A beginner’s guide to email marketing automation

Email marketing automation may be the secret to a successful marketing strategy, provided that you know how to use it. Here’s how to get started.

Email marketing is still a powerful method to boost your marketing goals, but as your business grows, it becomes more challenging to handle all the different types of emails you need to send.

Email marketing automation could be the solution to this problem.

What is email marketing automation?

Email marketing automation is simply the automated process of sending emails to a specific list of people, depending on the predefined triggers. Once the trigger is activated, the email is sent.

The use of email automation software allows you to set all the parameters that will determine when the automated emails will be sent, making the planning of them easier.

In other words, it’s the use of technology for the sake of an improved marketing strategy that may lead to an increased effectiveness.

Why use email marketing automation?

The first reason that marketers turn to email automation is the fact that they manage to save time and effort, by creating the triggers that send the right emails, to the right people, at the right time.

Moreover, the automation of this process is saving them time from future similar efforts, as the triggers can be adjusted to include more people, or additional emails to each action.

This increases the efficiency of their email marketing strategy, in such a way that their creativity is blended with technology for the best possible results.

According to Epsilon Email Institute, automated email messages lead to an average 70.5% of higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than usual emails.

Effectiveness also goes beyond click rates, as automated mails seem to contribute to a message’s relevance for the target audience. In fact, according to Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups, companies that send automated emails are 133% more likely to have relevant messages that correspond with a customer’s purchase cycle.

Now the question is, where should you begin with email marketing automation?

6 tips to consider when starting with email marketing automation

1. Think carefully about your lead magnets

The first step is to encourage people to sign up with the right lead magnets that provide them a reason to do so. It’s better to think of a reason that is relevant and useful, rather than an instant reward, as this increases the chances to create a long-term relationship with them.

Lead magnets have to be clear, offering value that cannot be ignored from the target audience. Testing of several forms can help you understand what users find more interesting and this can be the indication that will make the building of the list easier.

2. Focus on the welcome message

Once a user signs up to a list, it’s important to send a welcome message that’s as relevant as possible. Not every user is part of the same customer journey, and this may affect their future relationship with your business.

A proper segmentation of users allows you to send a warm welcome message that addresses their problems, helping them find the right answers while they are also learning more about your brand.

It’s also important to plan the emails you’re going to send, and how the workflow of the messages will work from now on.

What’s the best way to use automation to build a relationship with users who have already showed interest in the value you’re offering them?

3. Don’t underestimate lead nurturing 

Automation doesn’t have to be impersonal. On the contrary, it’s crucial to add a personal touch to your emails, as a way to show your genuine interest in every message that you send.

A personalized communication can be very useful as part of your nurturing process. A warm and welcoming message increases the chances of turning a prospect into a customer, with a smooth and positive inbox experience serving as a great lead magnet.

Once you manage to find the balance between automation and personalization, each email should indicate your genuine interest towards every recipient. Lead nurturing is all about consistency and although automation can be very useful, it’s still important to excel in the segmentation of your audience to ensure that each recipient receives the right message.

4. Set your goals and work towards them (create the right triggers)

Before you start with automation, it’s useful to focus on your goals and your expectations from each automated process. How could automation boost your email marketing campaign? What’s the best way to save time while increasing your effectiveness? What do you define as an effective email marketing campaign?

The ROI from email marketing automation depends on your goals, and it’s useful to be clear on what you expect from the earliest stages of your planning.

For example, if you’re interested in lead nurturing, then you can use email automation to send consistent and personalized messages to your recipients to create a relationship with them.

If you want to use email automation to increase sales, you can create the right set of emails to promote your products in the most relevant and appealing way.

Remember, not every email has the same purpose, and there needs to be a distinction between your goals in order to enjoy the benefits of email marketing automation.

5. Keep evaluating the process

Although email marketing automation aims to help you create a streamlined process among your emails, it’s still useful to evaluate it from time to time to measure its performance and examine whether it needs to be changed.

Does automation bring you closer to your goals? How does the audience respond to your emails? Is there a part of the process that can be improved?

As every audience is different, it’s a good idea to monitor its automated process on its own to test whether it’s contributing to a successful email marketing strategy.

6. Make subscribing and unsubscribing obvious

It’s frustrating for users to keep searching for the option to unsubscribe from an email that they are not interested in. Thus, it’s best to have a clear display with all their available options.

