Here are the three key content areas that you need to focus on with regards to deliverability:

1. Subject lines

Subject lines are the first exposure that your audience gets to your message and they can significantly improve your deliverability rates. People are busy and no matter how excited they might have been to receive your information when they first signed up, they will resist opening your emails without a compelling subject lines. Subject lines should provide a teaser for the content inside of the email and encourage the recipient to open up the message.

Subject lines are also evaluated significantly in terms of the spam content of a message. Having the right subject line can help you avoid spam filters and be sure that you’re actually reaching your intended audience.

2. Newsletter content

Deliverability rates are affected by your previous open rates. This means that the more that your messages are sent out and opened, the more trustworthy you are seen as a sender and the more likely your messages will be delivered and opened in the future. You can effect this directly with your newsletter content.

Focus on sending your list members helpful, targeted information in pre-set intervals. Your sales messages should be spaced out with helpful content in between. This will help your list members see you as a valuable resource rather just a company that is focused on the sale. By planning out targeted content that answers major questions for your audience, you can see an increase in your open rates and a boost to your overall deliverability rate.

3. List segmentation and targeted content

Besides sending helpful, informative messages and newsletters at regular times, you can go a step further with your targeting and improve your deliverability rates with list segmentation. If you know that certain members of your list are more likely to open and read messages, you can segment these members and send messages to them regularly. You can also segment your list by buying behaviour, click-throughs and a number of other factors. Using segmentation you can get ultra-specific with your list and see a better result from your email marketing efforts.

Deliverability rate is an important metric that deserves your attention if you want to excel with email marketing. There are many ways that the quality and nature of your content can affect this metric. Just like with other forms of online marketing, understanding what your customers want to know and delivering it to them in a helpful and targeted way is a key to deliverability and overall email marketing success

For More info on CFL Marketings HTML Email Services, please call 01225 782669 or log on to www.cflmarketing.co.uk

By considering a few key criteria, focusing on your most pressing marketing needs and evaluating what worked best in the past, you can determine where to best spend your marketing budget.

Marketing is changing and smart companies are keeping up with these changes. With web marketing, it’s become possible to reach more customers than ever before, but you need to keep a few important principles in mind when you are looking for marketing activities. As you look at the next year of spending,

keep the following four criteria in mind:

1) Trust

Which marketing methods and practice will help build trust in your company?

 2) Targeting

Do the marketing methods give you the ability to approach a small segment of your audience?

 3) Engagement

Are your marketing methods getting you in front of active enthusiasts of your product or service?

4) Social sharing

Do these marketing methods make it easy for your audience to spread and share your content to their social contacts?

With these criteria at the forefront of your decision making process, you need to look at where you are going to get the most bang for your marketing buck. What are your main goals for the next month, the next quarter and the next year? Which practices are going to help you meet those goals? Marketing activities and methods can help you meet a number of different goals but some are better than others for specific goals.

Here are five few possible ideas:

 1) Increasing website traffic and conversions:

Web re-design, copywriting, SEO and PPC advertising.

 2) Increasing sales:

Targeted email marketing messages, sales pages and web design.

3) Building a community and increasing your reputation with that community:

Email marketing, social media and community management.

 4) Increasing exposure:

Trade shows, press releases, white papers, email newsletters and guest blog posting.

5) Boosting credibility:

Regular email newsletters, authority blog posts, press releases and white papers. Your marketing spending should reflect your goals. Looking at your most immediate goals for your business will help you identify which marketing activities you should invest in. Give priority to those tactics that will help your reach your goals in the next few months.

Finally, you need to look at your past performance before you invest in marketing for the new year. Which marketing activities had the biggest ROI for your company in the past 12 months? Which efforts were disappointing at best or complete failures at worst?

Just because a technique or method is an industry standard or works well for another company does not mean it is a good fit for you. Always rely on your company’s experience with a marketing method to make your final decision. With these criteria, goals and experiences in mind, you can spend your marketing budget wisely and effectively.

However you decide to spend your budget CFL Marketing can advise you and help execute your plans – contact philm@cflmarketing.co.uk for more details or log onto www.cflmarketing.co.uk

That is why it is important to time your email messages just right. Timing relates to two different decisions:

What days and times are best for my email messages?

How frequently should I send out my email messages?

When you understand the timing and frequency rhythms that are right for your list, you can send out messages that have more impact. Here are three best practices rules to follow to boost your success.

1.) Find a schedule and stick with it.

The most important key to having email marketing success with your own list is being consistent. Find a schedule that works for your company (and gets a good response from your list) and then repeat it week in and week out (or month in and month out). Of course, this does not apply to special discounts or deals, but with your email marketing newsletter you should have a consistent schedule. Weekly or bi-weekly works best for most companies.

2.) Consider your users and their lives.

Your email marketing messages are more likely to be opened when your audience is not overwhelmed with other messages or checking in quickly. If your target market is busy moms, sending them a message at 10 am is not going to work. If you are marketing to small business owners, messages on a Friday afternoon are not going to have an impact. Think through the day to day life of your prospects and then pick a time when they are most likely to have time to open and read your message. Once you have decided on a time and day for your newsletters and messages, then you can look at your open rates, track your effectiveness and make adjustments.

3.) Give list members the power to select their own frequency.

One of the best ways to succeed with email marketing is to make sure your users get exactly what they need when they want it. You can do just this by allowing your subscribers to tell you how often they’d like to be contacted. For example, if you are sending a weekly blog update newsletter and a monthly in depth newsletter, your subscribers can indicate whether they would like to be contacted each week or each month. You can use this information to segment your list and send content at the right times to specific email list members.

Although these are important industry best practices, each email marketing list is unique. Your subscribers will respond best to a specific frequency and timing of content. Once you select what you think will work best, look at your analytics and results and make adjustments as need be.

The Taste of the Nation survey of 3,000 people found that 59% have used a special offer voucher when eating out, with 48% of people claiming they use vouchers in a bar or pub.

However, 25% say they go out more often than they otherwise would as a result of an outlet offering vouchers and only (18%) would stop visiting an outlet if vouchers were no longer provided.

Jon Lake, corporate finance director in the licensed retail group at Deloitte, said: “Vouchers have proved an effective tactic by some operators for encouraging consumers to eat in their outlets, and have risen in popularity since the recession.

However, the popularity of some of these schemes has raised concerns some operators are now reliant on them.

“In the run up to Christmas, voucher offers were removed by some operators. Other outlets offered a different deal, such as three-for-two, instead of the more generous two-for-one and buy-one-get-one-free offers, or a gift with every main course.”

CFL Have been helping many pubs and restaurants with their pre and post Christmas discount voucher promotions both online and offline. Please see some examples below.

Yes, it’s a report that focuses mainly on the US market (only 16% of the 2,735 respondents are based in Europe) but I still think we can learn a thing or two from the findings of this report. I’ve chosen these five findings to share with you:

1. Relevance and timing issues
Only 28% of marketers report their messages contained relevant content, are sent on time to targeted subscribers, and had a clear conversion goal.

What does this mean? To stand out in today’s overloaded inboxes, you need to consistently provide value to your subscribers. You can’t just continue to send everything to everybody. Instead, make sure that each and every message is well targeted and relevant to the person that receives it. Otherwise, your messages will get deleted, even before they were opened.

2. Marketers confident in email ROI
More than a quarter of senior marketer executives felt email is producing ROI, and almost half believe it will eventually produce returns.

What does this mean? It’s obviously crucial to get management buy-in if you want to increase your email marketing budget/resources. The best way to get their buy-in is by showing them the impact of email on the marketing-sales funnel. If you can’t measure how much money your email programme is contributing, focus on how many (sales-ready) leads you are generating, rather than reporting only on the opens and clicks of your campaigns. 

3. Wise list growth tactics 
37% of marketers say their organisations shared premium or educational content in exchange for an email address. Sweepstakes (used by only 10% of marketers) and gift cards (used by 6%) are not very popular when it comes to growing your list.

What does this mean? Incentives are often used by marketers to persuade web visitor to give them their email address. 

The trick is to find the right incentive. You don’t want to get just any email address; you want to get email addresses from people that are likely to buy your products or services. You’d probably get a ton of email addresses if the incentive is something that attracts to the general population (like the ubiquitous iPad giveaway), but will they also be interested in your products? 

Experience has taught me that email addresses collected using sweepstakes, giveaways and contests typically don’t perform very well in terms of open and click-through rates.

4. Email budgets on the rise
67% of marketers plan to increase their email budget in 2012, with 20% planning to increase it more than 30%.

What does this mean? Email marketing is still a crucial component of your online marketing strategy and, if executed well, it will drive a lot of business and revenue at a low cost. But marketers need to invest in strategy, expertise, integration of systems and resources.

5. Value of automated, triggered emails
90% of marketers found that sending emails automatically to a subscriber based on triggers like planned dates, events or behaviours are the most effective tactic to improve relevant communications. 

What does this mean? The great thing about automated email messages based on triggers is that you typically set these messages up, optimise them and then sit back and watch the results come in while you focus on getting another automated message set up. 

Quick wins in email marketing
If you don’t have a lot of resources to dedicate to email marketing, focus your efforts on automating email campaigns where possible. The top four automated messages include welcome emails, thank you emails, transactional emails and post-purchase emails.