Join me this Wednesday at 3pm GMT as I take you through what you need to know to increase personalisation in your emails (including why it's worth doing!). I have some great examples - you're sure to have take away ideas you can apply to your own email marketing campaigns.

When:  Wednesday, 1st February 2012, 3pm (GMT)
Duration:  45 minutes including Q&A
Host:  denise cox, Lead Email Consultant, Newsweaver

During this informative free webinar, denise cox, lead consultant with Newsweaver will take you through the steps needed to personalise your emails. You will also learn why you should personalise, what data to use and which are the most powerful elements of your email to personalise.

Register now

Are you reviewing how your email marketing campaigns are performing? I call it "doing a CSI" on your email marketing. Instead of just saying that you're not getting the opens and clicks you expected, you actually get stuck into by conducting forensic examinations into every aspect of the campaigns - from template, content, subject line and from field.

This is not a formal list, but just a few top level thoughts so you can get an idea of the process you should go through.

Have you stated what results you want from your mailings? Are you measuring conversions to understand if you are getting these results?

If you feel your results are very low, first take a look at your bounce, complaint and unsubscribe rates. Combined these can give insight into whether your subscribers are pushing back and treating your emails as spam - which in turn impacts delivery.

Are you trending your metrics? Rather than micro-managing your email marketing issue by issue, trend using your metrics reports your open/clicks across more than one issue to get a bigger picture of reader engagement. For example, for a monthly publication look across three issues, for a weekly publication look across two months. You'll most likely find a huge increase in your percentages of engagement - that's because most of subscribers don't open every single one of your emails. But they will have opened at least one of three that you sent.

It's important not to focus only on what people did - but also on what they did NOT do. Keep track to find out how many haven't opened any of your emails over a defined period of time, such as six months. Target this very inactive group with a special offer to see if you can activate their interest.

Are you testing to find out what works best for your audience? Don't assume the day and time you've always been sending is best - test all seven days of the week, and also time of day. Test the subject line, test the offer, etc. You want to keep working on targeting your emails (as in who receives what and when), crafting the offers and working to ensure you use the best subject line to entice and open.

Social networks have put ‘social’ and 'sharing' into every aspect of business. This includes sharing content from your emails. 

You should have a content sharing strategy in place because it will extend the reach of your message beyond your own subscribers. There are two aspects of this: 1) to share your email content within your own social networks, as well as 2) give your readers the ability to share your email content within their social networks.

Here’s another ‘shareworthy’ idea for you ... share your email content within your own organisation. Since sourcing content remains a top challenge for marketers (68% according to a recent MarketingSherpa survey) the side benefit of doing this means you’ll be helping your co-workers source relevant content. First, conduct an audit within your organisation amongst those who are creating and sending email marketing campaigns. This will identify who might benefit from sharing content. Articles might need to be tweaked with personalisation or a different call to action to make it relevant to their audience, but that’s easily done. Don’t forget to review both written and all rich media content sources - such as videos, podcasts or images. 

To aid this idea of “sharing”, we’ve just introduced a feature called LibraryLink. This function makes it easy to implement content sharing within your organisation.  LibraryLink enables Newsweaver clients with multiple accounts to share content such as articles, images, videos, logos and podcasts etc. across the entire organisation’s account. The built-in Monitoring Dashboard provides shared content activity metrics, helping stakeholders determine the most popular and effective content to share going forward.

I've just published the latest issue of the business of email - and it's all about content. I’ve chosen that topic because great content is an essential ingredient in successful email marketing.

What makes great content? In the most recent Email Newsletter Usability report by Nielsen Norman Group, the following content types were identified as of most value to a subscriber (both B2B/B2C):

• Informative and keep users up-to-date (mentioned by 63% of respondents).
• Offers timely information
• Provides work-related news or company actions (mentioned by 63% of respondents)
• Offers reports, prices, sales
• Gives interesting content relating to their personal interests, hobbies
• Gives details and easy-to-do action points on events, deadlines, important dates
• Requires no further action beyond a simple click

This is not a huge revelation - people receiving information they have requested by subscribing are going to be interested in your products and/or services to begin with... BUT what you provide about the products and/or services will be essential.

These types of content listed above should prompt you to dig deeper into your content war chest to ensure you are pulling in and generating content from all the sources of information available to you. For example: internally generated, on your website or on your blog. Don't forget to use written content AND visual content (eg video, pictures) and audio content (eg podcasts, webinars).

