Campaign

From Online Business Wiki

Contents 1 Introduction 1.1 Campaigns vs. Lists 1.2 Getting Started 1.3 One-off vs. loyalty-based campaigns 1.4 Understanding Loyalty-based campaigns 1.5 Sending a one-off campaign 1.6 Sending a loyalty based campaign 1.7 Birthday Campaigns 1.8 Email Series 1.9 Anniversary 1.10 Setting up Loyalty-based campaigns 1.11 Reusing a campaign as a TEMPLATE for future campaigns 1.12 Selecting your Recipients 1.13 Personalizing Newsletters (Tag-Insert) 1.14 HTML vs. Text Emails 2 DELETE Draft Campaign 3 Spam Control and Issues 3.1 All campaigns require our approval 3.2 Verify Your From Email Address 3.3 Unsubscribe option is enforced 3.4 Double opt-in mechanism 3.5 Unsubscribing customers from the campaigns manually 3.6 Allowing customer to unsubscribe from a single marketing list 4 Advanced Topics and Techniques 4.1 Customizing the Subscription Message 4.2 Customizing the Unsubscribe Message 4.3 Customizing the Unsubscribe link in Campaigns 5 Newsletter Writing Guidelines 5.1 Newsletter coding guidelines 5.2 Newsletter content guidelines 6 Related Articles 7 Related Videos

Introduction

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and powerful marketing tools available today, and one that your company can use to build stronger relationships with your customers. Email marketing allows you to cultivate loyalty in a customer base, providing them with a great value proposition for your products and services - increasing traffic to your website and strengthening sales potential.

Unlike most email marketing solutions that enable you to send one-off email newsletters to your customer base, this solution allows you to do much more simply because of the overall product offering. The possibilities are greater and can have a significant impact on your bottom-line. Right now one-off email newsletters campaigns would make up the bulk of your email marketing activities. Ongoing loyalty-based campaigns are another form of email marketing ignored by most players. These types of campaigns will not only compliment one-off email broadcasts but put a very different slant on how you can use email marketing to build relationships that translate into dollars for your business.

Here are some of the key features that will help you outperform your competitors:

• An easy-to-use wizard for creating email marketing campaigns
• 100's of templates to use for creating stunning email newsletters
• Extensive reporting to measure effectiveness, including open rate, links clicked and bounced emails
• Ability to customize your newsletter subscription forms
• Better spam prevention and control
• Choice of both one-off campaigns and ongoing loyalty-based campaigns
• Ability to include and subscribe customers to affiliate programs within campaigns
• Double opt-in mechanism for customer subscriptions

Campaigns vs. Lists

Before you embark upon email marketing it's important to understand some of the terminology used in this area. A List is simply any group of your customers that you want to send an email newsletter to. A Campaign on the other hand is an email newsletter which has been scheduled or has already been sent to this List of recipients. Every time you undertake a campaign you can use any list which signifies the recipients who will receive your email newsletter campaign.

Getting Started

Before you create an email marketing campaign you have to choose the type of campaign you want to send. If you are new to email marketing then more than likely you will want to send an email to a number of your customers and measure its effectiveness. When we talk about "measuring effectiveness" we are referring to how successful your newsletter was as far as how many recipients received and read it. Every time you send out an email newsletter, the system will automatically measure who opened your email, which links within the email they selected and how many recipients unsubscribed from your newsletter. There are also many other useful reports that will help you measure the success of your campaigns.

There are 3 main parts to every email newsletter campaign:

• Choosing the type of campaign
• Writing the content of your newsletter
• Choosing the recipients of your newsletter

One-off vs. loyalty-based campaigns

One-off campaigns are the most popular forms of email marketing. A one-off campaign is an email newsletter that is sent to a group of your customers at some date in the future. For example you might write a newsletter called "April Newsletter" and send it to your customer database. This is a one-off newsletter. Of course you may continue on and send another newsletter in May called "May Newsletter" but again, this is a one-off newsletter.

If you are new to email marketing then you should start with a one-off campaign, then when you are ready you should also explore loyalty-based campaigns.