Just as you add a CTA button to encourage further clicks in case they are interested in the email’s content, you should also feature an easy unsubscribe process.

Even if this means that you’re increasing their chances of opting out, it also means that you’re only maintaining the ones that are truly interested in your content.

Overview

Email marketing automation can be a very useful ally to your marketing strategy, provided that you find the right balance between automated messages and personalization for each segment of your contacts.

Even if the initial planning may seem time-consuming, the benefits should give you an additional motivation to work towards an effective process that will help you reach all your set goals.

Tereza Litsa is a Writer at ClickZ.

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10 Killer Email Marketing Trends to Watch in 2016

Almost a whole new year lies ahead and it is the ideal time to take a fresh look at your business goals and how you are going to take sound steps to achieve them. Whether it is a new business opened or you are leading a business for quite some time, the emerging marketing trends are likely to attract your attention.Email marketing after being left on the lurch for some time again came revitalized enjoying more focus from all around. 2016 with an array of new approaches in email design and automation is likely to be a great year with full of promises for email marketing. Here are our picks on 10 killer email marketing trends that every business need to concentrate in 2016.

1. Gmail will offer style and media query support

Gmail for long accursedly left itself behind in the league of new email services with new look-wise approaches. But this year can be a turnaround time for the number one mailing service. By following some enhanced viewing and design standards and support it can just offer a whole refurbished feel to the subscribers.

Gmail is likely to add two important aspects to their mailing service, respectively as style support for their web-mail clients and for mobile apps long awaited media query support. With these two designers, marketers and ESPs will be able to ensure great user experience both on desktop and mobile.

2. Mobile will be principal device for email opening

Until last year, 49% of email opened on mobile devices but in the last quarter of the year this figure surged ahead tremendously. In 2016, mobile access and opening of emails on mobile devices will outnumber desktops by huge margin.

As businesses continue to turn their back towards expensive desktop suites accessing emails on desktop will further shrink and a large portion of this will switch over to mobile. Moreover, with the rapid proliferation of cloud-based software, on-premise software suites will continue to shrink resulting in email access beyond boundaries of devices and location.

3. More emphasis on personalization

Real time email marketing is getting popular with the new technology allowing proactive and agile feedback on user access. Blast email sending has stopped garnering any effective result long ago and in the days to come will only contribute to negative user feedback. Email recipients are now interested in messages that are addressed to personal taste, preference and focus areas rather than just their first name. Engaging emails that are likely to have bigger chances of business conversion or response should at least offer some personal attributes connecting the recipient almost instantly.

4. More emphasis on video and animation content

Video and animation in email content will continue to garner more importance and find wider application in the months to come. Besides attracting subscribers’ attention at a glance the moving and dynamic elements can also intuitively deliver suggestions and guide recipients towards certain actions. Use of moving materials like timer also can enhance the click through rate tremendously. Making users respond to graphic and moving elements is crucial rather than just adding such elements because they look cool.

5. Aesthetic appeal in details will rule

With focus on design and visual effects ruling the web nobody is actually interested anymore in simple, plain text emails. Creating beautiful impressively designed emails has now become extremely easy thanks to an array of tools. From using good typographic variation to the use of full blown images to using the right mix of white space with distinct contrast of color, aesthetic appeal rules supreme here and there are too many ways to ensure that.

6. Modular email templates will rule

In 2016, modular designed template for emails will add to the variety of look-wise choices with the same email content. The goal of modular templates is to be offer quick and easy design options by editing the design elements. This allows designing emails easily while ensuring aesthetic appeal, quality and consistency. This also helps email automation to take effect as designing emails through such templates is likely to take much less time than usual.

7. Social media and Email marketing will become more and more intertwined

Social media no longer can just say that email is dead. As by many users social media is increasingly being considered as a waste of potential time or just a folly of branding, emails are being taken more seriously. Obviously, the revived role of emails incorporating new design approach took a big role in this. In 2016, we can see these two facets of marketing coming more closer and being more intertwined. While social media is considered to be an ideal medium to build email list, the email content get richer by incorporating some social media content. In the months to come this trend is likely to foster even more.

8. Interactive emails adding more substance

Emails that drive user interaction already garner higher engagement from the user. By ensuring user interactivity within the email marketers can ensure much higher click through rate, traffic for the corresponding website and business conversion.

Simple experiments like image rollovers and animations like rain or falling snow that can be stopped by the email recipient with a click can add fun to the experience and make a lasting impression. Advanced level kinetic email content and options to control them can make a simple email campaign popular. Creative insight and skill is the key for such experiments.

9. Time to bid adieu to batch and blast emails

Email that is created for all subscribers and that are sent at one go without any consideration to individual preference is referred as batch and blast email. Sending such generalized mass produced email is no longer effective due to increased focus on personalization. In 2016, such emails are likely to be abandoned as a campaign strategy of bygone era.

10. In-depth and consistent tracking will lead campaigns

Finally tracking the effectiveness of email campaign and accordingly adjusting to consumer demands will be important more than ever. Focusing on data driven excellence in regard to the user appreciation will be the key aspect in the tracking of email campaigns. A detailed understanding of the data concerning email opening, accessibility, click through rate, comparing elements from various campaigns and their output and business conversion rate from email recipients, all these and many more data driven metrics can just let you track results in details.

Let’s Wrap Up

Finally, it is the creative focus and systematic approach that will make a email camping stand out from others. With the evolving technologies and design approach email marketing now is one of the fast transforming areas of digital marketing that can be effective for those who can address these emerging trends.

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How to measure your customer service via email and social media

 
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Email and social media are two efficient channels to assess your customer satisfaction.  

Ignoring the fundamentals of tracking customer servicecould be detrimental to your business. The overall satisfaction can be measured, of course, by many traditional approaches such as survey your customer, call and thank them as well as conduct focus groups.But they are not enough. Here we focus on two effective digital channels – email and social – to help you improve your customer service.

Email

Email is one of the most efficient channels to assess the customer experience with your brand. For example, you can use email tools like Survey Monkey to deliver a set of surveys in order to receive qualitative feedback.

In the process, one question is how often should you send emails to track and measure your audience satisfaction?

There’s no single benchmark as you need to analyze your data points to decide the frequency.

“You should optimize frequency for each individual. For example, a loyal customer may want to receive an email from your brand every day. But if a consumer doesn’t have a tight relationship with your brand, he or she may only want to receive an email on a bi-weekly basis,” says Nick Edwards, chief executive and co-founder of Boomtrain.

Boomtrain measures its own consumer satisfaction on a quarterly basis. But if a company has a huge consumer transaction volume, say Amazon, it can measure on a daily or a weekly basis, according to Edwards.

Aside from assessing the overall consumer satisfaction, email can help bring unhappy consumers back, especially those passively upset ones who historically open emails but all of a sudden stop engaging with a brand.

In that case, brands can conduct re-engagement campaigns by either sending push notifications or customizing emails such as “We Miss You, Yuyu” or exclusive deals.

“Dedicated emails that trigger exclusive activities and predict consumer happiness are very effective at re-engaging the customer and bringing them back to the brand. In doing so, brands are not treating every consumer the same,” says Edwards.

In terms of measurement, he adds that it should be based on both an individual basis and a cohort basis. A cohort could be associated with the time when someone first signed up for the service, or it could be based on other attributes such as location and age.

When it comes to specific metrics, marketers should not overlook open rate, click-through-rate and engagement rate. But more importantly, they should keep an eye on downstream metrics such as time on site, return frequency, and the purchase size if e-commerce brand.

Remember, email is just one entry point so it has to be taken holistically to an overall consumer experience.

“It’s a mistake if marketers measure email customer care in a silo instead of having a comprehensive view of what’s going on,” says Edwards.

Social media

Compared to email, social media is a one-to-many channel rather than one-to-one. Social messages are less likely to be customized for individual followers but the advantage of social is that brands can publicly showcase their commitment to customer service and how helpful they are.

For example, Royal Dutch Airlines has established a dedicated customer service team on Twitter 24/7.

It’s hard to measure social customer care because it usually requires fairly robust teams fully dedicated to that side of the business. In addition, a lot of legalities and red tape could come to play in responding to customer satisfaction issues on social.

While Nick Hoppe, vice president of strategic marketing at Movement Strategy, says that his agency decided to shy away from handling customer satisfaction for its clients due to the above reasons, it does provide guidance when brands aren’t necessarily handling this aspect of social as best as they can.

