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5 Tips For Awesome Email Delivery

Many marketeers will focus primarily on the copy and design of their email campaign, while these are important to the success of your campaign it doesn’t amount to much if you can’t get your campaign into your customers’ hands.

Here are 5 things to keep in mind that will improve your deliverability

  1. Reputation: what ISPs believe about your trustworthiness is the MOST important variable in how your campaigns will be handled. Play by the rules. Your reputation is affected positively or negatively by every email you send.
  2. IP address management: if you use an Email Service Provider (ESP) keep in mind that many of them share IP addresses amongst mailers. Therefore, part of your reputation is tied to the mailers who went out on that IP address before you. Find out how your ESP keeps their IP addresses clean. If you feel your deliverability is low and your mail volume warrants it check with ESP to see if they offer dedicated IP addresses.
  3. Analzye your delivery reports: you need to understand how your ESP defines an open and how they determine if an address is a soft bounce or a hard bounce and how they handle non-deliverable email addresses.
  4. Get outside verification: consider working with a company like Return Path that offers a suite of products that will help you determine how much of your mail ACTUALLY hits the inbox NOT just made it through the ISP.
  5. Clean your list: be very careful sending email to addresses that have not opened emails from you in the past. These names are more likely to be either undeliverable or report you as spam. In the world of email, bigger is not better. A smaller responsive list will help enhance your reputation greatly.

5 Tips to Combat Paper Costs

While online continues to grow for many media companies from 50-100% annually, most report that revenue generated from their print magazines still contributes the lion's share of overall revenue. Paper (and postage) are the greatest fixed costs that eat away at that bottom line. Dr. Joe Webb presents some practical tips for reducing your paper costs.

  1. Frequency: 10x a year—the new monthly! Many “monthly” magazines come out 10x a year (sort of like red is the new black). If you reduce frequency can you offer some added value? Is there a mix of digital and hard copy that maintains and builds the brand, while creating revenue opportunities?

  2. Circulation: more than enough can be too much! Are you serving more copies than you need to be? Marginally interested recipients may make the rate base look good, but those readers and influencers may be better served in other formats. Consider digital.

  3. Format: Examine the physical characteristics and dimensions of your publication. Changing size, and paper grades, may take better advantage of postal regulations, but can be an opportunity for a more viable strategic direction. The New York Times will save $10 million per year because of its recent switch in format. How much can you save with a format change?
  4. Comp List: Review the copies you are sending out to your edit and advertising contacts. Classify them as A, B, and C prospects then serve copies based on their classification including considering removing your “C” prospects altogether.
  5. Ask basic questions: What is it that we, and our audience, expect from being in print? What attracts advertisers/communicators to pay for reaching our audience? What format today, and in the future, will retain, nurture, and build that audience? Does the print version have a brand presence that develops other revenue streams? These revenues should not be considered “add-on” revenue, but as the core of the publishing enterprise, essential to coping with increasing costs of traditional media.

4 Ways to Help Retailers

How can we help retailers?

  1. Create a button on your website that informs your readers where they can purchase your magazine or better yet blog about your top retailers.
  2. Consider special in-store events where you can drive traffic while building awareness of your titles.
  3. Support their promotional programs and work with them to develop unique programs for your titles.
  4. Consider money off coupons available online to drive foot traffic while increasing sale.

A Tip for Newsstand Success

Retailers and promotion providers are keener now more than ever to offer discounts plus provide added value to publishers. Now is the best time to take advantage of these discounts. In addition, it might prove to be a good time to test, but do remember that overall retail sales are down.

A Helpful Online Tip For Success

Use online cover testing to find out what images and features work best with your audience. This process also ensures connection and interactivity with your readers who are eager to share demographic information, ideas for content and design, preferences and buying habits. Next Steps Marketing offers this service. for more information.

A Great Tip For Subscription Success

If you haven't added email renewal and billing effots to your series, now is the time to do it. You won't be able to do away with your print efforts but it's a great opportunity to decrease expense or add incremental response. Not sure your audience is the type? Start with subscribers who came to you through your site. They've already shown an affinity for doing business online.

5 Tips For Improving Your eMail Marketing

  1. Constant change: While some truisms about direct marketing hold—“right offer for right audience” for instance—the world of email marketing is constantly evolving.

    
How to deal with it: If your list is large enough, do a small A/B test against new creative and see how your control holds-up. Roll out the best winner. If your list isn’t big enough to do a pre-test ALWAYS incorporate something to test in your transmissions.

  2. Best day of the week to mail: Everyone wants the answer to this one. There's no silver bullet. Most mailers try to time their mail drop Tuesday-Thursday. What that essentially means is you've got a lot of competition in the mailbox during those 3 days.

    
How to deal with it: Try doing some mailing on “off times.” Many people read their email 7 days a week; weekend drops may perform better than mid-week drops.

  3. Who sent it: Should the email be from a person on staff or should it reference the name of your publication, event, or newsletter. Many feel building a personal connection to your reader is best-someone might read an email from "Joann" before they read one from “X magazine.”

    How to deal with it: This one is tricky especially if you have multiple emails going out to your list from different departments. If you have a staff member with some public recognition to your audience it's definitely worth considering. One note, some findings indicate that emails from women are more likely to be opened.

  4. Think backwards: Given that subject is one of the 2 most important elements in getting your email opened and read (the other is the “from”), don't wait until everything else is done to come up with your subject line. Develop a strong subject and develop your creative copy for that subject line.

    How to deal with it: Review you past results and see what your audience seems to respond to. Keep an “inspiration file” of subject lines that you received from others that really pulled you in and you would like to test in an upcoming campaign.

  5. Trim it down: This one is hard for audience development marketers. Size of list indicates vitality to many of us. Given that on average 20%-30% of your recipients will open your email there's lots of room to cut down your list. Why do it? For starters, a lot of undeliverable names or non-responsive names will negatively affect your reputation with ISPs.

    How to deal with it: Review your deliverability reports, segment your list based on active, semi-active, inactive profiling; develop a specific campaign to re-engage your semi-active names (e.g., offer them the opportunity to change how frequently they hear from you like monthly instead of weekly). For your inactives let them know that unless they tell you differently they are being removed from your list.

Barbara Besser's Top 10 Gift Renewal Lifelines

Active Interest Media’s Group Circulation Director graciously shares her best practices for creating and deploying a successful gift program this holiday season.

2 Effective Newsstand Efficiency Tips

  1. Be Proactive! Removing zero copy sales can save you significant amounts in production and shipping.
  2. Partner with your national distributor, wholesalers and retailers to review line-by-line distribution. Order regulate where appropriate.

News and Notes
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