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.

Recently on the Sign-Up.to blog I wrote a post about the importance of using opt-in data. I talked a little bit about the data capture forms you can create in your Sign-Up.to account, and also the fact that we exclusively use a confirmed opt-in process with our forms. People often ask about our opt-in system and how it works, so I thought it high time for us to elaborate on the process.

First things first, you’ll need to create a data capture form. With the tools available you can easily make something that looks professional and fits in with your branding. Here’s one I prepared earlier.

To get people signing up through your data capture form, they will need to be able to see it. Place your form (or a link to it) prominently on your website and/or Facebook page for maximum exposure.

Great. So let’s assume that your lovely data capture form is now on your website and your site visitors want to hear more from you. What happens next? Let me explain.

Step one: Your subscriber enters their details into the first page of the form (as shown above). Then they are presented with a confirmation message to reassure them that the sign up process is underway.

Step two: At this point, the system sends out an opt-in email to the address the subscriber has provided. We do this to confirm that the address has been entered correctly and also to ensure that the right person will be getting your emails. It’s true, the standard opt-in email is fairly dull, but this can be fully customised within the system should you desire something more exciting.

The opt-in email contains two links as standard, the first is the form location and the second is the confirmation link. Your subscriber needs to click on the confirmation link to verify their sign up. Only once they’ve done this will their address be added to your mailing list.

And that’s it! Subscriber data captured and mission complete. Well almost. All that’s left to do is thank your subscriber for having shown an interest in you. Handily, when they click on the confirmation link, your subscriber will be taken to just the page.

These screen shots show the default text for each step of the opt-in process, however each stage can be customised to make your message as friendly as you like. Check out the following guides for more information on how to set up your data capture forms and custom opt-in emails.

A parting thought for you; once someone has given your their permission to contact them, don’t abuse it! Respect the subscriber in terms of how often you contact them and what kinds of messages you contact them with. In return, their love for you will grow and could blossom into something beautiful… or perhaps a purchase of some kind. Whatever floats your boat.

Any thoughts of your own on the subject? Leave us your comments in the box below.

At Sign-Up.to, we hold one principal above all else: permission marketing. It’s a concept that simply means you need someone’s consent to contact them with marketing material. However you’d be surprised at how often it’s misunderstood or ignored.

About permission marketing

Permission marketing as a term was coined by e-marketing guru Seth Godin and refers to email marketing in particular. On his blog, Godin describes the concept as “the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them“. Gaining someone’s permission involves having them opt-in to hear from you and this is a very good idea for a whole host of reasons.

Why permission is vital

Firstly, it’s actually illegal to send unsolicited bulk emails! This is spamming and there are strict UK regulations in place to prevent it. Here at Sign-Up.to we go above and beyond what’s required by law. We don’t allow any bought data to be used in our system and, if requested to do so, our clients need to be able to show us how and where a subscriber agreed to hear from them.

Beyond the legal ramifications, there are actually many common sense factors that demonstrate the value of gaining a subscriber’s permission. For example, sending an email campaign to 100 subscribers who are already interested in what you do is much more effective than sending to 1000 recipients who don’t know who you are. Sending to a smaller, more targeted list will cost you less money and provide more favourable results. When it comes to your subscriber lists, always think quality over quantity.

Buying data can bring with it its own set of issues, in part because you never quite know what you’re getting. A bought list may contain a large number of old or inactive email addresses which could bounce and affect future delivery. It could also contain spam traps, which are innocent looking email addresses that exist solely to catch out spammers. The hard facts are that bought data will undoubtedly generate high complaint rates and disappointing results. It’s also worth bearing in mind that it’s much, much easier for a business to ruin their good reputation than it is for them to redeem their bad one. From our point of view, buying data is just not worth the money or the risk!

Collecting opt-in data

The best way to gain opt-in subscribers is through a data-capture form on your website or Facebook page. This is something that you can create quickly and easily in your Sign-Up.to account and all of our data-capture forms play by double opt-in rules. This means that if someone enters their details into one of our forms, they will then be sent a confirmation email containing a validation link. Only once the link has been clicked are those details added to your account. We do this to ensure that everyone who signs up has entered a valid email address and it was in fact them who signed up to hear from you in the first place.