I'd also like to point out that people want things to be easy - so make sure you provide simple action points in your newsletter, and that the design of your newsletter makes it easy to navigate.

If you'd like to read more about this topic, here's an article to read before you assemble your next email newsletter to ensure you are providing the most valuable newsletter possible to your readers:

Four steps to follow when creating written content for your newsletter

I'm very excited about the Click Map feature just launched here at Newsweaver. This post-send report provides a visual 'big picture' of all click activity within a specific edition of your newsletter. You'll see how many clicks each link received - and on every single page of that edition. Plus, each click tab is colour-coded so you can assess where your hottest performers happened in the publication (red, most popular, yellow and then blue for least active. (Click on image for a full-size view)

This is something I've been doing manually as part of my consultation with clients. I printed out an edition of a publication and wrote the number of clicks next to each link. It always brings the raw metrics of a mailing to life.

So, how can a Click Map help you improve your results going forward?

First, it's 'big picture' easy to see:

• What content didn't get responses
• What links got the most attention
• Over a series of mailings it may help you spot parts of your design that are causing content blind spots

What to do with this information? Here are just a few possibilities:

• Repeat content that didn't get the clicks. There are a number of reasons a link didn't get clicked, such as text too long and they didn't bother reading, text didn't compel them to click. Rewrite your synopsis and run the article again.
• Check your calls to action - should 'read more' be changed to 'register now' or something more active and relevant to that content?
• If areas of your newsletter never get clicks, tease the content in that section higher up in the newsletter - such as the pre-text area or the preview pane.
• Another solution to getting better clicks involves your newsletter template design: if you don't have a permanent area of your template that serves as a table of contents area, consider adding one. It should be viewable in the preview pane. This helps readers scan to find what they want. And, because this table of contents appears on every page of your newsletter's template (home page and article back pages), it encourages multiple clicks by each subscriber.
• It's possible you have too much content, or more likely it may FEEL like too much content to your reader. Review your layout.  If you are putting a series of articles onto one long page it will be difficult for people to scroll through this dense mass of text to find what they want to click on. A series of snopsysis and calls to action, each leading to their own back page or landing page, makes for a more scannable - and more clicked - newsletter. And, it gives you better engagement metrics for each piece of content.

Use all reports to choose what to test. Use your Click Maps, along with all your other reports available to you, to make decisions on what to test. Testing ideas are endless, but here are a few: Test where you place content. Test your calls to action. Test repeating articles. Test less content. Test smaller synopsis, but same amount of content in your newsletter. Test segmenting your audience and sending them more tailored content.

Join me this Thursday the 29th of September at 3.30pm BST time for a live webcast ... I'll be talking about putting email the centre of your social media strategy.

I'll cover the points below - and also take time to remind you exactly why email should be at the centre of your social strategy!

• Moving beyond 'silo' marketing
• Expanding the reach of the email using social media (including your newsletter design)
• Building the in-house list using social media
• Interactive emails in a digital age
• Content ideas that get shared
• Great B2B examples
• Measuring ROI

Register at the B2B Marketing magazine website.

In today's inbox it's quite possible that your email will be viewed with images off.

Rather than panic and ditch the use of images, create emails that highlight your content and calls to action. Then, select images based on how relevant they are to the story. What you use should illustrate your points, rather than use a default lifestyle photo just for the sake of having some sort of image.

Here are six quick tips for using images in your newsletter marketing:

1. Your content should include descriptions of any pictures featured. This lets readers know what they're missing visually, and encourages them to turn on the images.
2. Test your emails before sending to see how they look with images on and off.
3. Don't embed or attach images - This can create delivery issues. Instead, have your images hosted on your server or with your email service provider.
4. Fill in the alternative text field in your image tags – in some email software this is what will appear where images are turned off.
5. Avoid using one big image - This can result in one big empty email when the images are off!
6. Make use of the pre-text link - Always include a link at the top of your email that clicks through to an online version of the email. If people are online and click this link, they'll automatically see all text AND images.

My blog is now featured within the Newsweaver website - and I'm loving the new look, the new logo - and all of that... I'll still be blogging all email all the time.. but I'm not the only one with expertise in email around here! I'll soon be joined by other members of the Newsweaver team who will blog regularly here about different aspects of email marketing, including delivery, design and metrics.