VerticalResponse for AppExchange Blog

VerticalResponse Supports Businesses Affected by the Gulf Oil Spill

We would like to recognize all of you who are doing your part to support the Gulf Coast during the oil spill. We would also like to help those businesses who might be affected by this tragedy. If you are helping or have been impacted, please accept 1,000 FREE email credits to continue your email marketing during this challenging time. If you've got extenuating circumstances, tell us the story and we'll see what we can do to increase that number.

Forward one of your email campaigns to helpthegulf@verticalresponse.com now with your username, and we'll get you loaded up.

We would like to recognize all of you who are doing your part to support the Gulf Coast during the oil spill. We would also like to help those businesses who might be affected by this tragedy. If you are helping or have been impacted, please accept 1,000 FREE email credits to continue your email marketing during this challenging time. If you've got extenuating circumstances, tell us the story and we'll see what we can do to increase that number.

Forward one of your email campaigns to helpthegulf@verticalresponse.com now with your username, and we'll get you loaded up.

Top 5 Ideas for Closing More Sales This Month

As the end of the quarter nears, many of you may have ambitious sales goals to achieve. Email provides an immediate and inexpensive means of accelerating your sales pipeline and closing more business when time and goals are tight. There's never been a better time to reach out with a quick campaign to engage new prospects, close existing opportunities, or re-ignite lost leads to help bolster your bottom line.  See our top 5 suggestions for helping close business using VR for AppExchange:

1. Wake Up the "Dead Wood"
Create a Salesforce report and campaign of leads and contacts who you haven't heard from in a few months.  Our Partner Team did this recently and generated incremental sales from a list we had long left for dead. Bonus: Unsubscribe and bounced email feedback helped us update our contact lists so our Salesforce data is even more accurate than before.

2. Bring Sales Holdouts Across the Finish Line
Position a special signing bonus or offer if a prospect completes a sale by a certain deadline.  Send to every prospect or single out your longest-standing holdouts. Depending on your sales cycle, expire the offer anywhere from the end of the month to a 24-hour deadline.  Be sure to give yourself enough time to process and post responses so the credit goes to your current sales period.

3. Re-Engage Customers with a Win-Back Campaign
Reach out and ask lapsed customers for their business again. Include a really rich offer (always with an expiration date) along with links to a survey asking them for honest feedback on their experiences.  Use the results to clean up your customer data and to formulate future offers and services.  See Also: 5 Tips for Winning Back Customers

4. Reward Loyal Customers
Salesforce campaigns aren't just for closing new sales. Create add-on sale offers of new goods or services and offer them at a discount to your most loyal customers.  Be sure they know they're getting a deal because you recognize their loyalty.

5. Keep Your Sales Funnel Full
Toward the end of any sales cycle, businesses tend to focus on closing sales, emptying the bottom of their sales funnel.  This makes it difficult to maintain selling momentum into the next month or quarter.  Don't neglect adding new contacts and opportunities during this time to nurture a healthy sales pipeline. Send a quick greeting or introduction to your new leads or contacts to ensure you'll have engaged prospects well into the next sales period.  You'll find you'll get better open, click and closed sale rates when you make an effort to stay top-of-mind.

Email Delivery: Understanding Response Rates

Our Email Delivery Manager Kiersti Esparza, recently contributed to our blog with Part 1 & 2 of our ongoing email delivery series. Today she’ll be talking email response rates and what they all mean.

Even with the most engaged audience it would be nearly impossible to ever see a 100% open rate. A 70% rate would be incredible and a 20% open rate might not be bad at all! Maybe your recipient doesn't have time in a particular day, or maybe they weren't compelled by your subject line. Perhaps they filter personal email by businesses they frequent and wait until a weekend to look at it. Either way don't despair, every business goes through this.

To top it all off if your recipient is viewing your email on a mobile device that only accepts text-based emails in most cases they will read the text version that won’t render an open. Remember, in order for the email to count as open, the images must have appeared and in the text version, they don't.

If you are feeling that your open and click rates aren’t as high as they could be and your bounce rates don’t indicate any specific delivery issues, the issue is the engagement of your audience.  You have to ask yourself a few questions:

• Is your content relevant to your subscribers?
• Did they sign up for mail from your balloon shop but are getting newsletters about your new florist business?
• Should you be segmenting your audience based on regional differences, gender, job title and messaging different parts of your audience with different content? 

After a few campaigns you may want to email a follow up message the nonresponders differently, testing different offers to engage them. It's pretty easy to target Responders (openers and clickers) or NonReponders (those who have done nothing) specifically.

• Are you sending too frequently?
• Are you not sending frequently enough?

Remember if you start sending too many emails for the relationship you set up with them, your recipients may unsubscribe. Conversely, if you send less than monthly, you may want to increase your frequency to ensure your audience doesn’t forget they subscribed. Older lists will generate higher bounces and generally lower engagement rates because your recipient is less likely to open and click an email from a sender they don’t remember subscribing to.

• If your audience is primarily B2B where content filtering be more of an issue?
• Are you seeing open and click rates in some domains and not others? 

Maybe some of the content recommendations above could be applied to your content. See Six Tips for Delivering B2B Email.

We suggest mailing to your new subscribers as early as possible. Specifically, send a Welcome message to set their expectations on content and the frequency of your mailings. This is a best practice for all email senders. Then the frequency of your newsletters should be just as you promised them when they signed up.

If you are feeling that your open and click rates aren’t as high as they could be and your bounce rates don’t indicate any specific delivery issues, the issue is the engagement of your audience.  You have to ask yourself a few questions:

• Is your content relevant to your subscribers?
• Did they sign up for mail from your balloon shop but are getting newsletters about your new florist business?
• Should you be segmenting your audience based on regional differences, gender, job title and messaging different parts of your audience with different content? 

After a few campaigns you may want to email a follow up message the nonresponders differently, testing different offers to engage them. It's pretty easy to target Responders (openers and clickers) or NonReponders (those who have done nothing) specifically.

• Are you sending too frequently?
• Are you not sending frequently enough?

Remember if you start sending too many emails for the relationship you set up with them, your recipients may unsubscribe. Conversely, if you send less than monthly, you may want to increase your frequency to ensure your audience doesn’t forget they subscribed. Older lists will generate higher bounces and generally lower engagement rates because your recipient is less likely to open and click an email from a sender they don’t remember subscribing to.

• If your audience is primarily B2B where content filtering be more of an issue?
• Are you seeing open and click rates in some domains and not others? 

Maybe some of the content recommendations above could be applied to your content. See Six Tips for Delivering B2B Email.

We suggest mailing to your new subscribers as early as possible. Specifically, send a Welcome message to set their expectations on content and the frequency of your mailings. This is a best practice for all email senders. Then the frequency of your newsletters should be just as you promised them when they signed up.

Get Higher Open & Click Rates with Pre-Header Links

Your recipients are getting your email marketing campaigns in various email readers and on mobile devices, and many of them are making decisions whether to read them in a split second. They look at who the email is from, then the subject line, and in some cases what comes directly after the subject line; the pre-header text. We see most people using pre-headers in the scenario where images are not visible due to a recipent's email settings. But this often times is also what is displayed right after your subject line in many email readers. It's pretty valuable space don't you think?
Check out the example below:
 

We recommend you test some of your most important content, short and sweet, right in the pre-header of your emails. We started doing it and have noticed an increase in the number of opens and clicks we're getting to our emails.

We still keep our other links in the pre-header. Notice below, we include a link to "View this Email", but we included a "Get Started & Download Our PDF Guide" link which got pulled into the email reader (see above). Since we launched this pre-header link, it has been the #1 most-clicked link of all of our newsletter URLs and our open rate has remained high because of the pre-header shown in the reader.

So, give it a try in your next email marketing campaign and send us your results!

Resolved: Stats Update Issue for VR Email History Object

Late last week we fixed an issue affecting stats updates back into Salesforce.com for VerticalResponse campaigns. This issue was reported by our customers and our technical team worked to identify the source of the problem as quickly as possible.  Unfortunately, it was a difficult problem to solve and the fix took longer than initially anticipated to uncover.

Things are now back on track and the reporting updates are working correctly. No reporting data was lost and you can simply click the "Update Salesforce" link within your account to re-run the stats updates.

Campaigns sent during the last 2 weeks in May would have been the ones most likely impacted by this stats update failure, but again if you re-run the updates now you'll see all the relevant email stats in the VR Email History objects for both Leads and Contacts.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact our Support Team.
Support is available weekdays from 6am - 5pm PST and weekends from 8:30am - 5pm PST.  Call us at 1-866-6VERTICAL (866-683-7842), or launch a Live Chat from our support pages during those hours.

Thanks for your patience while we addressed this issue and we're very sorry for this hassle.

Discover Our New Templates and Email Editing Options

Since rolling out our new Email Creation Upgrade this Spring, we've added new templates, designs and email editing methods to VR for AppExchange.  Be sure to try our new options to see all that the new upgrade has to offer.  Click the "Start Now" button in your VR for AppExchange session to get started.

 

Did You Know:

• Our new email creation methods include more than 500 pre-designed templates featuring brand-new designs and layouts  

• Our super flexible and easy Wizard features ready-to-use layouts that include sample copy, and our Canvas method lets you toggle between graphical view and HTML Code view.

• You can once again send emails using your existing Salesforce email templates with our fully-integrated Salesforce email template picker. 

• You can always provide your own HTML designs using our freeform editor, too.

Whether you're a start-from-scratch freeform user, you're true-blue loyal to your existing Salesforce templates, or you want to discover how easy it is to get started quickly on high-impact emails with our email wizard, VerticalResponse has an email editing method for you.

Login to Salesforce and start creating an email today!

Email Delivery: 6 Tips for Delivering B2B Email

Our own Email Delivery Manager Kiersti Esparza, shares her insights about how to get your email delivered to businesses. 

Businesses that sell their products or services to other businesses could have it a bit more difficult when it comes to getting messages delivered. Email Service Providers (ESP's) like VerticalResponse maintain great relationships with the ISP's to ensure consumer email gets delivered. However, individual businesses can add other hurdles for your messages to get past.

Breaking It Up Can Help

Some businesses, usually larger ones, might begin to get suspicious about email getting through their doors when they see multiple messages that contain the same content. They're likely to think it's bulk marketing email and perhaps block it or use some sort of filtering mechanism. One way to test this is to segment your list into a smaller campaign and see if sending smaller chunks of email gets you a better response.

Getting Rid of "Dear"

Another big impact to B2B delivery is starting your email with “Dear” as a salutation.  You might try forgoing your salutation altogether because while they are polite, they aren’t really necessary in email.  The biggest problem with using the word “Dear” is that it can be flagged specifically in SpamAssassin and other filters as well and businesses may be using that tool.

Calm It Down

Be tempered in your content design.  Avoid using font sizes that are too big for your headlines.  Be conservative and only bump a headline up a font size or two, and highlight it with bold.  Don’t use unusual background or font colors.  Filters also flag this fancy formatting as a trait associated with bulk marketing email.  

Clean Code

Make sure the HTML coding is clean since poorly formatted HTML could result in emails being bulk foldered or blocked.  Never use MS Word to design your email because when you copy and paste from MS Word there are additional characters that get automatically inserted. As a result it's flagged as sloppy code and can get filtered.

Don’t code your emails using Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. MS Outlook 2007 does not render CSS and neither will the newer version of Outlook 2010. Your email will look messy and unprofessional not to mention get filtered.

Active Links

Make sure your links are active since broken or improperly entered links could cause filtering.  Also, make sure your links don’t end with .php – this has been shown to cause message filtering.  Just designate a new link for that page that doesn’t have that .php and you will be fine.

A Healthy Balance

Balance Text and Images. Spam filters look for image-only email messages. If you embed your text and graphics into one single image, you risk your message going straight to the junk folder.  And since most email clients suppress images by default – if your email is one big image it will like open as a blank email with no call to action. Even worse, the first thing your recipients might see is your unsubscribe message. Ouch.

If you intend to send a text-only message, design it as a text only message from the start. If you design your message as text in an HTML document, this could also cause issues since filters will see the email unevenly weighted between html content and text content causing potential filtering.

Even if you're not building your email for business to business, these are all good ideas for consumer driven emails as well.

Related Post from The VR Marketing Blog: Email Delivery: Authentication, Reputation and Feedback Loops, What It All Means.

Businesses that sell their products or services to other businesses could have it a bit more difficult when it comes to getting messages delivered. Email Service Providers (ESP's) like VerticalResponse maintain great relationships with the ISP's to ensure consumer email gets delivered. However, individual businesses can add other hurdles for your messages to get past.

Breaking It Up Can Help

Some businesses, usually larger ones, might begin to get suspicious about email getting through their doors when they see multiple messages that contain the same content. They're likely to think it's bulk marketing email and perhaps block it or use some sort of filtering mechanism. One way to test this is to segment your list into a smaller campaign and see if sending smaller chunks of email gets you a better response.

Getting Rid of "Dear"

Another big impact to B2B delivery is starting your email with “Dear” as a salutation.  You might try forgoing your salutation altogether because while they are polite, they aren’t really necessary in email.  The biggest problem with using the word “Dear” is that it can be flagged specifically in SpamAssassin and other filters as well and businesses may be using that tool.

Calm It Down

Be tempered in your content design.  Avoid using font sizes that are too big for your headlines.  Be conservative and only bump a headline up a font size or two, and highlight it with bold.  Don’t use unusual background or font colors.  Filters also flag this fancy formatting as a trait associated with bulk marketing email.  

Clean Code

Make sure the HTML coding is clean since poorly formatted HTML could result in emails being bulk foldered or blocked.  Never use MS Word to design your email because when you copy and paste from MS Word there are additional characters that get automatically inserted. As a result it's flagged as sloppy code and can get filtered.

Don’t code your emails using Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. MS Outlook 2007 does not render CSS and neither will the newer version of Outlook 2010. Your email will look messy and unprofessional not to mention get filtered.

Active Links

Make sure your links are active since broken or improperly entered links could cause filtering.  Also, make sure your links don’t end with .php – this has been shown to cause message filtering.  Just designate a new link for that page that doesn’t have that .php and you will be fine.

A Healthy Balance

Balance Text and Images. Spam filters look for image-only email messages. If you embed your text and graphics into one single image, you risk your message going straight to the junk folder.  And since most email clients suppress images by default – if your email is one big image it will like open as a blank email with no call to action. Even worse, the first thing your recipients might see is your unsubscribe message. Ouch.

If you intend to send a text-only message, design it as a text only message from the start. If you design your message as text in an HTML document, this could also cause issues since filters will see the email unevenly weighted between html content and text content causing potential filtering.

Even if you're not building your email for business to business, these are all good ideas for consumer driven emails as well.

Related Post from The VR Marketing Blog: Email Delivery: Authentication, Reputation and Feedback Loops, What It All Means.

New! Test Seed Lists + Merge Field Testing

Back in March we launched our big Email Creation Upgrade which provided tons of new enhancements to make creating your email marketing messages easier and faster. At the time of launch one feature that wasn't quite ready for prime time was our new seed list feature for sending pre-launch test emails. So we placed a little "coming soon" blurb into the app to let you know we were working on something better.

First, we wanted to say thanks for your patience while we put the finishing touches on things and today we're happy to announce the new seed list features are available in your account. You can now create and save simple seed lists of just email addresses AND you can use existing mailing lists as seed lists to test personalization merge fields in your email. Login to VR for AppExchange now to check them out or keep reading to get a full overview of these enhancements.

What is a test email and why do I need to send one?
Sending a test email before launching your email is a great way to see how your message will look from your recipient's standpoint when they receive it in their inbox. You can send it to friends, co-workers or your boss to get additional comments and make any last-minute edits before launching your live email. Another added benefit is to see how your email displays in different email programs such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail or MS Outlook. Just include those email addresses on your seed list and test away!

Hey, wait -- didn't you guys have a seed list feature in your older email creation tools?
Yup, we sure did but it had some limitations, specifically with testing personalization merge fields. Using our old seed list feature, you could only "test" a few fields within a sample email (First Name, Last Name and Email Address) so there really wasn't an easy way to run a pre-launch test of all your personalization fields above and beyond these defaults.

The Old Way: Limited Merge Field Testing

The New Way: Test as Many Custom Fields as You Like

We know a lot of you use multiple merge fields in your email including standard fields (e.g. Company Name) and custom fields that you add when creating a new mailing list (e.g. Purchase Date) so we've added some new functionality that gives you a few different options for creating and saving seed lists for your test emails.

You can use any of the options below, and for those of you who previously created and saved seed lists in our old workflows, you can now import those to use in the new email creation workflows.

Summary of the new seed list features in your VerticalResponse account:

1. Create and save simple seed lists of "email addresses only"
If you are looking for a quick and easy way to create and save a list of just email addresses then the simple seed list is a great option.  Just create a new seed list, enter in up to 10 email addresses and then save it. You can create up to 20 unique seed lists containing 10 addresses per list which you can use for all future test emails you send.

2. Send a test email to an existing mailing list (max. 10 records)
We figured that the best way to provide additional merge field testing was to use the mailing list management tools already found within your account. Since it's easy to populate fields and create custom ones as well, this works well for test emails that contain any number of personalization merge fields. So when you choose the "Mailing Lists" seed list option you'll be shown a listing of ALL mailing lists within your account that contain 10 records or less. You can send test emails to these lists and also add/update standard and custom fields to help with your personalization testing. Note: any new mailing lists that you create and/or upload into your account will automatically be available to you for test email sending as well.

3. Import your previously saved seed lists into the new email workflow

This last bit only applies to customers who have previously created seed lists in our older email workflows, likely before March 19th, 2010. What you can do now is instantly import those seed lists to use within the new workflows and the following actions will take place.

• With one click we'll import your old seed lists and they will be converted into actual mailing lists so you'll see them in the "Lists" section of your account

• You can edit/update these lists as you would any other mailing list so you can input values for standard and custom fields for testing

• These lists will be available for use for all future test emails, assuming of course that you don't delete these from your mailing list section
  
  

Login to VR for AppExchange now to create your next email and try out the new seed list features!

We'd love to hear your feedback so let us know what you think.