Unsubscriptions

Including relevant and interesting content in your email campaigns means that people are less likely to unsubscribe from your mailing list. However you must bear in mind that some people will still choose to unsubscribe, no matter how great your campaigns are. In these cases you must respect their wishes and cease all contact or there can be consequences. A recent example of this came up in the news where Virgin Blue were fined over $100,000 for ignoring unsubcribe requests! Thankfully when someone clicks on a Sign-Up.to unsubscribe link in one of your campaigns, the system will automatically prevent you from emailing them again.

You may think that building a subscriber base from scratch is a daunting prospect, but it really will pay off and generate the best results in the long run. If you’re stuck for ideas on how to get people signing up, then check out this blog post for some great inspiration. Alternatively, drop us an email and we’ll be happy to advise further.

We’d love to hear what methods work for you to bring in new subscribers, please leave your comments in the box below!

Running a permission marketing program always starts from the same place – getting people to raise their hands and ask to hear more from you.

With the media saturated with news of smartphones and social media it’s easy to overlook some of the simpler methods which can be used to engage with your audience.

Offering a text-to-subscribe service is a quick and low-cost way to allow people opt-in to receive SMS and email alerts from you.

Text-to-subscribe enables people to opt-in wherever they are, using a technology everyone is familiar with (SMS) and gives the marketeer a number of tricks that they can use to engage people in more depth and measure return on investment (ROI).

According to Ofcom 89% of the UK population have or use a mobile phone and in 2009 the average number of SMS messages sent was a staggering 1700 per person – that’s nearly 5 per day. All of these phones have SMS capability, whilst under 30% of them are smartphones – so SMS has fantastic reach.

A text-to-subscribe service is a simple mechanism for people to use – they simply text in a keyword, optionally followed by additional information like their email address to a shortcode.

For example, if you text TRY followed by your email address to 61211 we’ll send you back an SMS and an email response automatically.

By using additional keywords on different adverts you can measure your response rates and return from different placements and messages, giving you real feedback on the success of your campaigns.

As we’ve shown in the example, you can also automatically send back SMS and email responses, allowing you to send customers further information or even vouchers immediately. According to a survey by mBlox 71% of UK consumers would like to receive vouchers to their phones so it’s a great way to incentivise response and reward people who take the time to show an interest in you.

Even better – it’s now free to set up!

With Sign-Up.to setting up a text-to-subscribe service is quick and free – every account (even free ones) gets a keyword on our UK SMS shortcode and we’ll even give you 25 SMS free credits to test things out. Receiving SMS messages from your customers is free as well.

You can set up your first text-in service in just a few minutes. Check out our tutorial to find out more or contact our support team for a walkthrough. We’ve got more mobile marketing tutorials available here.

We all hate spam and for obvious reasons. Spam filters exist to stop unwelcome content from reaching our inboxes, but what if your legitimate email campaign is being filtered as spam?

From time to time the support team at Sign-Up.to get calls from frustrated people whose email marketing campaigns are being junked before recipients ever see them. We often get asked why this happens and what can be done about it, so I’d like to shed a bit of light on the topic. I’d like to point out here that this is certainly not a guide on how to ‘cheat’ spam filters and we have a strict Anti Spam Policy here at Sign-Up.to. However there are some common factors that can influence the spam rating of your campaign even when your intentions are golden.

Firstly, understand the process. The most common method for filtering spam is the points system. Spam filters have a list of elements that they consider to be key spam criteria. Each of these elements present in your email will earn it a certain number of points. Earn enough points (the limit varies across servers) and your message will be filtered as spam.

More sophisticated filters which base their analysis on complicated statistical techniques like Bayesian analysis are becoming common. These don’t filter messages in the same way, in effect they learn based on messages they receive and user preferences, so they constantly differ in how they filter. However, applying the same basic rules will always help.

Here are some things to look out for:

1: Text/image balance
Sending an email that is too image heavy is the most common cause of campaigns going to spam. This can be a particular problem if your campaign is one big image containing hardly any text at all. You should aim for a good balance of the two.

2: Hot words
Particular words or phrases can often earn your campaign spam points. There are plenty of obvious ones such as ‘Earn extra cash’ or ’100% free’, but also terms like ‘opportunity’ or ‘click here’ can cause problems even when used legitimately. Try altering the language used in your email.

3: Punctuation
Moderate your enthusiasm! Too many exclamation marks will definitely earn you some spam points and lots of quote marks can also be problematic. Experiment with the punctuation present in your campaign.

4: Subject line
A long subject line can sometimes earn you spam points. The language and punctuation issues are very relevant here, so keep your subject lines free of hot words and exclamation marks to ensure it doesn’t get flagged.

