PepipostSimple. Effective. Fast

Knowledge Partner

Who says that “emails” are dead? Emails

are still the most widely used means for

marketing. More than ever, emails are being

used to sell, promote, market, retain, and

what not! But yes, with changing times,

emails and email users have changed.

Starting from lists to From names, subject

lines and social network integration, each

facet of email marketing is undergoing a

radical change! However big or small you

are, here is the plan to transform your ways

of campaigning to learn the newest rules of

the email marketing game!

In early 2015, we started Pepipost with a single mission – to help startups and businesses send transactional emails in the most efficient way and at the most disruptive pricing ever. We still continue to do so.

We believe that communication in any business scenario should be free, and this philosophy is at the core of Pepipost. That’s why we came up with a pricing model where you only have to pay for emails that are not opened by

your customers. The emails that are clicked, opened, or engaged with will always be free. Always. We promise you that.

With our reliable and scalable cloud-based email infrastructure, we’re able to help hundreds of businesses to send millions of emails every day without any hassle. We follow the best delivery guidelines, protocols and industry standards to fight against spam and make sure that emails delivered on time and reach the receipient’s inbox in the blink of an eye.

INTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTION

Key Features

We are happy to introduce EmailMonks as Pepipost's knowledge partner. The Monks would guide you in terms of content & brand building. EmailMonks can help PepiPost's customers design and code awesome emails and landing pages in a quick TAT of 8 hours. Monks offer strict NDA terms, white-labelled services & much more. Know more at www.emailmonks.com

In this handbook, Pepipost and EmailMonks come together to provide you with awesome email tips.

Pepipost

Quick andEasy Integration

Highly OptimizedDelivery

High InboxPlacement Rate

Bounce andUnsubscribe Handling

Triggerware -A Powerful Rule Engine

Actionable Real-time Analytics

Controlled Deliveryvia Send Management

PERSONALIZE EMAILSWITH PREDICTIVEDYNAMIC CONTENTThink beyond the normal personalization of just saying “Hi Mike or Hi Jenny".

The real opportunities for personalization are in what’s called “dynamic content.” Now, start serving the email content based on each user’s information and interest.

Most of the ESPs track the user actions and publish reports on the same. Have you ever wondered how effectively and innovatively can this information be used!

• Using geo location or zip code (if you have), show weather reports, location based updates, show nearby stores, use local culture/place images and a lot more.

• From the purchase behavior, show other products which are complimentary to previous purchases or the customer might be interested in.

• From click behavior, customize news or content based on a subscriber’s past click behavior.

• From demographic information, you can use the combination of age, gender and birthday or any anniversary date, to send personalized gift offers or content.

There are almost no limits on what you can

do with the Dynamic Content. You can think

of different combinations of information which

you have and which you are generating and

plan your content accordingly.

Personalization along with Dynamic Content

and Open time optimization can really add a

great value to your communications and can

trigger the next level of growth.

Open time optimization is the new thing

which marketers have now started focusing

on, based on the time of email open in real

time you can change the content of the

email. The content can be as simple as

saying Good morning with a cup of coffee, if

the user has opened the email in early

morning.

Generally, you receive two sets of information from the users:

1. When the user signs up

2. When the user opens or clicks the email.

Dynamic content is all about leveraging the power of these two sets of information.

Let’s see a couple of examples about how to use these information;

Tip 2Tip 1

“What’s in it for me?”

Hi!

Keep youremail campaign

relevant &focused to your

customers

USE EMAIL AS CONVERSATION,NOT INVASIONGone are the days of sending Batch and Blast. In this fast moving world, users expect

relevant and personalized deals, and like to be treated in special ways.

When you batch and blast, you are essentially admitting that your emails are not

individually relevant. You have to give subscribers reasons to engage with your emails.

Abandon the idea of sending batch and blast and enter into a relationship oriented

mindset that continuously builds engagement with customers.

A romantic date goes badly if all you do is talk about yourself. The same holds true for

marketing conversations. If you don’t listen — really listen — to your prospects and

customers, you’ll never earn the chance for a “second date,” let alone a long-term

commitment.