Based on his experience, Hoppe believes that what all brands should be doing is measuring semantic context on social.

“For the brands we work with audience sentiment is a very important measure of success on our part and often an important KPI in campaigns that we run,” he says.

In these cases, Hoppe’s team always asks the following questions:

• Are they responding with personal messages or using canned content?
• Is the content being well received?
• Are they quick to respond or is it taking several days?
• Are they responding to most people or are some people having to message them multiple times before they get an answer?

All of the above are indicators used to identify how a brand’s social customer care can be improved.

In a nutshell

No matter which channel you choose, you should measure through both quantifiable metrics qualitative feedback.

And when you assess your customer service, you need to look beyond regular metrics like open rate, click-through-rate and engagement rate in email, as well as likes and shares on social.

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Pairing email and social for success

Facebook’s $5.841 billion in Q4 revenue (a 51% jump vs. Q4 of ’14) is great for Facebook, but maybe not so great for online merchants.

Even with Facebook filters designed to help you create precise retargeting lists, you still end up paying for thousands of eyeballs that won’t convert.

Before you increase your social media buys to hit the conversion target, simply think about how to get more from your ad dollars by carefully integrating your email and social efforts.

There has been chatter in recent years that social will eclipse email as the prime way to reach customers.

All the social platforms have, or are working on, buy buttons and Facebook offers online shops. The idea was to attract younger customers who are less engaged in email as a communication tool.

The marketing oracles prophesied that email would go the way of the horse and buggy – or at least be reduced in relevance to that of a paper catalog.

It’s just not happening, nor will it happen.

• The first reason is operational: You still need an email address to open a social account and buy products online.
• The second is strategic: Email allows you to retain a direct relationship with the customer.A big list of people who “like” you on Facebook is not the same as a list of subscribers for whom you know what (or if) they bought, when, for how much and what types of messages they actually opened.

But just as social has its drawbacks, it also provides rich opportunities to integrate the channels in your ecommerce efforts.

It is a tremendous platform for content marketing and can be an economical way to advertise. It might not always lead to last click revenue, but it will increase overall interest of your brand.

So let’s look at how to synchronize your email and social activities to get the most from both platforms:

Segment and feed

Chris Pirrotta has adopted a hyper-segmentation approach to using Facebook for advertising at Sideshow where he is the Director of Ecommerce.

The company produces high-end, licensed pop culture collectibles. Pirrotta uses his email service provider’s segmentation capabilities to create very specific lists of customers to feed into Facebook.

How specific does Pirrotta get? If you buy a quarter scale replica of Thor from Marvel’s ‘The Avengers’ movie, you’ll get ads for the same size product from the other characters in the series – Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk and more.

In a similar vein, customers who purchase bad guys from the Star Wars universe will get ads for characters aligned with the Dark Side – Darth Vader, Kylo Ren, etc.

“We didn’t find success with general ad buys on Facebook. When you can get a return of 20:1 or 30:1, why settle for 5:1?,’’ Pirrotta explains. “It’s not rocket science, but it is really, really successful.’’

Give lookalike a try

Another Facebook retargeting option is its Lookalike service. Take the list of people who bought a specific product from your site and map their attributes (age, gender, location) to Facebook fields.

Facebook will then retarget ads only to people with those specific attributes. This might give you a narrower ad list than you could build with their filters – or at least avoid advertising to people who are already loyal to your brand and might not like to see more.

There are lots of other ways to use Facebook.

Fashion retailer JOHNNY WAS is getting ready to experiment with uploading the disengaged customer list into Facebook for ads with the thought that maybe customers aren’t into opening emails, but when they see the fashions related to their most recent purchase on their Facebook feed they’ll re-engage. 

Use your fans to help bring in more subscribers

It’s not new, but it remains very, very useful: Use social to encourage existing customers to draw in new customers on social.

When those new prospects show up at your website, encourage them to join your subscriber list with an opt-in-form.

Check out this delightful Valentine’s Day email that UK-based fashion retailer Oasis sent out.

They want customers to use #melthearts hash tag to post their Valentine’s Day date outfit, and they also call out their Facebook account, specifically encouraging their subscribers to share Oasis-branded love notes within their social network.

This approach not only sustains their current customers’ interest, but has the potential to lead new prospects to their website.

