Moreover, the report says, 63% of marketers believe they will be upping their outlay on email marketing at some stage in the future.

The report, the latest in a series of annual surveys by the DMA into email marketing, found that confidence in the value of email marketing campaigns had increased, with just 31% of respondents saying they had reservations about their investment return, compared with 61% in the previous year.

The positive view of email marketing found among marketers surveyed in the report was matched by growing satisfaction both with standards of deliverability and the level of click-throughs by potential customers.

Whilst 39% and 43% of respondents said they were concerned, respectively, with deliverability and click through rates, these levels were down a third on the numbers identified in the previous year’s survey.

The DMA found, however, that whilst confidence in the mechanisms of email marketing had increased, the main focus of concern among marketers had how shifted towards conversion rates: with 48% of marketers citing the latter as their main concern.

Two other points of concern found in the report were: a lack of internal resource (cited by 38% – a figure perhaps reflecting the fact that 74% of respondents said their email marketing campaigns were designed and implemented in-house); and budgetary pressures (cited by 26% of respondents).

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The report, from digital marketing advisors, STEEL London, reveals that 36% of smartphone users surveyed looked at marketing emails when they appeared on their screens; with this proportion increasing to 55% among those in the 18 to 34 year old age bracket.

Of those who looked at the marketing emails they received, 69% were found to have immediately acted on this information; with 42% clicking on an attached URL; and 30% actually buying a product or service.

The percentages were even higher for those in the 18 to 34 year old group; with 52% saying they had clicked on to a website, and 35% reporting having bought an item.

Interestingly, of those who read a marketing mobile on their smartphones, one third said they purposely saved the most relevant messages for closer inspection when they would be able to access a desktop or laptop computer later on.

Referring to this phenomenon, the chief executive officer of STEEL, Andy Hinder, said that mobile handsets were increasingly being used as a ‘gatekeeper’ for marketing emails; and that marketers therefore needed to focus on ‘how they further adapt their email marketing strategies for mobile.’

On a less positive note, the survey also uncovered criticism from consumers that there was ‘too much scrolling’ (42%); the ‘wrong layout for mobiles’ on some emails (29%); and ‘too much content’ (27%).

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The findings confirm that amongst other activities online including: Reading the news, accessing social networks, online banking, shopping, instant messaging and blogging, senior managers across the North West region in the UK spend a significant amount of their time accessing their email and searching using search engines.

The time spent on these two activities outweighs the other activities two-fold implying that these are definitely channels that marketers should consider when trying to access senior decision makers in major companies.

To see the findings of the report and learn more about senior-level executives from the North West’s Internet use, visit Digital Directions: How Business Decision-Makers in the North West use the Internet available from the 20th of September onwards.

The post The North West's Top Managers Spend a Significant Amount of Their Time Online on Email or Using Search Engines appeared first on PushON Ltd.

This works with Outlook 2007, and the tracking we are using is Google Analytics

If you don’t have access to amend your website

1. Use the following url to generate your tracking link: Google Analytics Link Tracker
2. Using the details in the following format:
3. Click on the Create URL button, and copy this long url
4. Create a new email message
5. Go to the Insert menu
6. Select Signatures
7. Select your default signature
8. Insert your tracking urls, and remember to amend the display text to a short pretty url or some anchor text
9. Save it and test it works by creating a new email message, inserting your signature (if this isn’t done by default), and checking your links look good and work in Rich Text, HTML and Plain Text.

If you do have access to change your website

Option 1

Ben suggests an alternative method if you have access to your website code.

1. Use the following url to generate your tracking link: Google Analytics Link Tracker
2. Create your tracking url described above.
3. Creating an index page, and use a server side redirect using the following code:(or the ASP equivalent) stick that right at the top before the html tag and it will seamlessly redirect.  Your ‘Location’ is the tracking url that you created.
4. Create a short directory, eg http://www.pushon.co.uk/kg
5. Put the index page in there and use the link in your signature http://www.pushon.co.uk/kg.

Option 2

Alternatively, use a client side redirect:

1. Use the following url to generate your tracking link: Google Analytics Link Tracker
2. Create your tracking url described above.
3. Set up a redirect by creating an index page with this code** in it:
4. Create a short directory, eg http://www.pushon.co.uk/kg
5. Put the index page in there and use the link in your signature http://www.pushon.co.uk/kg.

The benefit of this is that it works with plain text as well as RTF and HTML.

*Gathered moss along the way

**Code is nicked from Google as Ben’s code was stripped from his comment by our security features.

The post Track Email Signature With Google Analytics/Outlook 2007 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

But the content is strong, depressing and makes you evaluate what you need to do to get through these times of financial uncertainty…. well lets be honest, it was financial uncertainty 3 weeks ago… we now know we’re all screwed.

It’s highly American, so apologies for that, but here we go:

The key points I took from it were about reducing risk, getting aggressive with your advertising and marketing, and cutting spend on anything that isn’t essential or going to bring in more money.

OK, so I have ulterior motives.

But you have a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of the most accountable marketing you could imagine.

If you’re not using an analytics package on your website, get one.  If you have a decent system, set it up correctly and evaluate the results, then you have information that can drive your online marketing spend to achieve excellent return on investment.  You can literally see what works and what doesn’t, so you know what is essential to your business and what can be cut.

And what’s more important than getting people to your site?

Getting them to interact, return, request a quote, book an appointment, request a call back, sign up to your newsletter, refer a friend, purchase…

How do you find out what’s stopping people doing these things?

Analytics will help identify the poor performing pages, but you need some qualitative data to make informed decisions.  To start with, get some real people to review your site, and set them some tasks to complete. Watch them and ask what they think as they are going along.

You can also add surveys to your site to get a larger number of people reviewing and giving you feedback.  Now, we tried this and initially got the feedback of “pumpkins” and some abusive banter between our directors, but persevere and you may find out what’s stopping people transact.

If you can get the largest number of people to you site, in the most cost effective way.  Then plug the holes that stop these people leaving and never coming back, you can get the most of your advertising and marketing spend.

This may be the best money you spend on Online Marketing because it tells you what’s going on.

But don’t stop there.

If you continually have people visiting your site, making contact and purchasing, you’ll soon build up a database of people interested in your services.  Follow up on these initial transactions, but be very careful not to scare people off.

Make your emails interesting, useful and above all, relevant to the person you send it to.  You may need to segment your email list using the information you have.  For example, by geographic location, age, what they have expressed interest in, what they have bought, or point in the purchase cycle.

This is important because if Paul has just bought a king size bed from you, you don’t want to send him cut price deals on king size beds, you’ll just make him cross.  However, you may want to compliment it with an offer on king size bed linen.

And of course, you need to track the success, evaluate the results and learn for your next try.

Free tools to help make the most of what you have

• Google Analytics -This is a free tool from Google to help see what’s going on on your website.  It shows you where your traffic comes from, what people do on your site, how they transact and where they drop off.
• Kampyle - This is a free online survey for your website for qualitative data from your users.
• Conversion Rate Experts – These guys are experts in improving conversion rates, read their content and sign up to their newsletter.  It’s infrequent, but gold dust.

The post Depressing… but what are you going to do about it? appeared first on PushON Ltd.

I’ve worked with designers for a couple of years now, and feel their pain when they design a beautiful piece of email marketing, only for Outlook et al to turn it into something that resembles Hillary Clinton.

It’s definitely time to name and shame the main culprits… it’s no surprise that Microsoft have come up with a poor & average result for Outlook 2007 & Hotmail respectively, but they look to be upping their game, with the new Windows Live Mail and Windows Mail.

Hopefully a sign of things to come!

The post Email Standards Project appeared first on PushON Ltd.