Today is Australia Day – a couple of years ago we decided to celebrate by having a barbeque outside our offices here in Woking. It was snowing, so it was a little cold to say the least, and those sausages never did quite cook properly. The board shorts were definitely a mistake.

This year we thought we needed to do something more substantial, and what better way to celebrate than by opening a full Sign-Up.to office down under. So we have!

Our new office is located in Brisbane and headed up by Brenden Rawson, who previously worked here in our UK office for several years before his native Australia called him home (or perhaps he got fed up with not being able to wear shorts).

We’re really excited about this first step in our overseas expansion. We already work with clients around the world, including many in Australia and this is going to help us provide even better support and services to everyone.

We’ll be rolling out an updated site with more details of our services soon. Meanwhile if you’re in the region and would like to find out more, please get in touch.

Not content with just Australia, we’re also traveling far and wide this year. In February you’ll find us in New York as part of NYCEDC’s London 2 NYC program, and in March we’re off to SXSWi as part of the UK delegation. If you’d like to meet up when we’re there, we’d love to see you, please get in touch.

p.s. We now offer full timezone support across the entire Sign-Up.to platform, if you’d like this enabled for your account, just let us know.

Doesn’t time fly! Another year is here and so I’m excited to announce the release of our 4th Annual UK Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

For the 2012 report we’ve compiled open, click-through and unsubscribe information from over 900 million permission-based emails* sent through Sign-Up.to last year to produce a comprehensive email performance report for small-medium sized businesses, the only one of its kind for the UK.

The figures are broken down into 23 different industry sectors to help you gauge your success and gain some insight into how others in your field are performing.

The 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report is available free now.

The figures show that email marketing is still performing brilliantly for UK businesses and average open rates across all industries are over 18%, with many sectors considerably outperforming this.

We put together this benchmark each year because we think it’s important that UK small-medium business marketers have a relevant set of averages to work from – other reports we’ve found are either focused on blue-chip brands or non-UK audiences.

*Yep, 900 million emails is quite a lot. It works out at just over 28 emails a second, every second of every day, across a whole year.

According to a study from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Lithium, published on eConsultancy’s blog recently, when consumers follow your brand on social media what they’re expecting to see are incentives and rewards.

67% expected to be eligible for exclusive offers
65% expected to gain access to games or contests

Apparently though, this isn’t what a lot of CMO’s expected, but we’ve definitely seen strong evidence of this. Offers and promotions run on Facebook and Twitter using our Share tools have led to massive increases in fans and followers for the brands involved, even when using very simple mechanisms like fan-gating (showing different content, like a discount code, to followers).

In fact, using competitions on social media can be a very cost-effective way to build a fan base,  far more so than using Facebook advertising for example, even when offering a high value contest prize.

Interestingly, 60% of consumers also expected to be able to interact with other brand fans – not just the brand itself. It’s therefore well worth looking at promotions and competitions which can leverage this element as well and also keeping this in mind generally when posting – get a conversation going amongst fans, not just between your brand and the fans.

What do you think? Have you found particular success with social offers and contests?

Unsubscribes aren’t something that you usually want to see when you’re managing your email marketing, but they can actually be good for you, so don’t be afraid of making it easy for people to opt out – here’s why:

People change. Never forget that when you send an email it’s going to a real person, and real people’s needs and interests change. Your newsletter might have been relevant to their job or hobby before, but they’ve moved on now and it’s just not right for them any more.

When this happens there are 3 possibilities:

1 – They just stop reading. They ignore your emails when they arrive, leaving them languishing unread in the inbox or simply delete them straight away.

2 – They flag your emails as spam. In a recent Windows Live blog post, Hotmail revealed that a staggering “75% of the email messages that people reported as spam are really legitimate newsletters, offers, or notifications that you just don’t want anymore”.

3 – They unsubscribe.

Of these three, unsubscribing is the one you want to encourage people to use. With the other two options you’re wasting time and money sending emails that are never read or reacted to. That’s why you should always make it super-easy for people to opt-out. We automatically add unsubscription links to your email and in the headers, so that certain email services can enable their own unsubscribe links, but you can also insert your own unsubscription links anywhere you like using our email personalisation tools.

When people don’t unsubscribe but stop engaging, your email becomes what’s known as Bacn (pronounced Bacon), or ‘graymail’ – something that someone legitimately signed up for, but no longer wants. Now that email filtering is so good that on average less than 2% of the email in an average inbox is real spam, graymail is the new challenge for keeping the inbox relevant. In the same blog post mentioned earlier, Hotmail just announced a new set of tools to help consumers deal with graymail, by automatically filtering newsletters and the like into a separate category of email.

Many email services also look at how many of your recipients open and interact with your emails and use this to decide whether your emails get delivered to the inbox or the junk folder in future – not just for that person, but for all recipients at that provider. That means that you want to ensure that as many of your subscribers as possible engage with you regularly and that those who don’t unsubscribe instead.

The good news here is that as graymail filtering becomes more intelligent, relevant, engaging email marketing has more chance than ever to stand out in the inbox and get positive reactions. In fact, according to the DMA’s “Power Of Direct (2011)” report, email marketing delivers an average ROI of 4,000% – or $40 for every $1 spent – a long way ahead of the 2,200% return from search and 1,970% return from display advertising.

So – don’t be afraid to let go of a subscriber when it’s not working out. However, if you start to see large shifts in your interaction and unsubscription rates, it’s time to take a look at your strategy and see if you need to rethink your approach. That’s something for another post though…

Whether you’re already a social media power user or you’re getting ready to test the waters, Share will change the way you manage your social marketing. We’re really excited about this, as you may have guessed from the teaser videos we’ve put out over the last few weeks.

Social is a huge opportunity for businesses but to get the most benefit it has to be well managed and integrated with other online channels, like email and mobile. We found that there weren’t the tools out there that made this easy enough for a busy marketer to manage. So we went out and built them. It took a while. But we think you’ll like what we’ve come up with.

Share enables you to manage your Facebook pages and Twitter accounts directly from within Sign-Up.to – moving us a lot closer to our aim of making us the single login you need to manage all your one-to-one marketing.

This isn’t simply about posting messages though – it’s about creating truly interactive conversations with your fans and about tracking those conversations so that you can learn from them and constantly improve. We call this Business Class Social Marketing.

Share’s main split-screen view lets you interact with your fans and followers, track posts, comments and tweets in real-time. It’s designed to let you handle lots of interactions with minimum effort – saving you heaps of time.

We wanted to make it simple to stay on top of what’s important, so Share shows you who your most active followers are, lets you monitor the sentiment of comments using ‘Vibe’ and allows you to create private notes for your followers, to help you keep track of your relationships.

So that you can get to know your fans better there’s a Facebook app that you can install to run competitions and mailing list subscriptions on your Facebook pages, with all of the data being stored in your Sign-Up.to lists. Set-up is a breeze, just follow the steps from the new App tab in Share.

Share is available in two versions, both of which can be used on their own or added to an existing Sign-Up.to account.

The standard version is ideal for managing single accounts and comes with all the main features, but without the ability to schedule posts or view detailed analytics.

The Business Class version of Share is for social media power-users and comes with extensive analytics, supports multiple Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts and allows scheduling posts across multiple accounts at once.

As a thank you to all our existing monthly and annual customers, we’re making the standard version of Share available to you free forever and offering the Business Class version free until the end of September, with a permanent discount on the normal monthly price if you choose to upgrade before the end of the month. For details please see the notices in the Share section of your account.

You’ll find Share available in your account when you log in. You’ll need to follow the steps to integrate with Facebook and Twitter to get started. We’ve create a whole new section of the site to talk about the features available in depth, and a host of new tutorials to help you get the most from everything. As always, you can call or email us with any questions.

We can’t wait to see what you do with Share!

Have you designed a great email campaign recently? Something which makes you proud, something that you could frame and put on your wall, if it didn’t look so much better on screen?

Well, here’s your chance to show it off to the world! We’re looking for the very best examples of email marketing and you could win an iPad 2 for your efforts.

To share your email marketing mastery and be in with a chance to win this fantastic prize all you have to do is send your email design to us using the competition entry button within your Sign-Up.to account. If you don’t have an account, you can get a free one here. Entries are open until the 25th July after which time the shortlist of entries will be put to a public vote.

Find out all about the email design competition here.

The competition dates are:

• Entries welcome up until Monday 25th July 2011.
• Thursday 28th July 2011 – we’ll announce the 10 shortlisted entries and voting will begin.
• Thursday 11th August 2011 – voting will close and we’ll announce the winning email and the runner ups.

Good luck, and we look forward to seeing your entries!

We’ve just released an update to our email split-testing feature. We’ve always offered the option to automatically select the wining variant of a campaign based on opens or clicks and send that out to the remaining subscribers who didn’t receive the test.

We’ve now taken things a step further and if you have goal tracking enabled on your account you can use the value of these goals to select the winning campaign.

Goals can be either a counter (for example number of vouchers downloaded) or a monetary value (for example value of e-commerce sales generated from the email) and are recorded using a small snippet of code inserted on your website.

This means that you can now identify your best performing campaign based on a real measure of return on investment, rather than just an inferred value, making your results more accurate than ever before.

If you don’t currently have goal tracking enabled on your account get in touch to find out how it could help you get more return from your email marketing campaigns.

If you’ve spent any time working on your own email designs you’ll know that designing email campaigns that work across the huge variation of email clients that are out there can be a little… challenging.

That’s why we spent the last 12 months building our Campaign Designer tools, which make creating template based email campaigns a doddle.

We always knew that for some people a template based system just wouldn’t cut it though – the customisation possibilities that  come from being able to craft your own HTML code are just too appealing.

So we wondered what we could do to make this process a little more pleasant for email coders everywhere. How could we make building email campaigns less frustrating and a little more fun?

Introducing Mally

Mally is our in-house email robot. All he does all day is look at email code and fix issues that he finds in it. We had to use a robot because too much looking at email code drives humans nuts, and they expect silly things like sleep and food.

From inlining CSS styles, to removing embed tags and fixing styles that will break certain email clients, Mally is a pretty smart character.

All you have to do is paste in your HTML code and press a button. Mally will give you a full report of any issues he finds, give you the option for him to fix the issues automatically where he can and let you know where you need to fix issues yourself. You can then export your fixed code ready to use in the email system of your choice.

Mally is completely free and you don’t need a Sign-Up.to account to use him. Simply visit Mally here and paste in your code (or try out our demo) to see for yourself.

Mally is still in beta and learning constantly, so things may not always be perfect and he still has a few tricks to master, but we hope you like him!

We’re proud to be supporting StartUp Britain, an exciting new initiative launched today by Prime Minister David Cameron.

Founded by a group of 8 entrepreneurs, StartUp Britain is a national campaign to encourage enterprise and help new startups.

As part of our support we’ve created a special discounted package exclusively for new UK startups, to help them grow their business with permission-based email and mobile marketing quickly and easily.

There’s no escaping the fact that it’s an extremely challenging time for the UK economy at the moment, and I’m personally a firm believer that encouraging enterprise is a vital part of the recovery process. Initiatives like StartUp Britain, founded by experienced entrepreneurs to help assist new entrepreneurs are a fantastic way to do this, which is why the Sign-Up.to team have pledged their support.

If you’re a startup looking for assistance you should also check out  The Supper Club’s business mentoring scheme which is offering mentoring time to help assist early stage businesses; as part of our commitment to StartUp Britain I’ve committed some of my time to acting as a mentor.

Testing your email marketing campaigns regularly is vital to improving your results, yet according to a recent survey by eConsultancy, only 32% of marketeers currently do regular testing.

With regular testing you can eek every last bit of performance out of your campaigns, by finding out the best ways to word your offers, the best places to position your calls to action, the best format for your subject lines and much more.

It’s easy to test your campaigns but the process can seem daunting if you’ve not done it before, so we’ve put together this quick guide to getting started with testing your email campaigns.

The type of testing we’ll be looking at is usually called split-testing or A/B testing. This is essentially sending two (or more) versions of your email to segments of your database and then measuring the results to see which version performed best.

What to test:

The two main elements you can test are the subject line of your email and the content.

The subject line mainly influences the open rate of your email campaign, whereas the content influences the actions taken during and after reading.

Testing the subject line is simple as all you do is alter the text.

When testing content you have far more options – you could change the order of articles in the email, the wording of your call to action, the colour or size of your headlines – anything you like.

Whichever element you decide to test, it’s important that you pick just ONE thing to test each time, otherwise you can’t be sure which change caused the effect.

For example if you decide to test differently worded calls to action, say “click here for your free trial” and “get your free test account today”, then every other element of the campaign (subject line, other content, size and placing of the call to action) should stay the same, so that you know that any difference is caused solely by the change in wording.

How to test:

We’ll focus here on a simple 2-way (A/B) test, although with Sign-Up.to you can test up to 5 variations at once (depending on your database size, which we’ll come to in a moment).

Once you have decided on what to test you need to create the different versions of your email campaign. The easiest way to do this is to create your first version (campaign A) and then duplicate it and make the change that you want to test, saving this copy as campaign B.

Now that you have your test versions ready, you need to decide on how you will decide the winning campaign. When testing subject lines, you should generally stick to open rate as your measure and with content tests link click activity is the best indicator to use.

The final decision is whether you want to run a test using your entire database, or test your campaigns to a small segment of your lists and then send out the best performer to the remaining subscribers. If you have a sufficiently large list then the later option is generally best as you could see an overall jump in performance by maximising the number of recipients of your best campaign. Remember though to leave enough time between sending your test and choosing the winner (we suggest 24 hours).

This brings us neatly to the topic of sample (or segment) sizes. It’s possible to get quite deep into statistical maths here, but as a rule of thumb, for most lists you need each test segment to be between 300 and 400 recipients in order to be confident of an accurate test result. If you’d like to geek out and work out your ideal segment size there’s a handy calculator available here.

So, now you’ve created your test versions, decided on how you’ll choose the winner and selected your sample sizes. All that’s left now is to run the test and watch the results! Then make sure you note what you’ve learnt and apply that to your future campaigns – by constantly trying things out you can continually optimise your campaigns and improve the return on investment from your campaigns.

In Sign-Up.to you can use our split-testing tool to create your segments, run the test and pick the winner automatically (even sending the winner out to the remainder of your database if you wish). You can find out all about split-testing in Sign-Up.to here.