Starting today, you might begin noticing that things look a little different on the GraphicMail South Africa homepage.
We’re always working on projects to bring you a new and improved Email Marketing experience, and since updates to our look and feel is a great way to keep things fresh; we’ve decided that even our classic homepage needed a bit of a makeover.
It's just another step in our bid to improve our website and product
The way people use the web is evolving, and our goal was to make it more streamlined and simplified than before, so that everybody who visits it the first time gets a better idea of what GraphicMail is actually all about.
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Original infographic found here
Good email delivery rates are money in your pocket. The more people get your email, the more conversions you will have.
But if you're new to email marketing, you might wonder just what issues there could be around delivery. After all, you write an email, you put in the recipient's email address, you click send and you expect it to arrive immediately, right?
Unfortunately, there are various hurdles each email must overcome before its intended destination is reached
When you send a marketing email to your mailing list, not all of your subscribers are going to get it. And since nobody can click on a link in an email they never see, improving your newsletter deliverability is really important.
There are various strict systems in place for identifying which emails are spam. The bad news is that it's often not just spam that gets tangled by delivery nets: some emails that people have opted in to also get snared and then never get to the inbox.
Internet Service Providers keep making their spam traps more sophisticated, which is why you always need to keep few things in mind that might be restricting your deliverability
When an email isn't accepted by the receiving address, it's usually due to some technical issue. These rejections will trigger an automatic notification which tells you that the email couldn't be delivered and, usually, why.
Some of the common reasons are:
1) Bounces: categorised as either "hard" or "soft." A hard bounce represents a permanent problem with delivery, such as when you send mail to an email address that doesn't exist. A soft bounce refers to a temporary problem, such as when the recipient's email account is full. Email addresses with a permanent delivery issue should be taken off your mailing list; otherwise they're wasting precious send credits. And remember, sending emails to “dead addresses” is one measure used to identify “bad” mailers.
2) Throttling: This refers to a recipient restricting the amount of email that can be accepted over a set period of time from one source. It normally impacts only those sending huge volumes of email, so consider breaking bulk email sends down into smaller chunks, rather than regularly sending newsletters out to your entire list at once.
3) Content filtering: The way your email newsletter is written has a large impact on your spam score. After all, we can often tell a junk email apart ourselves even just by reading the subject line. Every word of your newsletter counts though, and Spam-checking tools can be used to test how your content looks to popular filters. If there are any problems, it will give you feedback and then you can take whatever corrective action is needed.
4) Blacklisting: When an email arrives from a blacklisted sender (i.e., one whose emails produce a large number of spam complaints) it's immediately treated as junk. So as an email marketer, you’d want to do everything humanly possible to avoid going over to the dark side of sender reputation! On the other side of the spectrum, whitelists are lists of trustworthy senders who are known to be sources of legitimate email. An email coming from a whitelisted sender will usually bypass many of the spam filters and tests, so play it safe and make sure you are using a white-listed ESP such as GraphicMail for your email campaigns.
Bulk SMS marketing is a quick and effective communications solution, and a valuable tool for interacting with customers by sending them updates, alerts or information about upcoming events or sales - on the go.
Some of the highlights of what SMS marketing can do for you are:
• a direct access path to the prospective or current customers
• personalisation of the SMS, since you are communicating one-to-one
• the means to tap a customer's constant availability
• the opportunity of direct response from the recipient (interactivity)
• the ability for messages to be sent to multiple customers simultaneously
• delivery reports that confirm the arrival of your messages
Mobile SMS marketing lets companies market themselves effortlessly and relatively cheaply.
But of course, there is an art to writing a great SMS, which includes more than just creating short, compelling copy to inform and motivate your audience.
To reel in clients hook, line and sinker (while not overspending on your SMS marketing) you have to craft luring and personalised text messages, all within 160 characters or less.
The Multi-part SMS
Sending a “mutli-part” SMS (especially when you don’t intend to) is the fastest way to break your mobile marketing budget. Once any SMS goes over the 160 character ceiling, even if just by 1 character, mobile carrier services will count it as multi-part SMS message (i.e. more than one SMS, strung together) - and pump up your bill accordingly.
So, if you’re not mindful about your character count, you could be paying twice or three times more than what you banked on for a bulk SMS campaign.
This is why it’s very important to shave your text down to the absolute minimum and double check how much you’ve actually written before hitting that irreversible send button.
Keep it short, keep it simple and have a strong call to action!
SMS Personalisation
It’s not easy to add phone numbers, website addresses and other crucial information into a basic 160-character SMS. You won’t be able to add images, video files or any other multimedia content either.
Let’s face it, without strong and personalised copy, your SMS campaign is probably not going to be really successful. The trick to an effective and inexpensive bulk SMS send is to blend in personal elements for more appeal within the ad copy, while using as few words as possible.
SMS personalisation allows your business to choose and address certain fields that will be specific to the recipients message (e.g. name, gender, age, favourite karaoke-star etc.). For example; if you wanted to text people a week before their birthday you could include something relevant to their birth date to make them more interested.
Personalisation just means placing any of a variety of signatures and personal call-outs on every SMS message sent, to grab your reader’s attention. While the 160 character limit does make this more challenging, the power of personalisation should never be ignored.
How can you solve this problem?
One way is by unifying the stenghts of mobile and email marketing!
With GraphicMail, you can easily combine your direct email marketing strategy with your SMS sweeps, by sending out quick updates via SMS with the minimum amount of necessary personlisation, and saving money by using your newsletters for more lengthy and more detailed personalised information.
Many marketers often mistake the terms email deliverability and email delivery, using them interchangeably, when in fact they are two really different things.
This tends to cause some confusion when people analyze emailing reports, which means some marketers may not even be figuring their success rates correctly at all.
So what’s the big difference?
Email Deliverability: refers to the ability of any given email to be delivered properly. It goes about ensuring email messages are delivered to the inbox and aren’t blocked or rerouted by spam filters. Neglecting email deliverability is a surefire way to worsen the any campaign issues you might be having, because these messages could equally end up in the inbox, in someone’s junk folder, or just go nowhere.
Email Delivery: is calculated by taking the total number of emails that you’ve sent and then subtracting the ones that bounced or were rejected – in other words – the number of emails that actually appeared in your subscribers’ inboxes compared to the number that you’ve sent.
Why does this matter to you as a marketer?
If you are just looking at high deliverability figures, you probably think that you’re already hitting the spot and that there is no need to improve your campaign.
But, if you knew you had an 80% email deliverability rate and your report shows 95% emails delivered (of the 80%), then you’d know you’re throwing money away on lost sends. If a message isn’t making it into the inbox then it’s not being read, making your email ROI drop.
So then, just ask yourself - do you want to put your head in the sand and believe that everything is great, or do you want to see the real numbers?
As an email marketer, you need to look closely at both metrics and figure out what clues these give you about how to improve your newsletter sends. Email marketing campaigns are futile if you experience either delivery or deliverability issues. GraphicMail's email marketing services guarantee that you reach the optimal of both with every send.
GraphicMail offers a number of advanced tools to ensure reliable delivery of all your email campaigns. We boast some of the highest delivery rates in the industry: we’re 100% Anti-SPAM compliant, support double opt-in email marketing, have strong relationships with major ISP and are a member of ReturnPath.