Understanding Loyalty-based campaigns

Loyalty-based campaigns automate communication to a group of your customers on a one-by-one basis. There are many types of loyalty-based campaigns.

To give you a better understanding here is an example of a birthday loyalty campaign. Imagine you are a restaurant, a hairdresser, a massage parlor or any other type of business which regularly deals with customers.

If you are in a position to collect your customer's date of birth or even just their day and month of birth, then you can setup birthday loyalty-based campaigns that automate communication to your customers on a one-by-one basis.

Once you create one of these campaigns and choose the list of recipients, as each customer's birthday month is reached a customized email is sent to that recipient alone. For example you can send an email wishing them happy birthday and include a sweetener such as a 20% discount or a 2-for-1 voucher if they purchased with you in the month of their birthday. This process continues around the clock and for every single customer in your recipients list. You needn't remember when customer birthdays are but you can rest assured that you are wishing them happy birthday and keeping them up to date with your latest products and offers.

Sending a one-off campaign

Creating a one-off campaign is a simple and quick process. You need to have covered off 3 essential items.

1.The date to send the campaign

2.The content of your campaign

3.The recipients of your campaign.

To get started use the wizard to go through the steps to create your one-off campaign. The wizard is intuitive and allows for the creation of stunning newsletters without any prior technical knowledge just follow the steps from 1 to 7, and dont forget to Save at the end!

Sending a loyalty based campaign

Here's the complete range of loyalty-based campaigns that you can setup through this service.

• Birthday
• Campaign Join
• Anniversary 1 e.g. next car service
• Anniversary 2 e.g. next dentist appointment
• Anniversary 3 e.g. next haircut invitation
• Anniversary 4 e.g. next restaurant invitation
• Anniversary 5 e.g. next holiday purchase invitation

Birthday Campaigns

Are used as in the example earlier use them to get maximum value out a simple happy birthday message and drive them back to your business.

Email Series

Imagine if you write a newsletter which has 8-issues. In a one-off campaign you would have to set the date at which each issue is sent out to a list of recipients. One-off campaigns are great until you acquire a new customer that joins when you are already up to issue 7 that customer has missed out on issues 1-6!

Email Series campaigns allow you to automate the sending of newsletters to recipients as and when they are subscribed to a list.

For example if you setup a campaign of this type with 0 day, 7 day and 14 day delivery days then when person 1 joins, they will receive issue one straight away. Issue 2 will be sent 7 days after they subscribe and issue 3 will be sent 14 days after this person first subscribed. But when person 2 comes along a month later and subscribes to a list via your website they will receive the same issues at the same intervals relative to their subscription date. This process is repeated for every person that subscribes to the list attached to these campaigns.

Anniversary

The system allows for 5 anniversary based campaigns. These are all of the same type but you can use each anniversary date for a different purpose. You can set up to 5 anniversary dates for each customer. To do so view a customer's record in "Customers" section and click on the "Anniversary" tab.

Here are some examples on how you can use anniversary based campaigns within your business.

• A travel agent could update the Anniversary 1 date with a date 12 months from the date of a customers travel package purchase. Now you would setup a campaign of Anniversary 1 type which sends a reminder to your customer that it's been 12-months since their last travels and that its time for another holiday!
• As a mechanic you could service a customers car and then tell the customer that their next service is due in 6-months. You update the customer's record and enter a date 6-months from now for Anniversary 2. Your campaign will automatically notify any customer when their next car service becomes due.

Every business can and should take advantage of anniversary based campaigns. These types of campaigns can save you a significant amount of time whilst delivering significant benefits and driving repeat business for your business.

You can collect anniversary dates using web forms.

Setting up Loyalty-based campaigns

Loyalty-based campaigns are created just like one-off campaigns - with one major exception. When you create a one-off campaign you designate the date at which it's sent out to your recipients. With loyalty-based campaign you don't set a date for delivery as each loyalty-based campaign is sent to customers based on some date relevant to that customer.

You therefore set Delivery Days. For example a Delivery Day of 0 for birthday campaigns means when a customer birthday is reached, on the day of the birthday your campaign will be sent to them.

