Tag : Subscribers

Taking the surprises out of the campaign approval process

Posted by TravelMailer at 9:33 am

Have you been importing email addresses into your subscriber lists in TravelMailer? You may have noticed that when you import lists larger than your approved list size, a warning appears, noting that you will have to complete our campaign approval process prior to sending your campaign. The benefit is that you will no longer be caught out by the need to get your campaign approved, just as you’re about to send that time-critical email newsletter.

Our approval process is in place to ensure that everyone enjoys reliable deliverability and service. By having our approval team check that lists abide by our anti-spam policy, we can maintain permission best practice and great deliverability for all campaigns.

If you import a list above your current approved list size, then you will see a warning like this (“Your account has not been approved for a list of this size”):

Once you have imported the list, an email will be sent to us, explaining that you will need to go through our approval process before you can send a campaign.

You will have to have to go through our approval process. This involves answering two short questions regarding your list, which we will then review prior to approving your first campaign to a list of this size:

You will only have to do this once in order to send to your new subscriber list. Read more about how the approval process works.

Please note:

The approval process is actually a campaign approval just as much as it is a list approval. Meaning we actually need to see the actual campaign being sent (in its completed form) as part of our review, that’s why we can’t just check the list when it’s imported.

This is important for us to be able to know that the creative itself meets our policies (isn’t content that violates our terms of use, has a visible unsubscribe, etc) and is relevant to your list permissions.

Using the preference center to retain & target your subscribers

Posted by TravelMailer at 2:53 pm

Not sure if your subscribers prefer to receive campaigns about soccer or snooker? Would they hang around if they received updates on country music, over calypso? There are immense benefits to knowing your subscribers’ interests, desired email frequency or even location, two of them being better targeting of your subscribers and less unsubscribes. Plus, in order to reduce email churn, you will want users to be able to update their active email address. Thankfully, you can achieve this and more, simply by using TravelMailer’s preference centre feature.

The preference center in a nutshell

Even if you’ve had an existing subscriber list for a while now, collecting preference information and giving subscribers the option of changing their preferences instead of simply unsubscribing is easy, with a little know-how as to how segments work. In an earlier blog post, we discussed how useful segments can be – if you haven’t tried segmenting your lists yet, do give this post a read.

Setting preferences is akin to allowing your subscribers to subscribe and unsubscribe to sub-lists – a subscriber to a widget store newsletter may be interested in Arduinos, but not Faraday cages, and therefore may only want to receive newsletters solely about Arduinos. Having a preference center allows the subscriber to state this:

Another benefit to setting up a preference center is a reduction in email churn, being the number of emails in your list that become inactive as people discard their email addresses. On average, 15-25% of all valid email addresses are discarded each year as people move to a different ISP or change jobs – with a preference center, subscribers can change their subscribed email address without completely unsubscribing from your list.

Setting up the preference center

In this example, we will set up a preference center with the three interest categories above, being ‘Arduinos’, ‘Faraday Cages’ and ‘Gewgaws’.

In your account, click on ‘Manage Subscribers’, then your subscriber list, then click ‘Custom Fields’. Under ‘Edit field’, create a new field with Data Type, “Multiple Options (can select many)’ and enter your desired preferences. Ensure “This field should be visible to recipients when they edit their settings in the preference center” is checked:

Subscribers will now be able to subscribe to these preferences, and you will be able to segment your subscriber list accordingly:

Customizing the preference center

To change the colors, header graphic, message and language of the preference center, click on ‘Client Settings’, then ‘Preference Center’. You can also preview the preference center:

Adding a link to the preference center in your email

Linking to your preference center is as easy as adding the following tags to your email content. When we send your campaign, we’ll convert this into a personalized link for each of your subscribers.

HTML emails -

this will be a link

Plain text emails -

[preferences]

Note that the preference center is only available to subscribers once the campaign is sent – in order to test the preference center link, you will need to send the campaign to subscriber list that includes you as a subscriber.

Editing your subscribe form

When creating a subscribe form, you can also add custom fields so that subscribers can state their preferences when they sign up for your email. In ‘Manage Subscribers’, click on your subscriber list, then, ‘Create a subscribe form’. Check the custom field you wish to add, generate the code and you’re off:

So.. How do I get my subscribers to edit their preferences?

