Email Mailing
WhyWaitForever has been involved with email mailings for large and small companies.
The strengths of WhyWaitForever are the technical aspects of the mailing.
For one marketing and communications company, with limited sales resources, it was important to understand which prospective customers were most interested in their newsletter. The prospective customers who opened the newsletter the most times were the first to be followed up with a phone call.
For one retailer once every two months, batches of 250,000 emails were sent out over a four week period. Each week around 60,000 emails were sent out in order to minimise the impact on the call centre. The tracking report had to identify popular lines and the direct sales resulting from the mailing.
WhyWaitForever conforms to best email practice.
Mailings
A mailing requires a mailing list of email addresses, a date and time when the mailing should start and the time period in emails per hour over which the mailing should be sent. Typically a variable delay can be set between the sending out of each email.
Mailing lists can be difficult to acquire. A subscribe and unsubscribe process must be in place.
As an alternative to creating a mailing list from scratch, a mailing list can be purchased. WhyWaitForever can source specialist mailing lists.
Creative
An email comprises copy, images, layout and "look and feel". In many cases, companies want to reinforce their brand and so can use variants of existing material used in their websites.
WhyWaitForever can provide the creative work in full or use that provided by the customer.
Technical
The outputs of the creative process need to be optimized to produce the best technical solution. If copy contained special characters or words that resulted in automatic deletion by email "spam" filters the response would be non existent.
The tasks that need to be undertaken include the following.
Validate and verify the mailing list.
Produce HTML and Text equivalent coding to the highest technical standards.
Activate and test the web links.
Send the emails.
Monitor the response.
Produce and publish a comprehensive tracking report.
The emails need to meet legal, usability and accessibility standards.
A facility for unsubscribing to the email may need to be developed.
The Process
The following outlines a typical process.
The customer supplies a mailing list. This is usually in the form of a comma or tab separated text file or a spreadsheet or a database.
WhyWaitForever verifies and validates the email addresses.
WhyWaitForever supplies, after each mailing, an amended mailing list where the failures have been removed. In addition a file containing just the failures is supplied. These files are typically returned as tab delimited text files. These text files can be directly opened by spreadsheets or database programs.
The customer supplies, or WhyWaitForever creates, publication ready, original artwork in the form of copy, images and layout. The created images should be optimised for the web. They should be in JPEG, GIF or PNG format. If videos and or animation are required, they should be in MPEG or Flash formats.
WhyWaitForever creates a text version and HTML version of the original artwork. When required, WhyWaitForever creates viewable, printer friendly versions, XHTML versions and AOL acceptable versions. Where necessary WhyWaitForever will create a cascade style sheet (CSS) for use with the HTML version. The text version excludes images.
Quality checks, including spelling, are undertaken. WhyWaitForever can spell check for UK strict, UK loose, US loose or US strict. All "special" Microsoft characters and other illegal characters are converted to UTF-8 or are removed. All links are enabled and tested.
Tracking images are added. Tracking "click through" code is added. Tracking information is added to the links to appear in the web activity logs.
The journey from the receipt and opening of an email to the arrival to a landing page is tracked. When required, further tracking, to associate a purchase with a particular mailing campaign can be implemented.
Much software development effort is being expended to protect privacy and reduce the effectiveness of tracking mechanisms. Default email client and browser settings can inhibit tracking. Tracking work has to be undertaken on a best endeavours basis.
WhyWaitForever publishes the text version,the HTML version, the viewable version and the printer friendly version on to a WhyWaitForever (or other) website for review and approval. For personalised emails, these online "test" versions contain "generic" personalisation.
WhyWaitForever emails, as separate emails, the text and HTML versions to a review and approval list of email addresses provided by the customer. These emails are personalised if applicable. The test emails should ideally be opened and read by a range of email clients including Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora etc. Some of these email clients can automatically desensitise and remove tracking information.
The customer notifies WhyWaitForever of further changes and amendments that are required. If changes are required, one or more of the above steps are repeated. If no changes are required, the customer authorises WhyWaitForever to deploy the viewable and printer friendly versions to the live web servers. Once live, the emails are able to be sent out.
In cases where WhyWaitForever is not responsible for hosting the viewable and printer friendly version, a process needs to be agreed to update the host web server. Access to parts of the log files is required to produce a comprehensive tracking report.
WhyWaitForever sends out the emails in line with the agreed timetable. Failures will be retried.
It is better if the web server that hosts the domain has the same domain as the email server that sends out the mailing. More and more spam filters might reject mailings where different host and email domains are used.
WhyWaitForever monitors and tracks the results of the emails for a number of days after the mailing. The usually time period is between seven and ten days. The final report is published after this time period has elapsed.
WhyWaitForever is happy to "white label" reports.
Example
An example of a series of email marketing reports produced for a large web retailer. The reports have been desensitised and the emails information edited to keep the actual company confidential.
Example Email Marketing Report contains full product purchase tracking.