For a birthday campaign you may want to set a Delivery Day of -30 which means 30-days before a customer's birthday your communication is sent out. You may also want to have another campaign with a Delivery Day of 0 which wishes a customer happy birthday on the day of their birthday.

A positive Delivery Day such as 5 means your campaign is sent out 5 days after the relevant date.

Lets examine how Delivery Days work with Anniversary-based campaigns. Imagine you update the Anniversary 1 date for a customer for 12-months from now. When you setup a campaign of this type with a Delivery Day of 0, when this future date for this customer is reached your campaign is sent to this customer. However if you had set the Delivery Day to 5, then the customer would have only received your campaign 5 days after this future date was reached.

For Campaign Join campaigns, you would create a series of newsletters by creating follow ups to the first email. This is done by right-clicking on the campaign you wish to copy, then changing the Delivery Day (and other details) accordingly. A typical campaign join series might go out at Delivery Days 0, 7, 14, 21, 28 and so on.

To complete the creation of your loyalty-based campaigns you need to finalize your content and choose the recipients.

Reusing a campaign as a TEMPLATE for future campaigns

Once you create a campaign and you are happy with the layout and the content, you'll probably want to reuse that campaign as a template for you future campaigns.

It is rather easy to achieve that in this application. All you have to do is go to Marketing -> Email Campaigns and in the Campaign List click on the campaign you want to replicate. Then in the Related box click on Copy This Campaign and the system will make the identical copy of that campaign.

You then need to give a proper name to that campaign and so on and once you save it as draft you will notice that the campaign will look like a follow-up to the existing campaign. If it's not a follow-up newsletter you can simply click on the campaign in the list and drag and drop it wherever you wish to position it.

Selecting your Recipients

You must choose the list of recipients for every campaign. These are the customers who will receive the email newsletter from you. When creating a campaign to send you have 3 options in regards to recipients.

The most common option is to choose one of your existing lists.

Alternatively you can create a new list on the fly to import your customers into or add them manually one-by-one.

A third option is to send your email newsletter to your entire database. This option will email everyone in your database where they have not previously unsubscribed from a campaign and have not since re-granted permission to receive communication from you.

If for instance you choose your entire database and a customer does not have an email address then they will not be sent your email newsletter. If you choose a birthday type campaign and you have not specified date of birth for a given customer, again they are excluded from your broadcast. Please note that the system always uses the Primary Email address for a customer.

Personalizing Newsletters (Tag-Insert)

You can personalize every email newsletter. Personalizing email newsletters is an important part of effective email marketing. When you use the online WYSIWYG editor to create your email newsletter you will notice the Tag-Insert list on the editors toolbar.

There are a number of items you can add to a newsletter to personalize it.

For instance {tag_recipientfirstname} will add your customer's first name to each newsletter. {tag_unsubscribe} will add the unsubscribe option to email newsletters and so forth. You can view the entire list of personalization tags when you create your next email newsletter.

HTML vs. Text Emails

When you create an email newsletter campaign you can choose to send it in either HTML or Text format. HTML emails are aesthetically much more pleasing. They are easier to read and can include images. They have a higher impact and can be much more effective in delivering your messages to your customers. Only HTML emails can be reported on. Statistics such as who opened your email and which links they clicked on only pertain to HTML newsletters. These statistics are not available if you send your email in Text format. Keep in mind unsubscribe and bounced reporting is available for both HTML and Text emails.

So why would you decide on Text formatted emails if HTML formatted emails are so much more powerful? Well there are a number of reasons why you would opt for a Text formatted email. Firstly not all your recipient's email clients support HTML emails. This is less of an issue nowadays but certain mobile email clients do not support HTML formatted emails. When you send HTML emails via this system we automatically include a Text version. This means if a recipient doesn't support HTML then they will automatically be shown the Text version.

The other reasons that you would opt to send Text formatted emails is spam.

HTML formatted emails are often mistakenly considered to be spam. It's not unusual for up to 20% of your recipients anti-spam software to consider your email newsletter to be spam and deliver it to the spam folder where the recipient is unlikely to ever see it. You can ask your recipients to add the email address you use for broadcasting to their white list (trusted list) but not all your recipients will do this nor know how to do this.

