Capturing the attention of a prospect in email marketing can be quite a challenge sometimes. It takes time, trust, and an ability to visually attract a prospect. Here are four email marketing tips to help build your clientele.
The Reward Delivery
Email is a great tool to build loyalty, send check-in rewards, and making offers in general. Companies, like Groupon, use this method to do exactly that, and then snatch an email address when coupons are bought from them.
Buy something from them once and more promotional emails will usually follow. This is a great method to gain a prospect’s respect and get contact details.
The Double Opt-In
Many email marketers can get one opt-in, but the real question is: Are you able to secure a double opt-in? The double opt-in often includes a confirmation email that is sent with an email opt-in (a form fill is often used in this case). This could be thought of as an inconvenience to customers who don’t know what you are doing and ludicrous to learning email marketers. Still, the double opt-in might be a valuable asset when maintaining a database for interested subscribers that is clean and high quality.
A Welcome Series
Once new customers opt-in you can start emailing them a welcome series. These series of messages ready your customers to receive from your list and then result in their own drip campaign. Giving your prospects a time frame will also help hasten the process and those that don’t respond can be moved to a cold prospects list.
Integration Within Display Ads
Capturing your prospect’s attention and keeping it is one of the greatest challenges for marketers. A great place to start is by including display ads with confirmation and reminder emails. Integrating a newsletter also has also been a good method of keeping your prospect updated.

Content Marketing is deemed the basis of any good inbound marketing strategy. There is increased competition in online businesses for brand building, search engine optimization, referral traffic, and lead conversion. Marketing content is an essential part to all of these. There are 10 necessities listed below to achieve successful online content marketing.

1. Blog: A blog is an extremely flexible way to publish content on the Internet. Publishing about your current domain will increase your ability to rank well in Google’s Search Engine Results Page, making your business more accessible to the public.
2. Publish a Schedule: A schedule has three functions. First, to create deadlines for content producers. Second, to establish the number of submissions required per week. Third, to set up an accountability system.
3. Advanced Content: Hook visitors in to your website by publishing case studies, white papers, tutorial videos etc. In order for a visitor to gain access to this content they will “trade in” their email address. This visitor has just entered into the top of your sales funnel. You can then nurture them into a lead email campaign, with the idea of nudging them down the funnel.
4. Calls-to-action: These are billboards that will lead a visitor to the advanced content located on your website. They should center in on convenience, value, and solving problems.
5. Landing Pages: Pages that will be awaiting your visitor once they have clicked on your call to action button. While drawing your visitors to fill out the form on your page, your business must look trustworthy and have a clear message of value.
6. Quality Content: The content published on your website must either solve problems, or entertain. These are the only two reasons people have for using the Internet. Focusing on yourself or the company will not draw in visitors.
7. Social Media Distribution: Creating social sharing buttons on your website will maximize public visibility of your content.
8. Subscription: Provide an easy way for your visitors to subscribe to your blog. Have both email and RSS available to fill out. This will also prove to be a good way to monitor the popularity of your published content.
9. Analytics: Being able to track the popularity of certain content on your website will help you gauge what kind of content is most important to your visitors. It will also define the content that is consumed right before a visitor becomes a costumer. When this is identified the same content can be offered up to new visitors in hopes that this will bring in customers faster.
10. Syndication: Once a blog has been out their for a while and your content is considered valuable, other blogs may request to republish your posts. If you can confirm that this doesn’t damage your brand, then accept. Syndication can lead to greater exposure of your business and increase the number of referring leads.

The best email lists are those that contain the names of loyal repeat customers, referral sources who respect others privacy and interested prospects who know you and your business well enough to recognize your emails. Building a permission based email list with a high number of quality subscribers can be tough, but the return is worth the effort!

Store your email data in an easy to edit, and segment electronic database. A good place to start would be your email marketing providers built in database. Email lists are an asset. Therefore, offering some sort of incentive, or reward for signing up should be common practice.

Creating an effective incentive is tough.

1. Decide where to ask.
2. Decide when to ask.
3. Decide how to ask.

To engage potential subscribers you must find out what motivates them and use that to ask for “sign ups” in an effective way.

Email marketing is essential in every businesses marketing “quiver”, don’t let a small subscriber list stop your company’s email marketing campaigns. Everyone has to start somewhere.

How we monitor delivery

We have developed some instrumentation so we can monitor how we are doing on getting messages to our users’ inbox. Our applications tag each outgoing message with a unique header with a hashed value that gets recorded by the application before the message is sent.

To gather delivery information, we run a script that tails the Postfix logs and extracts the delivery time and status for each piece of mail, including any error message received from the receiving mail server, and links it back to the hash the application stored. We store this information for 30 days.

We also send these statistics to our stats server so they can be reported through our metrics dashboard. This “live” and historical information can then be used by our operations team to check how we’re doing on aggregate mail delivery for each application.