Using our above example, say you wanted to start sending the special-interest newsletters (‘Arduinos’, ‘Gewgaws’…) to your subscribers. Here are some tactics you could try:

For existing subscribers – Consider sending an introductory email, suggesting that your subscribers update their preferences in order to receive more relevant updates on their favorite products. Also remind them that they can change preferences or their subscribed email address at any time. All future emails should contain a link to the preference center.

For new subscribers - In the confirmation, or welcome message, make sure the subscriber is made aware that they can change their preferences, or unsubscribe at any time. It doubly helps if you have already edited your subscribe form to reflect the preferences on offer.

Finally…

Preference centers are a very powerful addition to any email campaign as they not only encourage subscriber retention, but allow you to profile your subscriber list by interest, gender, or whatever field you please.

Segments are good for you

Posted by TravelMailer at 3:29 pm

Although previously considered to only be in the realm of expert email marketers, segmentation of your subscriber list is something that everyone can do – and should. In this post we will cover some of the great reasons why you should apply segmentation to your campaigns, how to segment your lists and finally, mention that segmentation should be used to promote engagement, not kill it.

What is a segment?

A segment is a subset of one of your existing subscriber lists. Simply speaking, it’s a group that can be defined by you, based on criteria such as:

• If the subscriber clicked a link in a previous campaign
• If the subscriber joined your list prior or a specific date
• A match with any of your custom fields (eg. Subscriber lives in Berkeley)

Lets say you’re running a coffee club meet in Berkeley. Your list may contain a lot of other coffee club subscribers from across the country, but your email is only relevant to subscribers living in Berkeley. That’s where list segmentation can come to the rescue.

But that’s not all…

There are oodles of other reasons why you should use list segmentation, including:

• Sending introductory offers to, or asking for feedback from new subscribers
• Re-awakening subscribers that have not responded to your last few campaigns
• Limiting your subscriber list when sending a campaign to subscribers who responded to a previous campaign
• Testing a new subject line or call-to-action on subscribers who did not respond to a previous campaign
• Sending nice notes to subscribers on their birthday

Segmentation can create more personal, targeted interactions between you and the subscriber, as well as minimize list fatigue. Secondly, it’s a great way to get in touch with specific groups such as inactive subscribers, who may simply need a different kind of prompting.

So, where do we start?

We’re going to pick up again with the example of a coffee club meet in Berkeley. Lucky for us, our subscriber list includes the custom field, ‘Suburb’, so we will be able to filter and segment our list using ‘BERKELEY’ as criteria.

Start by clicking the ‘Manage Subscribers’ tab and in the ‘List’ column, click on your subscriber list. You will now be able to view all the subscribers in your list. To define a segment of this group, click ‘Segments’.

On the ‘Manage segments’ page, click ‘Create a new segment’. You will then be asked to enter a name for your new segment. Make it something meaningful, like ‘Subscribers in Berkeley’. Now we will create the first rule for our new segment. From the ‘Create your first rule based on…” drop-down, select ‘Suburb’ and click ‘Add Rule’.

We now want to specify that we will be selecting subscribers from Berkeley only for this segment. To do this, beneath ‘Suburb’ we will select Suburb Equals ‘BERKELEY’. You also have the opportunity to add further rules, as well as OR conditions to the rules you specify (e.g. Suburb Equals ‘BERKELEY’ OR Equals ‘OAKLAND’). Once satisfied, click ‘Save and refresh count’. The number of active subscribers that match the criteria and thus, will populate this segment are displayed.

You can now use this segment to send your email to, or alternately, you can view the subscribers’ details or export the list as a CSV or text file. To send your email campaign, simply check the segment you want to send to when defining your recipients.

And voila. 87 Berkley coffee drinkers and a list of subscribers happy to receive one less irrelevant email.

So… It all looks like win to me.

Not so fast. While there are countless advantages to clever segmentation of your subscriber lists, the above-average delivery and response rates for certain segments may tempt you to send these groups plenty of email, while ignoring the rest of your subscribers. Remember to share the load – even if a subscriber hasn’t responded to your last two campaigns, that’s no reason to segment them out of your next send. These dormant subscribers may be simply waiting for a more compelling offer. Plus, you may run the risk of fatiguing your most valuable subscribers.

Happy segmenting!