The dilemma between choosing a HTML or Text formatted email affects anyone familiar with email marketing. Experimenting and reviewing your bounced reports is an effective way to find out how many of your emails are getting through and how many are considered to be spam.

DELETE Draft Campaign

To delete a campaign you click on the campaign you want to delete and then click on step 7 "Reports and Performance" on the right, scroll to bottom of that page and you will see "Delete" button on the bottom.

Simply click Delete button and campaign will be deleted.

Spam Control and Issues

Spam is a major issue affecting everyone on the internet. We take strict preventative measures in this solution to ensure we curtail the explosion of spam. The following are some of the measures we take.

All campaigns require our approval

After you have created your campaign and it has been finalized it is sent to our team of qualified editors to determine whether its contents meet our requirements for broadcasting. Any email newsletter campaign sent through this system must adhere to our terms and conditions.

At a minimum any content sent must relate directly to your business. You must be a valid business and your business' existence must be easily verifiable, and you must undertake that your list of recipients have given you permission for you to be able to broadcast to them.

Once you have established yourself with us we will remove this requirement where your campaigns are sent out without any intervention from us.

Verify Your From Email Address

You must be the legal owner of the from email address that you use to send out your newsletters with. If your email address is not verified we will automatically send you a verification email when you create your next campaign. After you have clicked on the verification link that was emailed to you, you can finalize your campaign for broadcasting.

Unsubscribe option is enforced

You are able to completely customize your email campaigns. This means you can put the Unsubscribe link in any part of your email. Refer to our customization section to learn more. However if you decide not to include this link on an email newsletter then the system will automatically append this to the bottom of your email. If a customer unsubscribes from a campaign then they will not receive any future campaigns from you until they grant you permission again.

Double opt-in mechanism

Double opt-in is a process which verifies a customer's subscription to your lists. Generally customers will subscribe themselves to your lists by entering their details in your subscription form on your website. However it's important to verify that the person who subscribed did not enter somebody else's email address.

This verification is done by sending an email to the email address used during subscription which will contain a verification link. When the customer clicks on this link it's then considered that they have given their permission to receive email newsletters from you.

Regardless of how many campaigns a customer is subscribed to, if they unsubscribe from a campaign they are considered unsubscribed from all your campaigns. For this customer to receive any future email newsletter campaigns they will need to grant their permission to you again.

You can send a request to them by viewing their subscription details under their customer record.

When you add or import customers into the system for the first time you will not need to request their permission. In this scenario you undertake that every customer added or imported has given their prior permission to receive email newsletters from you. But again if they unsubscribe from a campaign then you will need to request permission from them to resume your communications.

Unsubscribing customers from the campaigns manually

Please note that every email newsletter has to have an unsubscribe link as mentioned above and the easiest way for customer to opt-out of your email campaigns is to click on the unsubscribe link.

If for some reason customer emails you and asks you to unsubscribe them from the email marketing you can do this in Admin. All you have to do is go to Customer -> Search and find that customer's contact details. You then click on Manage Customer Subscriptions and click on Permanent Unsubscribe button.

That will permanently opt-out that customer from email marketing. If they want to be removed from a particular list you simply need to click on Edit and untick the box next to that marketing list and click Save.

Allowing customer to unsubscribe from a single marketing list

You can provide a link for to your customers that will allow them to remove them selves from the single marketing list and remain opted-in for email marketing.

To do that, all you have to do is place {tag_unsubscribelist} into your newsletter and that tag will render the link that will unsubscribe the customer from that list. Customer will continue to receive other marketing material.

Advanced Topics and Techniques

Customizing the Subscription Message

By default a system message is displayed every time a customer subscribers to a campaign list. You can customize this message via Admin -> More Customization Options -> System Messages.

You can also configure your subscription form to go directly to a web page that you designate. This web page can be hosted with Your Online Business or a 3^rd party hosting provider.