Another way to get some cross-promotion going is with an old-fashioned competition. You sell costumes? Provide a gift certificate to the scariest goblin or sparkly princess.

Instagram likes

Fashion and beauty retailers love Instagram. The visual site is perfect for engaging customers. One way to benefit is to start a campaign to allow your audience to opt in to alerts that are based on their Instagram activity.

Now, when they like a photo, you can then trigger an email with additional product details and images. This is the best time to really do the selling – allow the Instagram posts to cultivate that interest and let the email get them shopping.

Marc Jacobs Beauty pursued this type of cross-channel marketing and saw awesome results.

Get competitive

Encourage posts to your Instagram page and provide hash tags for items related to your products. Solicit user-generated content or launch a scavenger hunt.

Select winners based on the ingenuity and creativity of their submission or on the most likes. Whatever the method, contests can be a great way to drive engagement on Instagram.

“Last year we gave away $90,000 in product, but it was worth it,’’ Pirrotta of Sideshow says. “It garnered 160,000 new subscribers and dynamic social reach.’’

Social is no longer just a brand awareness exercise. The money you spend here should drive revenue.

And why not use social as a tool to benefit the one program that gives you keen insight into your customer’s behavior – email? Working on the two together gives you so much more than working with each in isolation.

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Separating the 'what' from the 'how' in digital marketing

Marketers that align messages with the right communication platforms and take a multichannel approach to campaign strategy can ensure that their content will reach targeted audiences.

All too often, when I meet with marketers, I find out they are planning a new campaign and making a huge assumption that they are going to solely focus on email to get their message out. If I have done my job in this column, then you will step back and no longer make that assumption.

There are lots of ways to get your message out there. Taking time to assess the right channel for each message could pay off handsomely with improved engagement and results.

Remember when you were in elementary school and while learning new vocabulary you had to learn to say the words, write them down, use them in a sentence, and even work them into a story?

Although we really didn’t know it at the time, these multichannel approaches really helped us learn the material - not just for the weekly spelling test, but (hopefully) for a lifetime.

Well, the same applies with campaign offers and content: the more methods and approaches that are taken with marketing tactics, the more memorable campaigns will be. 

If you’re launching a new campaign, a multichannel approach that integrates snail mail, SMS messages, infographic-based ads, calls from reps, social posts, a Web-based diagnostic tool, a call center (outbound or inbound) - and yes - also a few emails, will reinforce your offers and appeal to every learning style.

What are your overall campaign objectives, and who is your target audience?

The first step in any campaign plan should be to determine your overall objectives and target audience specifications.

• Which personas make up your core audience?
• What roles make up the other segments that you’d like to influence?
• What is your audience's current state of mind?
• Do they already know about your company, product, or solution - or are you starting the awareness process from scratch?
• What is your time frame for executing the campaign?
• How will you measure activity, influence, and results?

An engagement scoring model can help you automatically assign points to track activity and influence, giving you a real-time view of your progress.

What content will you use?

Build a content matrix to name all the content you’ll need for each persona and each stage in the customer journey. Note what photograph, design, or other assets you will need, so you can give your creative team a head start on their own strategy and production work.

So often we leave those elements to the last minute, causing our digital agency or in-house creative teams huge amounts of stress, and I have rarely seen stressful creative teams perform at their best.

Will you use in-house or external writing talent?

Now is the time to tee them up for your project. Know that if you give your creative team free reign to choose the channel that might work best, they might have some great ideas about the optimal channel on which to deploy what they have created.

Make sure you are collecting other channel information. You might realize that SMS would be a fantastic way to reach your audience, but if you don’t have many mobile numbers it will be hard to leverage that channel - the same goes for physical mailing addresses.

A great way to make progress is to enlist your call center representatives to help you complete your audience’s profiles. If you have your call center integrated with your digital marketing platform, then any cell phone numbers and snail mail addresses should port over to your digital platform.

Conclusion

Only when you have your campaign targets and objectives, key personas, content framework, and a creative strategy in place, should you begin to think about which channel is best for each tactic. Of course a few will be email, but by adding in other approaches you’ll create a richer experience for your clients and target audience.

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Email Interaction: Tell It Like It Is

One-click emails are an efficient way for consumers to share personal preferences with brands and provides email marketers actionable data that can be used to enhance the customer experience.