Why run your own mail servers?

Over the last few years, at least a dozen services that specialize in sending email have popped up, ranging from the bare-bones to the full-service. Despite all these “email as a service” startups we’ve kept our mail delivery in-house, for a couple of reasons:

• We don’t know anyone who could do it better. With a 99.3% delivery rate, we haven’t found a third party provider that actually does better in a way they’re willing to guarantee.
• Setup hassle Most of the third party services require that you verify each address that sends email by clicking a link that gets sent to that address. We send email from thousands and thousands of email addresses for our products, and the hassle of automatically registering and confirming them is significant. Automating the process still introduces unnecessary delivery delays.

Given all this, why should we pay someone tens of thousands of dollars to do it? We shouldn’t, and we don’t.

Read more about how we keep delivery rates high after the jump…

How we keep our mail delivery rates up

Lets be honest from the get-go. Mail delivery is more of an art than a science. We’ve found that even when you “play by the rules”, there’s still times when a major provider will reject all your mail without notice. Usually it takes a couple emails to to the providers abuse address, and things get resolved. In spite of these “out of our control” issues, we’ve found a few things help us keep delivery rates up:

1. Constantly monitor spam blacklists: We have a set of Nagios alerts that regularly check if we’re listed on any delivery blacklists, and whenever they go off we take whatever corrective action we need to get back off the blacklist.
2. Have valid SPF records. Don’t impersonate your users. When running a web app like Basecamp, which sends email that are generated by another user, it can be tempting to send the email from that user (e.g., so that a comment I wrote on Basecamp would appear to come from noah at 37signals dot com), which might make people feel more comfortable. Unfortunately, this is a surefire way to end up on spam lists, since you’ll likely be sending from an IP address that does not have the valid SPF records. And chances are, if the user’s domain does have an SPF record, it doesn’t include your application’s IP.
3. Sign the mail! DKIM and Domain Keys. Yahoo and Gmail both score signed email higher.
4. Dedicated and conditioned email sending IPs.
5. Configure reverse dns entries. Most of the “big boys” won’t accept mail from your servers if your reverse dns entries don’t match. You might need your IP provider to help with setting up these records.
6. Enroll in feedback loops. We haven’t automated our parsing of feedback, but a daily / weekly review of feedback loop emails helps us know when there’s an unhappy user, or other problem. Too many complaints and you’ve got trouble.

A problem we haven’t solved

By far the biggest cause of failed email delivery we see is due to bad email addresses that were entered in to the system—problems like ‘joe@gmal.com’ or ‘sue@yahooo.com’. By and large, these pass a regular expression check for email addresses, but aren’t actually valid addresses. There’s no perfect solution here, but we’ve been experimenting with checking for valid DNS records or actually attempting to connect to the mail server as part of the validation of an email address, and with notifying people within the application when we aren’t able to deliver mail to them.

A few tools

• MX Toolbox is a great site for doing a quick check on your mail servers and your customer’s mail servers.
• Sender Score is really a marketing tool for Return Path, but it can be used to get insight about how some of the “big boys” are scoring your sending IPs.
• Postmark offers a web tool and API to get the SpamAssassin score for a message, which can be helpful for identifying things you can improve to boost delivery rates.

Have questions about email delivery? Ask in the comments, and we’ll try our best to answer.

Capturing the attention of a prospect in email marketing can be quite a challenge sometimes. It takes time, trust, and an ability to visually attract a prospect. Here are four email marketing tips to help build your clientele.
The Reward Delivery
Email is a great tool to build loyalty, send check-in rewards, and making offers in general. Companies, like Groupon, use this method to do exactly that, and then snatch an email address when coupons are bought from them.
Buy something from them once and more promotional emails will usually follow. This is a great method to gain a prospect’s respect and get contact details.
The Double Opt-In
Many email marketers can get one opt-in, but the real question is: Are you able to secure a double opt-in? The double opt-in often includes a confirmation email that is sent with an email opt-in (a form fill is often used in this case). This could be thought of as an inconvenience to customers who don’t know what you are doing and ludicrous to learning email marketers. Still, the double opt-in might be a valuable asset when maintaining a database for interested subscribers that is clean and high quality.
A Welcome Series
Once new customers opt-in you can start emailing them a welcome series. These series of messages ready your customers to receive from your list and then result in their own drip campaign. Giving your prospects a time frame will also help hasten the process and those that don’t respond can be moved to a cold prospects list.
Integration Within Display Ads
Capturing your prospect’s attention and keeping it is one of the greatest challenges for marketers. A great place to start is by including display ads with confirmation and reminder emails. Integrating a newsletter also has also been a good method of keeping your prospect updated.

~Chelsea Jensen, Prospectr Marketing