To do this you need to append the following to your web forms action URL:

e.g.

action=/CampaignProcess.aspx?........

change to:

action=/CampaignProcess.aspx?........&PageID=/Results.htm

Another technique is to go back to the same page where the subscription was made from and display a confirmation message next to the subscription form. To do this:

change to:

action=/CampaignProcess.aspx?........&PageID=Origin

And then place {module_url,error} on the page with the web form, where you would like the results to display....and this is where the confirmation message will appear.

Customizing the Unsubscribe Message

By default a system message is displayed when customers unsubscribe from your campaigns. You can customize this message via Admin -> More Customization Options -> System Messages. If you wish to redirect to a different web page then you will need to add your own META REFRESH tag or JavaScript redirect to the source of this confirmation message:

Javascript example:

document.location = '/yoururl.htm';

Customizing the Unsubscribe link in Campaigns

It is possible to customize the unsubscribe link by placing your custom text inside the unsubscribe tag e.g. {tag_unsubscribe,YourCustomText}

NOTE: If you customize the text displayed by {tag_unsubscribe}, the "Unsubscribe" link will automatically be appended to the bottom of your newsletter.

When you add the {tag_unsubscribe} to your campaigns the system will only display the word Unsubscribe in your campaign. This approach enables you to append your own words around this to customize the unsubscribe option e.g.:

If you wish to be removed from this campaign please {tag_unsubscribe} here.

Newsletter Writing Guidelines

There are two main concepts you need to worry about when writing a newsletter. The first is the content (what your newsletter is about) and the second is the structure (how your newsletter was coded in HTML). We will give you some hints on both concepts in this article.

We first cover the structural (coding) guidelines and then we'll cover the content.

Newsletter coding guidelines

When coding a newsletter you have to make sure that the HTML code you produce will be compatible with majority of the email clients your customers are using. These are, MS Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and the list goes on.

So here are some quick tips:

1. Use tables for the layout instead of divs - email clients work better with tables. Some programs such as MS Outlook 2007 do not support float.

2. Use inline CSS - Try not to link to external stylesheets or embed your styles inside the head, because some email clients do not support this. Gmail and Outlook 2007 pretty much ignore anything above the body tag.

3. Test, test ,test - you should test with multiple email accounts and multiple email clients.

For more tips and and further information please google the subject. A good place to start is - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters/

Newsletter content guidelines

However, email newsletters aren't just printed newsletters delivered electronically. They must be written using a different style for a unique reading environment. These top 10 points will help you publish a successful and valuable email newsletter.

1. Remember that your reader is reading light, not matter (ink). When reading light we blink less often and we're unable to adjust text size by moving the document closer or farther from our eyes. This causes more eyestrain than reading the printed page.

2. Remember that because of this potential eyestrain, your reader will more likely scan a page, looking for key words or phrases to get the information he/she needs without reading every word. A Sun Microsystems study determined that 79 percent of people who visit Web pages, for example, don't read them...they scan them.

3. Remember that you only have a few seconds to capture your reader's attention. Wow your reader with valuable information that doesn't have a lot of introductory material.

4. Write short. Short means about 50 percent less than you write for a printed newsletter. Each article should be about two page-downs at the most with a maximum sentence length of 15 to 20 words, maximum paragraph length of five sentences, and a maximum article length of four paragraphs. Remember...these are maximums!

5. Remember to write in a conversational tone. Newsletters are written with "friendly authority". Let your personality show through and readers will more likely invest their time reading what you have to say.

6. Remember to use lots of bullet points and numbered lists. Lists are easy to scan and they help the reader absorb each item one at a time.

7. Remember to limit each article to a single concept. Add resources such as web sites where longer articles or more information can be found.

8. Remember that email newsletters are easily forwarded. Never write anything that you wouldn't want the whole world (including your competition) to read.

9. Remember that email newsletters only cost you your time. Send your newsletter out consistently and reap the marketing rewards of regular contact. Email newsletters are one of today's most economical and successful marketing tools. Use it!

10. Remember that newsletters are considered a news source. Unlike other direct mail pieces, newsletters enjoy the same status as newspapers and other news media. Respect this privilege. Be sure your information is accurate and newsworthy. Enjoy the marketing advantage while maintaining integrity to your readers.

These tips were picked up from http://www.powerhomebiz.com/vol24/emailnewsletter.htm.

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