Listen your customers at various stages and then respond accordingly.

You might be thinking, how to listen what the customers are saying. Right?

There are some innovative ways to accomplish them:

Tip 2Tip 2

• Reply Based Campaigns

• Survey

• Feedback

• Building Automation

CustomerCustomer

BrandBrand

xxx

xxx

HaveConversationsnot campaigns.Your Inboxingdepends on it.

START SENDINGWELCOME SERIES OFEMAILS

Tip 2Tip 3

If you are a seasoned email marketer, you already know that a welcome email is an incredibly

powerful tool to on-board your new customer. While almost every other brand today sends a

welcome email, we find that more than 60% of the brands send a single plain Jane ‘you are

subscribed’ kind of welcome note rather than a well-planned series of welcome emails.

Brands should realize that welcome email is more than an opportunity to say ‘hi’ and capitalize

on the potential a series of emails would have to differentiate them from the rest.

3 reasons why you should be sending a welcome series:

1. Increase engagement and improve inbox deliverability

Planning a series of emails is a smart tactic to warm up your customer to your brand, increase

engagement and improve deliverability. A series helps in gradually building trust and credibility

of the brand and paves way for positive engagement. Furthermore, it also gets you the

thumbs up from MSPs who place high importance on engagement for delivering your emails in

customers’ inbox.

2. Drip market your brand

You only get one chance to make the right first impression and welcome series gives you the

perfect opportunity to extend this interaction. A series allows time for your customers to get to

know you and your product/ service offering in a better way, thereby creating the right

impression about your brand.

3. Improve customer life cycle

Getting it right in the beginning itself will ensure you build a long lasting relationship with your

customers. Make an intelligent email series that will draw useful insights on your customer and

will help you plan an email strategy accurately.

Some of the things you can incorporate in the email series to improve the customer life cycle

are as follows:

– Capture customer preferences (what type of emails they prefer to receive) and send

tailor made emails

– Get customer attributes (location, birthday, gender, etc) so you know more about

them and send meaningful and relevant emails

– Understand their email frequency preferences and reduce unsubscribe rate

– Share Easy-to-use information (store locations, e-catalogues, etc) so your customer

can know more about your brand

Open Rate

Dropped

No Welcome

Series

Open Rate

Dropped

No Welcome

Series

Consider welcomeemails. Open Ratesdrop by 25% after fewweeks of sign-upif a welcome emailis not sent.

1. Sending Time is very important. Send the first cart abandonment email within 1 hour:

The longer you wait to hit send, the lesser chance you have to re-engage them back with your store.

Reason being, that if the email is triggered after a long duration, they would not be able to recall the information entirely, or may not have the same emotional attachment they felt while adding the product(s) in their carts.

2. Always Choose Clarity Over Creativity:

It is the subject line that entices a customer to open your email. Therefore, it should precisely describe the abandoned item or category. Do not confuse or

mislead the customer by using a cluttered subject line.

e.g. On opening the mail, a pre-header reads “Your shopping cart misses you, <my name>” and that was one-click personalization.

3. Focus on Copy, Headlines and CTA:

A compelling visual with a great copy will trigger the same emotions the customer felt while adding the products to the cart.

Avoid sending only TEXT-based emails.

4. Positive Reviews, Ratings and Customer Success Stories:

Show That You Can Be Trusted with all information you have.

START SENDINGCART ABANDONMENTEMAILSAbandoned cart emails are sent to customers who have added products to their cart but failed to check out.

It’s remarkably effective as a sales recovery tactic. Research says, that nearly half of all abandoned cart emails are opened and over a third of clicks lead to purchases back on site. You have to understand that customers often abandon their carts without meaning to do so, for example because the website crashed, because the process was complicated, or because the site timed out.

Reduce your cart abandonment rate and recover lost revenue instantly with automated cart abandonment email campaigns.

Few best practices for sending cart abandonment emails:

Tip 4

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CartAbandonment

Emails sent within 24 hours of cart abandonment generates 105%more revenue.

Segment.Because a small

list that wants exactlywhat you’re offering

is better than a list thatis not committed.