As humans, we are accustomed to dealing with yin and yang, good and evil, happy and sad. Whether in the tangible world or the digital world, one can expect for the good to always come with the bad. Recently, Facebook has announced that it is testing a "Dislike" button to convey the notion of disapproval and complement the Like button. 

Whether Facebook winds up implementing the Dislike button or not, it's clear that it understands the value in knowing the likes and dislikes of its members. Testing the Dislike button demonstrates that simple question and answer content has the potential to generate extremely valuable information, and email marketers can borrow from the polarity of these options. You don't have to be Facebook to reap the rewards of this information; email marketers can also use a variety of techniques to learn what their consumers like and dislike.

Some consumers absolutely love what’s landing in their inboxes. Others may dislike it to the point of unsubscribing or complaining that messages are spam. Yet, these sentiments and points of input remain a mystery for many marketers. Fortunately, an email itself can be used to gather input related to the root cause of possible complaints and disengagement metrics.

First, email marketers must recognize that messaging and brand communication is not a one directional valve that drops information to the masses. Brands can tap into the true potential of the email channel while simultaneously empowering their customers to vote for the next promotional offering, the next product to stock up on, or the next cover of the catalog. These types of communications create an opportunity for subscribers to tell it like it is.

Using input data to determine a customer's likes and dislikes enables email marketers to bring more innovation, interaction, and reality to an inbox. Email clicks provide a wealth of explicit and implicit input data from a consumer that immediately translates into an actionable data point. This triggers an automated touch point in the consumer journey, which allows email marketers to develop more use cases for inbox interaction and data gathering, providing a more meaningful inbox and overall brand experience. 

With email now open on mobile more than any other device, a Like/Dislike or Yes/No option is a fast track to capturing actionable data from consumers on the go. A quick input approach also works well on mobile push notifications, which makes all digital communications inherently more interactive.

Essentially, the beauty of one-click email is that it lets recipients have a voice - they can tell it like it is on the spot. Here are three examples of brands using one-click emails to prompt automated lifecycle messages based on the customer's direct influence and proactively address issues that could culminate in the form of a block, complaint, or even an unsubscribe action.

1. TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor can gather valuable input via one question about travel destination preference.

 

2. Shop Your Way

Shop Your Way uses coupon value to gather fast feedback.

3. Amazon

Amazon asks for input on delivery status as a means to collect actionable data.


There is virtually no limit to the type of data you can capture with these types of binary questions. The first step is to understand what kind of data you could easily capture. That enables you to deliver a more relevant message and customer experience. Next, build out a plan to collect this information over a series of messages and touchpoints, whether via email, mobile push notifications, or any other channel. Once your customers see that you're using the data to create a better user experience, they will continue to participate in this type of progressive profiling.

Is your email program allowing your audience to share its sentiments? Are you putting this data into action with relevant, timely communication? If not, consider these possibilities and open up new lines of communication by encouraging your audience to tell it like it is.

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What Are The Best Days And Times To Send Marketing Emails?

You’ve come to this blog looking for a straight answer. And yes, wouldn’t it be awesome if I could tell you that by sending your email at noon on Wednesdays your email campaigns will have stellar performance? Unfortunately, the optimal day and time to send marketing emails is as mythical as Big Foot. Sure, you can examine a number of factors that contribute to the best timing, but there isn’t a magic formula for the best day and time. Truth be told, you’ll ultimately have to figure out what is best for your marketing emails through testing, but you can start off on the right foot by knowing some industry trends and considerations.

First, Think About Spam

Before you can think about the best time and day to send marketing emails, you need to ensure that your email content is worthy of surpassing spam filters. Today’s spam filters and even features like Gmail’s Promo tab, are becoming smarter and smarter at detecting irrelevant, marketing email, which means you have to up your game to get past them. Here are some of the most important considerations:

CAN-SPAM Act

You likely know this, but this law requires you to always include a working unsubscribe link and a physical address, as well as avoid deceptive headlines in email. Failing to do so isn’t just debilitating your reach to a subscriber’s inbox, it’s actually illegal.

