Using Campaigner - Email Marketing For Your Online Business Mélanie Attia Explains How Campaigner Will Help You Make Money

Mélanie Attia is the Product Marketing Manager for Campaigner, an email marketing solution that enables organizations to have personalized one-to-one email dialogues with their customers, measure how they respond, and analyze those responses. Mélanie can be reached at mattia@protus.com.

Bryan: What does Campaigner do?

Mélanie: Campaigner is an email marketing service that makes it easy for small-to-medium-sized businesses and organizations that are new to email marketing to create sophisticated one-to-one email campaigns, resulting in profitable relationships with customers at a low cost.

Bryan: Why should online businesses use email marketing?

Mélanie: There are many reasons, but the most compelling is a powerful ROI. Email marketing was estimated to generate an ROI of $43.52 in 2009 according to the DMA.

• It offers a low cost when compared to other retention marketing methods like direct mail, telemarketing and general advertising.
• It offers a quick turnaround, from email creation to distribution.
• It provides statistical tracking that shows opens, clicks, and more.
• One out of two Americans will have a Smartphone with email capability by the end of this year, making email communications even more real time and personal. Your subscribers won’t need a computer to get your message. That changes everything.

Bryan: How difficult is it to setup an email campaign with your tools? How much technical ability is required?

Mélanie: It can take as little as half an hour – from importing address book contacts, to creating an email using one of our 500+ fill in the blanks email templates. Sending the email can be immediate too!

You don’t need to have any technical skills like knowledge of HTML. If you know how to surf the web and use Microsoft Word, you can use Campaigner.

Bryan: How do you help online businesses build their email lists?

Mélanie: We provide signup forms that can be easily embedded into any website, blog, or even your Facebook business page! From there, you can collect email addresses when people sign up for your emails.

We also help businesses that use Intuit QuickBooks to import their existing business contacts to Campaigner.

If you use Salesforce CRM, you can use Campaigner to continue the conversation after someone becomes a lead in your system. This lets your sales team do what it does best -- sell, and brings leads nurturing back to the marketing department.

Bryan: Should a premium (i.e., free report, an ebook, video access) be offered as an incentive for subscribing to a newsletter? If so, what type of subscriber increase is typical? What type of premium/incentive works best?

Mélanie: Absolutely. Especially when the premium is something intangible like knowledge or a process that will help your potential subscriber become a customer faster; for example, free shipping on a first order. The great thing with offering whitepapers, eBooks and video content is that they become a conversation starter. By breaking down the content into bite-size chunks, and enriching it with more supporting information such as case studies and success stories, you can continue a meaningful dialog between your business and your subscribers.

With regard to best incentives, it really varies on the type of business you are in. For example, free shipping is an aphrodisiac for retailers. On the flip side, a whitepaper works very well for B2B companies. I encourage testing various offers, as well as where you place your signup forms, to see what’s the ultimate subscriber signup sweetener.

I strongly suggest avoiding lavish sweepstakes or giveaways like iPods. They generate low quality lists. I’ve seen competitors enter contests with the sole purpose of winning a prize. When the contest is over, there’s no real interest in what you have to offer so you get lower opens, higher unsubscribes and higher complaint rates.

Bryan: Is there really a difference in deliverability between the different email marketers? Please explain.

Mélanie: Deliverability has changed so much over the years and is in constant evolution. It’s no longer only about content filters, or black and white listings. ISPs are now looking at interactions with emails. This promises to continue in shaping the landscape. Although I am not a fan of having my provider prioritize my emails for me, the reality is that Gmail’s Priority Inbox, (where important emails, or ones that you interact with the most go to the top of the pile) does serve as a type of sorting system for the user. If you aren’t junked, then you go in the “everything else” bin.

So yes, in short, depending on the business you are in, you could have more deliverability issues than others. But if you want to break through the filters and avoid being labeled as junk email, then you have to regularly deliver high quality content to your subscribers and make it engaging enough to have opens and clicks.

Bryan: Everyone hates spam. How big of a problem is spam for your company? How can the “spam ranking” of a specific campaign be reduced?

Mélanie: Spam is certainly a problem for everyone in the business of sending emails. For the most part, problems occur when you are completely new to the space. The first reflex many “newbies” have in stepping into email marketing is to buy a list. This is a major, full stop don’t. We do have technology in place that will identify potentially problematic lists and stop them before any damage is done. I have to commend our excellent postmaster team, who spends a lot of time educating our customers and explaining the pitfalls to bright-eyed newcomers.

When you look back, spam used to be either unsolicited email or, "I didn’t subscribe to this." However, now it means "I might have subscribed to this, but it’s no longer relevant to me." Email service providers like Campaigner can help you by:

• Immediately honoring unsubscribe requests
• Implementing the latest technology to enable sender certification, feedback loop protocols, and so on.

Customers have control over the following elements such as :

• Not buying or renting lists.
• Emailing your subscribers at least once a month. Why? Because it allows you to stay top-of-mind with your subscribers and offer an easy option to unsubscribe.
• Making sure your content isn’t poorly formatted – like bad HTML, links to dead URLS, or broken URLs.
• Avoiding "spammy" words. Word filters are still used by many businesses. For example, overused suspicious words affiliated with the pharmaceutical industry such as, "viagra," "antidepressants," and other terms associated with phishing scams, can impede on your ability to deliver to the inbox.
• Treating your subject line like you would a headline for a news article; tell the story of what your email is all about in six words or less.
• Using a "From Name" and address that your subscribers recognize and sticking to it. In fact, commit to it so much that you can ask your subscribers to add the address to their address book.

Bryan: What are some common frustrations of email marketers? How do you smooth these out?

Mélanie: Being relevant is probably the biggest challenge. It’s essentially creating the trifecta of sending the right message to the right person, at the right time. Email makes it easy, but figuring out what the three “rights” are can be demanding and can change constantly. Campaigner gives you the tools to target your audience through intuitive segmentation and scheduling through single or recurring campaigns. Our, “out-of-the-box” integration with Salesforce.com, or through other CRMs and shopping carts, with our API allows businesses to leverage the information they already have on hand.

Delivering to the inbox is still a big problem for businesses. There’s nothing more frustrating than being junked, or worse, never making it to the recipient at all. Since we are founding members of the, “Email Senders and Providers Coalition,” we are always at the forefront in implementing the latest authentication and feedback protocols to stay one step ahead of spammers and potential pitfalls. Our great postmaster team is always monitoring our sends and they respond quickly when issues arise.

Growing your house list is getting tougher and tougher as potential subscribers are now more cautious of when and where they give out their email address. We help our clients by providing them with ideas through our case studies and success stories. What better way to learn than through the experience of others?

Mélanie Attia is the Product Marketing Manager for Campaigner, an email marketing solution that enables organizations to have personalized one-to-one email dialogues with their customers, measure how they respond, and analyze those responses. Mélanie can be reached at mattia@protus.com.