SLICE & DICE YOUR EMAIL LIST FOR BETTERSEGMENTATION

Tip 2Tip 5

Email list building is one of the most challenging exercises. You can blend various online and offline list building techniques and ensure your email list to remain hygienic. However, segmenting the email list to deliver optimum results is even more intriguing.

Here are a few ways; you can use to segment your email listand differentiate apples from oranges:

1. Segmentation based on the gender, age, income, occupation and interest areas.

2. Segmentation based on geographic location, previous purchases, buying behaviour, frequency of purchases, type of product/service preferences.

3. Segmentation based on preference centers like daily, weekly, monthly subscribers.

4. Segmentation based on the kind of content preferred to be delivered:E.g. Whitepapers, Case studies, Infographics etc.

5. Segmentation based on relationship with the customers like a prospect, existing customer, previous customer.

6. Segment your data into Active and Inactive. Touch inactive base at lesser frequency. If you send a daily newsletter, touch your inactive base once a week.

7. Start your campaigns every day with BEST of your dataset and move to rest.

Say: You hit your frequent openers when you start the campaign. Slowly move to less frequent openers. Maximize opens by atleast 2%. Give priority to people who open your email daily, than a person who opens your email once a week?

8. Use a list hygiene service to clean spamtraps and screamer accounts.

9. Getting most out of Inactive users :- Exclusive offers? Historical user preference analysis and target specific offers to them? Try to reach out via other mediums like Gmail Ads? Facebook Ads?

While selectingan ESP, checkcustomer service,security & compliancebeforehand.

Choose the right vendor

HOW TO SELECT THERIGHT ESP FORYOUR BUSINESS?

Tip 6

Email is one of the most preferred and cost-effective channels of communication and marketing. To execute email marketing well, you need to have the right ESP support.

Platform: There are crows and there are cuckoos! After having a self-examination about the kind of requirements, start your search for the right platform that matches your needs.

• Increasing your deliverability rate & ROI

• Eliminating a future cost of switching to any other ESP

• Integrating your technology and automation systems with it

• Minimizing the unsubscribe and spam complaints

• Building scalable & reliable mail server

A: Is it a Usability rockstar

Usability of the platform is quintessential. If the platform isn’t user friendly, your staff might not be able to use it quite well. Consider the speed of training your staff.

B: How strong is the deliverability?

Deliverability is the key concern for most marketers. Without emails being delivered, marketers will not be able to track the ROI from the campaigns.

C: Is your ESP reliable?

Make sure the ESP is reliable.

• Are you able to track the success of your email programs?

• Does migrating to a new ESP impact your revenue?

• Are you evaluating ESPs keeping in mind the budget?

• Would you require robust deliverability and reporting?

A right ESP helps in: Before selecting the ESP,ask a few questions:

D: How scalable in the ESP?

Remember, migrating an ESP is tougher than selecting an ESP ab initio. That said; it is now mission critical to choose a platform that is easily scalable with your growing needs.

E: How effective are the analytics?

Reporting and analytics is a crucial part of any ESP’s feature list. With marketers now tracking more than just email open, click through rate and unsubscribe complaints, it is essential that the ESP provides more logical matrices than just open and click rates.

Pricing : Fly high reasonably! Having a pricing term that fits your budgets and sending pattern matters. Analyze pricing plans from various vendors before selecting an ESP.

Customer Service, Security and Compliance : The other kind of question to probe while choosing an ESP is about the customer service, security and compliance. Check whether there will be consulting, 24/7 support, data security, trial accounts etc.

Is “FOLD”hampering yourdesign goals?Consider a foldfree approachfor email designs.

BELOWTHE FOLD

ABOVETHE FOLD

‘FOLD FREE’ APPROACHFOR EMAIL DESIGN

Tip 2Tip 7

• Your content in the fold might not work out all over as there are multiple resolutions and devices

• Fold will also change depending on horizontal and vertical preview pane

• These concepts will change furthermore with emails wrapped around on your wrists. Yes, wearable and other smart connected devices.

Newspapers are now obsolete, but email is alive and well. Thinking fold? Think twice!

Some tips that will not hamper your design goals and at the same time enable you in placing

CTAs at the right spot without jogging the gray:

1) Carve a Story : Give users a good reason to scroll. Let them explore the email by creating

a story starting from the top of the page. A curiosity at the top of the page can encourage a

reader to scroll down the page.

2) Use the power of preview pane : Using appropriate preview pane and pre-headers will

encourage users to scroll and engage with the CTAs irrespective of their placements.

3) Stack up the content together: Instead of stuffing a lot of visible text in an email, it is

beneficial to simply tell the user that there is more content for them to see with the help of an

accordion and menu. This may power a reader to click on accordion and read more content in

each section or rather simply click on the menu and redirect to an entire page.

4) Adjust the blocks to create curiosity: At times the length of the content doesn’t really

matter. This is especially true when your email has different blocks for different target

audience. For desktop users, there could be a different layout with different CTAs within the

folds. However, the same could be drastically overhauled for the mobile user. You can also use

content blocks and images in a way that there is clear indication and curiosity about a CTA in

upcoming folds.

5) Identify the clicks and engagement: You should not stop monitoring your user behavior

to ensure placing CTAs at the right spot. Measure it in relation to the most commonly used

screen resolutions and then place the valuable content in a way that gets the most

clickthroughs.

Challenges

Adapted from newspapers, the words “Above the Fold” and “Below the Fold” are now alsobeing used while designing an email. The vital information and CTAs are placed at the beginningto instigate an action initially. However, this could not be true always.

There are many debates about putting efforts to drive engagement using the folds in email.Above the fold could be crucial as an average email is read for only 51 seconds, but this canalso hamper and obstruct the overall design goals.

Our study indicates that Video in email increases the click rate by 92.8%.

call-to-action

20% 30% 40% 50%

Buy

Egoole

INCREASECLICKTHROUGHRATES BY USINGVIDEO IN EMAIL

1. Stand Out of the Crowd: Using video in email gives you the first mover advantage and helps you stand out from the competition.

2. Increased ROI: Research has shown that video email receives a better response in terms of open rates and very high click-through rates compared to traditional emails.

3. Better Branding and Search Results: Using video email leads to increased website traffic, increased conversion rate, brand awareness, and more referrals in turn.

4. Matches Human Touch: Videos with quality content and a “human touch” add to strategies. In fact, they can even replace physical salesmen.

5. Cross Selling Opportunity: Adding strategic clickable links can direct the recipient to certain web pages or video channels, thus enabling cross-selling or up-selling opportunities for your business.

6. Video Creates Buzz: Ease of distribution over the internet allows video emails to go viral.

7. Video has humongous scope: Relevant, educational, engaging and problem solving videos can consistently motivate the interest and involvement of employees, customers, suppliers and business partners.

Video support in email is becoming the hottest topic in email marketing circles.

HTML5 Video is supported by 58% of email clients.

7 awe inspiring BUSINESS ADVANTAGES of video email:

Most chanted video email types:

HTML5 Method

Using HTML5 video, email marketers can embed video directly in email through the use of a video tag without causing deliverability problems.

Static Image Method

This is a type of video email where marketers use a static image of the video within an email. When a user clicks on the image, they will be redirected to the landing page where the video will play.

Video email will play for 58% of users, and for others they will see the fallback image instead of the video.

Tip 8

Egoole

FromName Subject Line

Egoole

1stMicroYes

2ndMicroYes

BEST HEADERAND HEADLINE

Egoole

PARAGRAPHS &PRODUCTS

Egoole

Call to Action

Recognitionand opens

Confirmationand enticement

Explanation and‘need to knows’

Click and Hand off tothe Landing page

3rdMicroYes

4thMicroYes

EMAIL LIKE A PRO, WITHMICRO-YES CONCEPT

Tip 2Tip 9

Human mind works on the micro yes concept. Before taking any big decision, we consider

multiple things in our mind. After multiple small Yeses, the bigger yes comes.

In case of emails also, the same concept is applied, because the readers of the email are

actually human beings only. There are various logical steps in an email which the human

analyzes one after the other to take a bigger decision to buy a product or to even read further.

Now think of those elements as steps on a stairway. You need to go from one to the other, in

order to rise up the stairs.

1. The name and the subject line should entice the reader to open the email. (1st micro yes).

2. The header and headline should explain what is in your email and entice the reader to pay

attention (2nd micro yes).

3. The body of the message: text and images to convince the reader to click (3rd micro yes).

4. Then the Call to Action to proceed to the landing page (4th micro yes).

Logical steps

Subject line speaks “great sales on dresses this week”.

But the headline says “all products 30% off”. There is a clear mixed messaging.

Is the email factually wrong? No. Does it feel disconnected? Yes.

The first yes (open), isn’t confirmed in the email and headline. Every time we have to think

to make the connection between elements, we lose a part of our audience. So, that is a

big email marketing No-No.

Avoiding misalignment. An example:

Your images play a big role in your path to yes, too. Promising an exclusive service and

showing a stock image. It just doesn’t say yes. Make sure your images reinforce the main

message and keep them consistent and reappear on to the landing page. That way,

people feel that they have landed on the right page and can easily continue the flow. More

about the flow and placement of ”yes enabled” images next time.

Making images say “yes” too

Make it more than a consistent message, make it a persuasive message.

INCREASE YOURDOMAIN REPUTATION TOAVOID SPAM FOLDERS

Tip 10

With email being one of the most cost-effective channels of communication and marketing,it is widely used by most brands globally. However, to achieve a great deal of ROI from this channel, your emails ought to deliver. Many email marketers dream of making their way into the inbox, but in reality they end up going into the spam folders. In fact, Return Path report claims that one spam trap can affect your deliverability by 53%.

Consider a scenario, John’s boss asked him about the automated nurturing workflow and John uprightly informed him that the emails are going from time to time, but the open rates seem to be low. Boss tried digging deep and found most emails actually weren’t delivered into the inbox. Bummer, Huh!

The story is the same for many email marketers. So how can you treat your email campaigns to make them work?

Warm up exercises – A must for healthy emailing: Warm up exercises help rejuvenate your body. Dig some deep for identifying the ISP pain points. Try gaining some trust by warming up your IP. Cover up poor sending score and make sure you start covering this up by sending emails to a small segmented list. Make sure that this list is of subscribers who are more engaged and regular loyal email readers.

Sub domains – They work as your medical claim: Imagine you are stuck with poor health and have a financial crunch! A permanent medical claim can help you overcome your health issues and get treated against insurance anytime. Creating a subdomain that exclusively handles the email marketing activities might be a smart move to make which will safeguard you for the rest of your life. With such a sub domain, you will be able to build trust among your users. It will also go the extra mile in helping you to monitor your IP reputation and win against the most challenging domain based certification filters.

SPF – A great way to prevent email tanning: Like a sunscreen lotion with a SPF that makes you more beautiful, Sender Policy Framework can help you build trust among receiving mail exchangers. It is an email validation system designed to ensure that the host domains are authorized. If your domain name matches the associated IP, your emails have higher chances to get delivered. So, use it like your sunscreen!

Monitor your heart-rate – “Blacklisting”: Most companies never pay heed to blacklisting unless they are blacklisted! Some ISPs keep changing their algorithms and with changing rules, you might at some point fall prey to blacklisting although you practice safe emailing. In such a scenario where you feel you are blacklisted without a known cause, do write to them and identify the reasons. If it is a stroke of bad luck stroke, request to lift the blacklisting.

ISP Monitoring

IP Management

Spam ComplaintManagement

ReputationMonitoring

IP

Made with © 2015 PepiPost. All Rights Reserved.

www.pepipost.com

@pepi_post

Pepipost 4th Floor, Peninsula Chambers,Peninsula Corporate Park,Lower Parel (W),Mumbai - 400013, India.

Email: pepis@pepipost.com

Notes:

Made with © 2015 PepiPost. All Rights Reserved.

www.pepipost.com

@pepi_post

Pepipost 4th Floor, Peninsula Chambers,Peninsula Corporate Park,Lower Parel (W),Mumbai - 400013, India.

Email: pepis@pepipost.com