5: Text formatting
When you come to format the text in your email, don’t go too crazy. Using a lot of bold or brightly coloured text can earn your campaign some spam points. Making your text very big or typing all in capitals is also not recommended. Less is more on this front (and from a design point of view as well!).

6: Links
It is possible that having a large number of links in your campaign can get the attention of spam filters. If you do have a lot of links, you will need to decide if they are all strictly necessary and try taking some of them out.

7: HTML quality
Spammers are notoriously bad coders. If your HTML is sloppy then spam filters may assume that your campaign is spam. This could also be the case if you’ve used MS FrontPage or Word to code your design, so if your HTML skills are not so hot then why not use our Campaign Designer to create your emails? No coding knowledge is needed and you can still produce some cracking results.

8: Plain text
Spammers rarely bother to do this, so if you take the time to set a plain text version of your campaign then it will stand a better chance of getting through. Using our new editors, you can generate a plain text version of your campaign with just one click.

9: Alt text
Whilst not strictly a spam trigger, setting alternative text for your images will help when a recipient’s email client does not immediately display images. This is a very common security setting, so by defining your alt text you can let your readers know that you are including appropriate images before they see them.

10: Spam check
In the Sign-Up.to campaign editors there is an option to ‘Spam Check‘  your campaign. This gives you a broad run down of the content of your email and can be useful in spotting issues that may be present.

Lastly, test test test!  In reality, the only way you are going to know if your campaign will go to spam is to test it. Previewing your campaign to a range of different email clients is also great advice for making sure your design looks how it should for everybody. Check out our email design guidelines to point you in the right direction.

We hope these tips will prove useful, do let us know if you have any additional thoughts in the comments box below.

As you may have gathered if you’re a regular on our blog, here at Sign-Up.to we’re inordinately passionate about 3 things:

1. Permission Marketing
2. Creating great customer experiences
3. Technology

Or to be more precise, all of those 3 things combined. We’re always experimenting with new ways to help our customers engage with their audience and when that involves new technology, that’s even better, but only when we can do something genuinely useful, not just for the sake of using something new.

One of the things we’ve been itching to try is creating an iPhone app. Today we’re really happy to be launching our first one (there are already many more in the pipeline!)

This app is for the lovely Prezzo, the fabulous Italian restaurant chain.

As well as letting users find and book their nearest restaurant, browse the menu and view the latest Prezzo news, the app integrates with their Sign-Up.to account to allow users to register for, receive and redeem discount vouchers directly from their iPhone.

We love it when we can use technology like this – everyone wins. It benefits the consumer, making it easy to find and book a restaurant table and really easy to secure a great discount (no need to print out vouchers and remember to take them with you!) and it benefits Prezzo by giving them a new channel to engage with customers and an easy way to track usage of mobile vouchers and reward loyal customers.

You can download the Prezzo iPhone app for free (UK users only)

We realise that apps aren’t all about the iPhone though, so we’ll be following with Android and possibly even Windows Mobile apps in the near future.

If you’d like to find out more about creating a mobile app to link in with your permission marketing, get in touch!

First of all, apologies for the long break in between posts. Changes in my work life meant I had to take a break from helping my friends at Sign-Up.to with these PPC themed articles. I am back now though, and the rest should appear in short order. Anyway, on with the info:

As I outlined in my last post, The 7 Stages of building a Great PPC Campaign, the first steps to being successful with a PPC campaign are all about research.

Research the market

If you are already starting or running your business, or are running marketing campaigns for a bigger business, the market research should already be done, so we won’t go into too much detail on this step.

If you do find yourself needing to do some research into your market, there are plenty of tools which you can utilise, some of which are also good for keyword research. My top 3 are:

1. Twitter Advanced Search – actually a very powerful tool to monitor and discover what people are buzzing about in your marketplace.
2. Google Insights For Search – great for seeing the development of search trends as well as comparing potential traffic by keyword and region.
3. Compete.com – There are a couple of similar tools around, such as Alexa, but I like Compete when I need a tool that enables you to see estimated traffic to your potential competitors’ websites.

Do your Keyword Research

Your keyword research will form the backbone of your campaign, so it is important to get it right.

Our goal here is to get as many interested people as possible to sign up to your email list, so that they receive all the amazing stuff you will send them, and ultimately become a paying customer. In other words help them through their Customer Journey.

The Customer what?

Most people go through a process when they set out to make a purchase, they will think about what it is they want, why they want it, which product and which supplier to choose. This journey can be broken down into four stages:

1. Research: This stage is where someone is finding out about an area of interest. The search terms will be 1-2 keywords, and will be pretty general, such as: Snowboarding, Snowboards, Snowboarding info

1. Consideration: This is where we see the search terms becoming more targeted, and generally 2-3 words in length: Snowboard Lessons, Beginner Snowboards, Snowboard Shops London

1. Purchase: Here we see the person in question becoming a potential customer, and the search terms generally hit 3 or more words: Buy snowboards online, cheap snowboard shop, buy snowboarding boots

1. Loyalty: These are generally brand terms and website names: Burton Snowboards, bargainboards.co.uk, Santa Cruz Snowboards

Ok, so what does this mean for your Keyword Research?

Well, as someone who probably already does email marketing, you will hopefully be familiar with the concept of targeting your emails. This is just the same. You should have a look at your offering and think about the best time in the Customer Journey for you to sign visitors up to your email list.

It may be that you want to grab them at the interest or consideration stages so you can send them some great info on your industry or product range, and help them decide to purchase from you, or possibly you would like to be more sneaky and grab people who are looking for the best prices on a specific brand of item.

Usually it will be a case of testing keywords in different stages and seeing what works best for you.

Where do you get those keywords from?

There are a number of tools out there, both paid and free. All have their strengths and weaknesses but here are some of the ones I use:

1. Wordtracker: Their free tool gives you the top 100 searched related to your chosen keyword, and is always a good start.
2. Google Adwords Keyword Tool: This also gives you the top 100 keywords from Google’s own data and has some nifty advanced features as well.
3. Your own site analytics: Yes, this is a bit of a curveball, but one of the best keyword sources on your industry is the incoming keyword data in your analytics package. You will already have great data about how certain keywords perform if you have your analytics set up correctly.

Right, that’s your lot on researching keywords and your market. Next time we will go over how to build a quick campaign in Google Adwords, and that should get you well on the way to building your list with PPC!

Mike Theodoulou is a Director at Site Optimizer

Follow Mike on Twitter

In this blog I’ll be focussing on helping you to grow the number of subscribers you have in your Sign-Up.to account. This blog contains helpful advice, hints and tips on how to go about this using Facebook, Twitter and other forms of advertisement to grow your subscriber base.

Buy advertising space – not lists

Instead of buying lists of email addresses, buy advertising on either Google or Facebook to gain more traffic to your website. Advertising on Facebook offers powerful targeting tools, allowing you to ensure your advert is shown to those Facebook users who would find it most relevant and interesting. If you would like to know more about this, please see my earlier blog entitled “How to use Facebook adverts“.

Give it away

Give something away to entice more subscribers to opt-in to your newsletter. This could be a new single from your band, or writing a guide on something that is relevant to your business like a guide or an ebook. As an example I recently found a website that creates a free website template each month exclusively for their newsletter subscribers. This not only would increase their newsletter subscriptions but each month they send their newsletter out with a screen-shot of their new template and where you can download it from – meaning the subscribers would be more inclined to click the link, in turn increasing their open and click through rates – just what the doctor ordered!

Do you tweet?

Use Twitter to update your followers with either updates of your business or special offers that you are currently running. If you haven’t used Twitter yet fear not, we have an excellent blog on the question that is on your lips “What is Twitter for”.

The next step would be to make your page sparkle, we wrote another blog on “Creating a consistent brand image across Facebook, Twitter and Youtube”. This has some great tips when keeping the brand consistent when designing these pages.

Now you can use TweetDeck to make it simple to contact your followers as you can post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time, making this easier to manage these accounts. Another blog worth reading is “How to grow your social media presence“, with tips on how you can grow your Facebook and Twitter followers.

The running man

Catch your subscribers running by creating an auto-responder that they receive the moment they confirm their subscription for your newsletter. This can include a guide, hints and tips, or an offer a voucher for your site.

This way you don’t drop the ball when handling a new subscriber. If someone signs up at 1am they automatically will get the auto-responder immediately. This is also useful as some people could lose interest very quickly or even forget about your company if you don’t stay on the ball!

If you are unsure on how to set this up please see our video guide on how to set up an autoresponder.

Show them what they’re missing

On your website – next to your sign-up form – place a link to previous versions of your newsletter to show the user what they’re signing-up.to! You should place copies of your newsletters onto your webspace so you can refer to more than just one newsletter to re-assure them to opt-in for future newsletters. More companies are doing this now as potential subscribers could become wary of what they will receive and how often, so take this step to ensure they sign-up to your newsletter.

I hope this blog has been helpful for you, please use the comments box below if you have any questions.

There’s one thing that separates great email marketing from spam. Permission. It’s the vital ingredient to any email marketing program and the principles of permission marketing are at the core of our business.

Did you know that we have an automated spam feedback loop with major ISPs such as Hotmail and AOL, and that we also receive automated updates from spam reporting services such as Spamcop? Additionally, our abuse.reports@sign-up.to address is circulated and made available on various web sites and DNS records to ensure we receive reports of any unsolicited email being sent through our systems.

We take any such reports very seriously in order to protect our clients’ reputations, our reputation, our email delivery rate and ultimately, recipients’ faith in email marketing. Our aim is to ensure that every email we send is anticipated, personal, relevant and rewarding – never unsolicited.

Ideally all data held in all our clients’ accounts would have been gathered using our built in forms, so we will ensure a confirmed opt-in loop and hold all IP addresses and times of consent on file. This means that each time an email address is added to a list we verify both that it exists, and that the owner knows that they’re signing up to an email list.

Of course, sometimes data needs to added en masse to our clients’ accounts – for instance if they move to our service from a competitor. In these cases we can only ask our clients to confirm that the data is fully opt-in. We do however have some key points to cover, and a more detailed overview in our anti-spam policy.

• We view any unsolicited, unexpected email/SMS as spam.
• We don’t allow use of 3rd party lists, whether consent has been gathered or not. We don’t believe that consent is transferable between organisations.
• We don’t permit purchased data to be imported, whether apparently opt-in or not.
• We believe that any communications sent to a subscriber about an unrelated subject to that which they requested to be kept informed about are spam.

We enforce these beliefs because:

• We want to promote permission marketing and protect subscribers’ inboxes.
• We all hate spam.
• We need to have a good email reputation to ensure that genuine permission-based messages are successfully delivered to inboxes.

We actively encourage disgruntled subscribers to report any unsolicited emails to abuse.reports@sign-up.to – and we investigate each and every report to the last detail. We also use both automatic and manual checks on all imported lists, and data added via our API.

Much as we love our clients, on the odd occasion that one doesn’t adhere to these rules we have to intervene, and if necessary terminate their account. Of course, we hate to lose a client, but we deeply believe in the principles of permission marketing and the benefits that it can bring to marketers and subscribers.

What has happened?

AOL have this week closed down a large number of disused email accounts. As is common with any free and popular service, over the course of time a significant proportion of accounts opened fall into disuse; as people’s ISP or other preferences change, they may start using another mail provider and stop checking their AOL account. As per their terms of service, AOL may close accounts not accessed for 30 days. While that could be perceived as being a bit too keen, reports have certainly been coming in of AOL accounts that haven’t been used for a couple of months or so being closed.

How does this affect my email marketing?

In the scenario where an AOL user signed up to your mailing list in the dim and distant past, but has since stopped using their AOL account, we have been successfully delivering your mail to that account for you. Of course, as the intended recipient no longer uses that AOL account, that mail will show in our Analysis section as being delivered but not opened. Now that AOL have closed accounts like that, such mails will now be hard bounced, so we’ll immediately suspend that address. This means we’ll no longer send email to that address and you’ll no longer be charged for it.

Doesn’t this mean fewer people will receive my email campaigns?

No – so long as AOL’s measures are executed correctly we’ll only stop sending your campaigns to inboxes that will never be checked. So long as your email campaigns are relevant and effective, the chances are that anyone who has moved their email account has re-subscribed to your list since doing so. The consequences for not suspending these email addresses are serious, as I’ll now explain.

The benefits of Sign-Up.to

This incident serves to highlight why using fully automated and dedicated permission marketing systems like Sign-Up.to is the best way to ensure your message is received by the broadest possible audience. It is entirely possible that AOL will repeat history and in time re-open some of those accounts as spam traps. If you get caught sending mail to a spam trap – an email address that has been issuing hard bounces for a large period of time and then lies dormant – it can only be the case that the address has been scraped or an old, dirty, list is in use. Sign-Up.to cleans your email lists by suspending addresses after just one hard bounce, ensuring that your email reputation is not damaged while also making your marketing budget work as efficiently as possible.