Bronto Blog

Lessons Learned from Bronto’s Marketing Team:
Multi-Channel, Part 2 in a Series

2007 was a year of testing for Bronto’s marketing team. Our goal was to create successful campaigns across multiple channels. Multi-channel marketing is becoming more and more significant to customer life cycle management. Reaching customers or prospects can no longer be accomplished using one tactic. Your respondents may react to a campaign online but may not respond to a direct marketing piece. It’s important to create a plan that has fluidity and test to see what performs in each market.
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Surveys can be extremely valuable. They confirm your strengths, while highlighting areas for improvement. It’s a great way to see a snapshot of what your clients think about your company, but you can only see this picture if you get enough responses. Just take a look at another blog about quick and easy surveys. To prove that this really works we here at Bronto have been sending quarterly Client Services surveys for several years. Our most recent survey broke all our records (opens and responses) in the first 3 hours of delivery. So, how did we do it?

Challenges:

1. Opens: How do you ensure that your email will be opened?
2. Responses: Once opened, how do you encourage clients to respond?

Opens: We created a subject line that created incentive to open (see below).

Simple and to the point, a subject line with a clear incentive entices the recipient to read further to get their $5!

Responses: Our opening paragraph was above the fold, had appropriate image/text balance, was viewable with images off and provided enough encouragement to complete the survey (see below).

Other Email Marketing Lessons Learned:

1. Feedback through multiple iterations. We internally deliberated over the introduction paragraph for weeks prior to the initial send. Ask several different people in your organization to evaluate your email before it goes live.
2. Test. Test. Test. Typos happen. We all make mistakes. Try not to let the mistake be the one that is sent to your entire list.
3. Think (a lot) about the subject line. A company-wide subject line contest generated great ideas. Spend the time to create a great subject line as it is one of the most critical components in the open decision. Do your own version of BrontoFire.

Make one of your 2008 email marketing goals to improve your survey response by implementing these takeaways. As always, ask Bronto if you need help.

DJ Waldow
Account Manager at Bronto

Are your email messages delivering brand and design intact? The answer would probably surprise you. In our recent Email Rendering Quiz, marketers were quizzed on how often they were using best practices when designing their messages. Here’s a recap of the responses as well as advice on how to ensure your messages deliver as intended.

• CSS - Only 24% of respondents are currently using inline styles for their email formatting. While embedded CSS or an externally linked style sheet can work, the only widely email client supported CSS is inline styles. Inline styles also provide the flexibility to make variations in style throughout the HTML message.
• Alt Tags - 40% never use alt tags in their messaging. Always add ALT tags to your image tags to ensure the viewer knows its content, regardless of whether the image renders. Using ALT tags also satisfies accessibility issues, conforms to W3C HTML 4.01 specs, and allows the disabled to read and receive their emails.
• Image/Text Ratio - 19% of responding email marketers design their emails with the image as the predominant message. It’s important to keep a balance between text and images. Not only are filters on the lookout for email messages with only images, if images don’t render well within the recipient’s client, your message may be lost. Instead, create a message that balances text and images so that regardless of how the email renders, your message is received.
• Text - We were impressed with the number of respondents that are including a text version, 47% to be exact. We would still like that number to increase, so why not consider multi-parting your message? Now don’t get us wrong, creating a text version is definitely a must. However, most e-mail service providers offer an option so that messages can include both an HTML as well as a plain-text version. When both versions are included, they are sent together as your messages go out. This approach allows you to keep the benefits of formatting and branding.
• Testing - Only 50% of respondents always test their email messages. You should conduct tests for the major ISPs (Outlook, AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) as well as other email providers that make up a large portion of your email lists. Try making a checklist of items to test: CSS, image blocking, url links function properly, and more.

Interested in learning more, or seeing how your email campaigns render? Take our quiz today!

Sally Lowery
Online Marketing Manager at Bronto

Including a survey in an email can be very valuable as it’s a great way to better understand your recipients. However, surveys can also be tricky. Forms, which are the basic components of a web survey, are often unreliable in email. In many common email clients forms aren’t visible or if they are visible they aren’t functional. Update -11/06: For those who asked, Forms don’t function in Hotmail,
Outlook 2007, and AOL among others - hence my aversion to using them directly in emails.

So how do you reconcile this issue? Well there’s an easy way to get direct responses without having to use forms. The answer is easy, you use it in every email already; any guesses?

The answer is links!

Because you are already tracking the links that are clicked on within your messages, you can easily see how many people have clicked through. Here is an example: Of course this limits the number of questions you can ask, but you can easily link to a separate survey outside of your email if you’d like to gather more info. Aside from an external survey you can link people to a simple thank you page, your home page, or better yet, a page that is tailored to the response they gave you.A lot can be gleaned from inserting a quick one-question survey into your emails. This method requires less incentives, since you’re asking much less from your recipient. Of course adding incentives into the mix will increase your response rates. Your response rate is also nearly guaranteed to increase as recipients are much more likely to answer 1-3 short questions than follow a link to a longer survey.

The best way to increase response rates, however, is to show that survey responses have an impact. There is nothing more disheartening for me than responding to a survey and then feeling that my responses weren’t “heard.” I’ve taken my time to give feedback and if my responses weren’t heard…well, it’s now very unlikely that I’ll give feedback again. So, be sure to ask actionable questions and incorporate the results immediately - whether means a change to the email format or just posting peoples’ favorite in the next mailing.

Update 11/7: Kevin asked for some examples found in the wild, here is one I dug up from my email archives. Tivo ran a poll this summer of which cartoons or comic books people would like to see next in the movie theater. The links all led to the same landing page, shown below. The results were given in the next month’s newsletter.

In case you are wondering, The Jetsons won for TV Shows and Wonder Woman took the Comic Books category.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto