Uncategorized Arquivos - E-goi

Holy smokes, Canada has a new anti-spam law. Am I on the safe side? Help!

Rúben Alvim — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 20:58:54 +0000

That’s right. As of July 1st, the Canadian Anti Spam Legislation Act (CASL) has been brought into force. Failure to comply can result in fines between $1 million (for individuals) and $10 million (for businesses).

Mother of God! How can I be sure my mailings comply?

Fear not, that’s the easy bit:

1) Did EVERYONE in your list subscribe to your mailings using a double opt-in sign-up form?
2) Do you have records (IP address and subscription date) for each sign-up?
3) Do you use E-goi (or any other ESP which auto-adds 1-click unsubscribe and a physical address to all your mailings)?

Check, check and check

Then you’re good to go! You’re following both email/SMS marketing best practices and CASL! Feel free to stop reading – go and celebrate your awesomeness with a nice sweet and tasty treat Also be sure to share this cool infographic with your friends so they too can make it to the top compliance spot!

What if I failed that checklist?

May God have mercy on your soul, because CASL won’t (not really, but you get the idea). It requires all commercial messages sent to Canadian citizens anywhere in the world to have prior recipient consent. This can be implied (eg. someone buying something from you) or express (people signing up to receive your mailings).

Under CASL, permission for implied consent goes stale after 24 months, which means a whole lot of businesses have been rushing to get opt-in confirmation from their Canadian contacts and customers. Check out this handy pic highlighting the differences:

If you’ve only been given implied consent from your Canadian contacts, there’s a nice easy way in E-goi to ask them to confirm their opt-in. Just use the “Help” menu in your account to give us a shout on how to do it. This will also have the added benefit of pruning your list down to those subscribers who are clearly engaged with your brand, ramping up your CTOR rates and maximising your deliverability.

Got it. So is CASL a good or a bad thing?

Everything that helps curb spam is a good thing. CASL looks and sounds pretty much like EU’s own E-Privacy directive and, quite honestly, it was high time a major country in Northern America got in on the act, as CAN-SPAM is just a set of easily circumvented guidelines – CASL is an actually enforceable law. And all the better for it.

Rúben Alvim

Product Content Manager

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Are you getting 65% of unique opens in your email sends?

Rúben Alvim — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 20:23:12 +0000

That’s no typo! One of our clients achieved a stunning 65% average email open rate! And that’s unique opens we’re talking about (instead of the usual misleading total opens).

Impressive! How was this done?

Engaging contents that truly connects with your audience is always key. Plenty of our customers average 50-60% unique open rates, but they’re usually major retail brands or bloggers with huge followings. What’s interesting in this case is how quickly and effectively a single entrepreneur with no subscribers and no previous mailing history dramatically ramped up his response rates.

Who’s the chap?

Meet Caio Henrique Teodoro, a young Brazilian fellow who put together PromoB, a plain no-frills site offering a series of hands-on courses on 3D architectural rendering. Visitors simply pick their desired course and enroll using an E-goi form built into a WordPress plugin. E-goi will then dole out a series of daily emails for each class in the course, as well as a couple bonus hints and tips from Caio himself.

So far so good. Nothing too fancy, it’s just a standard autoresponder sequence. As all sign-ups are double opt-in, good open rates in the first few emails are virtually guaranteed, but Caio was really keen on increasing engagement over the course’s follow-up series (which usually tends to wane). This is where it gets interesting.

So what did he do?

Instead of whipping up his follow-up series and just leaving it at that, Caio took it upon himself to keep a close eye on how each follow-up performed every day, so he could finetune them on the fly.

After 6 months of tests and more than 3,000 emails sent, these are his top takeaways:

1) Most engaging subject lines (over 60% unique opens): – I need to apologise – Bad news – I’ve been deceived – Important course information – Are you familiar with this technique?
2) Nr of follow-up emails required for his subscribers’ engagement to peak: 5
3) Unique clickthrough rate required to sustain such a high open rate: 60% or more (Caio averaged a 72% unique clickthrough rate, a clear, unequivocal indication that his emails connected with his audience)

Did he do anything else?

Yep. Caio cooked up another way to keep his subscribers engaged. He would send an email with highly relevant, impulse-clicking contents first thing in the morning and re-send it the next day only to those folks who hand’t opened it the previous day. He’d then do the same on the 3rd day but only for those non-openers from the 2nd day. Rinse and repeat for the next few days.

The masterstroke here is making the re-send look like a personal reminder by adding “Re:” or “Fwd:” to the subject line and quoting the original email below Caio’s follow-up text (he went with “Hi again, did you have a chance to check out my email below?”). It’s particularly effective to drive opens from folks who have tons of messages to sift through. The cherry on top? E-goi can create and send this auto-reminder for you.

Which subject lines fared the worst though?

“Hi, check out this hot tip”, “Don’t miss out on this class from a top expert”, “Awesome flash sale” and “How to use software X”. They averaged 30% or less (still nothing to shake a stick at).

Hmm, these subject lines (including those who performed the best) sound a bit sketchy. Should I use them?

Subject lines which go right for the jugular are always a touchy matter. When is pushy too pushy? That’s why you really need to make sure that the contents of your emails follows up properly and honestly on a killer subject line – drive masses of subscribers to open your email because you said “I need to apologise” and you better be pretty damn sure to have a bullet-proof reason for having done so. Honesty is absolutely key here. The more you talk openly and frankly with your audience, the more you’ll earn their trust and engagement. Fail to do so and you’ll get yourself in a big heap of trouble.

How should I go about improving my response rates then?

Test, measure, repeat! Set up slightly different follow-up series (focus on subject lines, contents and sequence order), use segments and tags to sort your subscribers into small groups (about 50 people) and kick off each follow-up separately so you can easily compare them against each other.

You can either do it manually or use our automated A/B split testing. And even when you get to reach a 65% open rate (woohoo, congrats! :), keep monitoring your sends daily and always be on the lookout for any wrinkles to iron out. Remember, there’s always room for improvement!

Rúben Alvim

Product Content Manager

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E-goi’s auto-responsive design makes your email look great on any smartphone or tablet!

Rúben Alvim — Fri, 28 Oct 0203 20:56:07 +0000

How does your email look like on a smartphone? Need to pinch, scroll or zoom to view it properly? Responsive design makes this a thing of the past by adapting your email layout to ensure it looks perfect on small screens! The great news is that E-goi can now do it automatically for you!

Terrific, how does it work?

Piece of cake! E-goi will simply detect how small the mobile screen is. Then it’ll auto-adjust your email’s design and pics to render the whole thing along a single scrollable screen-fitting column. Take, for example, the email below.

When displayed on a mobile screen, E-goi automatically turns it into this:

And this is how it looks behind the scenes.

See? E-goi converted the entire contents into a high-performing single column design, making it a breeze to scroll through. No zooming and pinching in sight! This works well even on more complex email layouts, such as the newsletter below. This is the standard web version.

And this is the mobile version below. Notice how the full newsletter contents is sorted into stackable sections readily available by simply scrolling up and down the mobile screen. This streamlined approach is key to connect with your smartphone-toting audience!

Crazy cool! Does any email I create in E-goi come with a responsive version?

As long as you create your email using our Easygoi editor (either from scratch or working from one of our templates), that’s a resounding yes! Forget about HTML tinkering or static templating monkey-business

Just edit your email in Easygoi, hit the “Global colours and styles” left-hand panel and tick “Responsive design”. E-goi will then auto-generate a mobile-ready version of your email when sending it out the door!

Excellent! Will this mobile version always look nice on small screens?

It will in virtually all cases. Most current iOS and Android-based mobiles fully support responsive design and even web-based email clients (such as Gmail and Yahoo) should follow suit. Still, keep in mind very complex multi-column newsletters may not always render flawlessly. But don’t worry, we’ll be finetuning the rendering engine from time to time, so if you think the responsive version of your email doesn’t look just right, give us a shout!

Will I be able to preview my email’s mobile version straight from E-goi?

Yes! We’ll soon be adding a mobile display to E-goi’s email preview, allowing you to check how well responsive design kicks in for a variety of screen sizes. You’ll even be able to turn the preview sideways! Stay tuned

Rúben Alvim

Product Content Manager

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