Quality Lists

You’ve heard it time and time again – use a quality list when sending email marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, there are still executives and marketers out there who still insist on blasting their message to as many as possible. Likely, they do this because they do not truly understand how spam filters work, but if they knew, they’d be less likely to push the “blast to everyone from the past” email sending method. Let’s look at this closer…

When a sender sends an email to a recipient, some spam filters look at the domain of the sender. If that sender has shown to make multiple attempts to bounced emails or if that sender’s email domain doesn’t match the server the email is being sent from, a spam filter will detect this, and the sender’s overall quality score decreases. Thus, future campaigns from that sender are routed to junk or won’t even be delivered. To keep a quality email list, ensure the following:

• Don’t purchase lists
• Don’t email recipients who you haven’t emailed in a while
• Stop sending to unengaged subscribers
• Ensure you ask recipients to opt-in

The Subject Line And Message

Spam detecting that uses content filtering to identify the quality of a message and sender dives deep into the content by looking at some of the commonalities of spammy content. Some of them, which you should avoid, include:

• Links or domains in the email that are blacklisted
• Missing a plain text version of an HTML email
• Spammy words including “FREE,” “Business Offer,” “Save up to,” and “Click.” Get a full list here from HubSpot of spammy words to avoid.
• High ratio of images compared to text
• Using all caps or excessive exclamation points

Keeping all of this in mind, the bottom line to avoiding spam filters is to create content that doesn’t appear spammy to filters but also content that isn’t spammy to the reader. Your message should contain information that the reader finds valuable so that they continue to open your emails. When they open your emails because the content is valuable, you won’t need to be concerned about spam filters.

The Ideal Day & Time – Does It Exist?

Now, onto what you came for. As I mentioned, there are a number of variables that determine what the best day and time to send an email is for your company. One example of this comes from data derived by Pebble Design on the hotel and tourism industry. For the corporate or B2B audience, Thursday between 11 am and 2 pm was best; however, those traveling for leisure tend to open and click most between 2 pm and 5 pm.

The point being driven with this example is that there isn’t an ideal, one size fits all time and day for sending email campaigns. What really matters is taking a close look at your industry, audience and buyer behavior to know what is best.

Industry & Demographic Trends

So, if the industry and audience matter, what are some the trends related to each industry and audience? Let’s look at some insights from MailChimp to find out.

Weekend Email

While the weekend is typically a bad time to send email for corporate industries, it is optimal for various leisure type industries. Below is a graph of industries who should be sending on weekends.

10 A.M. Local Time

If you market at a national or international level, you have email recipients in multiple time zones. Considering this and data from across industries, MailChimp found that 10 am local time or shortly after was best for performance of emails that are non-leisure related. When sending campaigns, break up send times by time zones to ensure your email campaign performs well in every region.

Age Differences

In the MailChimp Insights, they also examined the differences between various age groups for peak open and click-through rates. Due to the sleep patterns and different lifestyle of college age recipients, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that optimal times for this audience is actually around 1 pm.

Campaign Differences

The goals of the email campaign and the type of campaign at hand may also determine the best time and day to send an email. For example, GetResponse found that open and click-through rates were highest not by day or a particular time in the day but by the time of the year, which was Q4 for consumer marketers. They point to the fact that most retail shopping is done in November and December.

When identifying the best day and time to send your email campaign, look at the campaign itself. Does it correlate with seasonal purchasing? Is it event related? Look at the factors in the campaign that may reveal when the best day and time to send the email are.

Mobile Changes Email Metrics

The rise of mobile has shifted email campaign performance much like it has the rest of marketing. Research from Campaign Monitor that analyzed over 6 million email campaigns found that 41 percent of emails are opened on mobile, while only 28 percent are opened on desktop. In addition, they also found that 25 percent of those who open an email on mobile will open that email again. Of those who open the email and do not click, 67 percent will click-through when opening the email a second time.

For marketers, this means that focusing too much on open rate, especially for mobile, isn’t the best indication of good performance because email recipients are likely to flag that email and come back later for more information.

Test, Test, & Test

As you’ve surely noticed, the theme throughout this post is that optimal send day and times vary. Because of this, you’ll need to test, test and test again to continue to refine your email marketing campaigns. Taking into account variables such as the industry, audience and even the device used by your audience will help you to gauge the optimal day and time for your company to send email. A/B testing is one way to help test emails without having to look at multiple campaigns and eliminate the possibility of other variables. Learn more about A/B testing in this blog.

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