experts, cart abandonment rates range anywhere from 60-70%, which coincides with data we have collected from our own clients which show an average of 69% abandonment.

Let the data speak for itself!  Download the entire guide here: Abandoned Cart Emails: the facts, the data and the how to. (.pdf, 2.87 MB).

Simply defined, automated targeted campaigns are emails that are directed to a specific group of people and are triggered based on a set of rules or criteria. The most classic example of this is the ‘Welcome’ campaign. It is sent to those who have just registered to receive your emails and is triggered off of that registration date.

We love automated targeted campaigns because we know they work! We have completed hundreds of these campaigns for clients over the years and have found huge increases in effectiveness when compared to normal blast mailings. For instance, we’ve observed the following differences when comparing automated mailings against normal mailings...

In email marketing, as in telemarketing, there is a key difference between persistence and pestering. One can garner customers, whereas the other will get you on a Black List in a hot second. But how do you know where to draw the line?

“Brevity is the soul of wit,” wrote Shakespeare, and this principle of communication has held true for centuries. In email marketing, too, brevity can pay off big time. A recent study found that marketing posts on Facebook that are less than 80 characters create 27% more engagement than their longer counterparts. In email subject lines, this concision is equally important if not more so, given that many email providers crop subject lines after a certain number of characters.

The character limits

Various studies have found that the major email providers tend to cluster between a 40 and 50 character limit for their subject lines:

• AOL: 38
• Hotmail: about 45 for their initial line (using word wrap)
• Yahoo!: 47
• Gmail: 130
• Thunderbird: 130
• Outlook: 255 characters

Image-only emails look beautiful. You have full control over your branding and messaging and frankly, they are easier to design. The drawbacks, however, are too serious to ignore: