Category: Data

Data

Customer insight: who is subscriber@yourmailinglist.com?

2 minute read
Adrian Young Adrian Young

Pick a subscriber from your mailing list. Any subscriber. What do you know about that person? If the answer is their email address, then it’s time to embark on some customer insight.

It’s common knowledge that personalisation makes for better marketing, and it’s common sense that good data makes that possible. But how can you go about learning more about an existing subscriber?

Tracking

Your email platform may come equipped with a link-tagging function. Add categories such a brands or product types to your links, and you instantly have a convenient new source of customer data.

No such functionality in your ESP? No worries. Third party tracking platforms like Google Analytics can provide deep insight into your subscriber’s behaviour both within your email and on your website.

Preference centres

There’s a simple way to find out more about a person: ask. A preference centre is an online form that lets your customers pick and choose what kind of content to receive. Give your subscribers the power to customise your emails.

Example preference centre

Don’t go to the trouble of creating a preference centre only to bury a link to it in your footer’s small print. It’s worth shouting about.

Surveys

Email marketing often feels very one-way. A survey can help to rebalance the situation. It has multiple benefits. A survey shows that you value your customers’ thoughts, provides an engaging form of content to add some variety to your emails, and lets you harvest useful data for your future marketing campaigns. Win win win.

Split testing

An well-planned A/B testing programme can yield significant insight into your customers’ interests. The emphasis is on programme. Ditch the hasty, ad-hoc A/B tests and instead implement them as an ongoing strategy. It takes some patience, but the payoff is worth the effort.

Product recommendation services

One-to-one content is the holy grail of personalisation. Platforms that integrate with your website can gather individual behavioural data and generate relevant product suggestions accordingly. Sit back while the algorithm does the hard work in the background.

AI

Artificial intelligence is already a part of the marketing world, and its role will only continue to expand. Let’s see where machine-learning and content-generation goes in the coming years.

The more you know

You don’t need to know every want and need of every customer right now. Every little bit of customer insight is powerful, and mutually beneficial. When your customer sees content to their liking, you’ll also see something to your liking: stronger mailing reports.

Data

Fill the gap

3 minute read
Mel Jewell Mel Jewell

Through our extensive travels around multiple email platforms we have noticed that whilst they all do the basics really well, sometimes there is just that missing bit of key functionality that you long for, or it just doesn’t quite work how you want. So, you find yourself doing things the hard way and dreaming of a day where all you need to do is push a button and it all magically happens. But how can you fill the gap?

Well, we thought “why not do something about it?” and came up with our own solutions that anybody can take advantage of. Fortunately, most email platforms provide their own API integrations so these solutions, where required, should be adjustable to suit each platform.

Fill the gap scenario 1: list splitting

You may have a list held in your platform and for whatever reason you need to split it into 2 or more chunks. In theory this is possible with A/B testing but not if you need it for some other purpose.

The hard way: download the data, stick it into a database, run some SQL on it to output however many chunks you want, reimport.

The easy way: use a tool which lets you enter a list identifier, what you want to call the new lists and how many splits you want and it will run the downloading, SQL and reimporting for you whilst you eat that biscuit.

List Splitting

Demo

Here’s a demo of how a tool to split files could work (since it’s a demo we’re restricting to a 1 column file, txt or csv only, and we’ll only split out 100 records):

File to Upload:

No Splits:
Random:

Fill the gap scenario 2: list limiting

It could be possible that you have a list held in your platform, but for now you only need to send a small amount from it.

The hard way: you download your list, recreate it to the size you want and reimport.

The easy way: use a tool which lets you enter a list identifier, what you want to call it and how many rows and it will run the downloading, limiting and reimporting whilst you sit back with that cup of tea.

List Limiting

Fill the gap scenario 3: campaign send going slow?

It could be that something seems to be going slightly awry with a campaign send and it’s being very slow or stopped delivering entirely.

The hard way: you download all that should be sent and check the send status, then run some group counts on the domains of the unsent emails using Excel or SQL.

The easy way: use a tool that lets you identify a campaign send by its ID that will download all the unsent emails and run the count for you before displaying the results to you so you can see where the roadblock is whilst you get some darts practice in.

Queued Domains

Fill the gap scenario 4: campaign send delivered poorly?

If your campaign didn’t perform as well as you hoped and you suffered a lot of soft bounces, and you want to try a resend down different IPs for example then you will want to pull them into a new list.

The hard way: you may have to go into the campaign send, download all the soft bounces and reimport into a new list. Not so bad…assuming it’s just the one campaign…

The easy way: use a tool that can let you input one or more, campaign ID that will identify just the soft bounced records and reimport that into a new list for you whilst you put your feet up and think about your next holiday.

SB Resends

I’m sure there are countless other niggling little things that a simple solution using API can be found for that will save you time and frustration – we’re always looking to innovate where we can, so why not ask us if you have a problem, and let’s see if we can come up with a solution. You can always check out some more information on ways we’ve tried to solve other development problems here.

Data

Generate a PDF on the fly

4 minute read
Mel Jewell Mel Jewell

What do you do if you need to send a document to a bulk mailing list (let’s say 5,000 for argument’s sake) that is unique to each person? For example, confirmation of a booking, a pre-populated form to be sent back, a quote, an invoice, a printable document…the list goes on. You can’t jolly well sit down and make one for each person, host them, and send everyone an individual link. That would be a colossal waste of time and resources. But what you can do is create auto-generated PDFs (the ideal format to be accessible across a multitude of systems and devices) that you can simply drop in the personalised details for each recipient and let the tool do its magic.

 

How does a PDF generator work?

As long as everything required for the PDF is stored for all recipients in your mailing platform, this will get passed along to the PDF generator URL held within your email template. When the link is clicked, the tool generates and redirects your customer to their own auto-generated PDF. It will get regenerated with each new click, so if space is an issue you can remove the PDFs. The only real design consideration for the PDF is how many characters could the personalised information be. Will it fit in any gaps you have provided in your document? The tool will allow for automatic line and page breaks so with a thoughtful design this should be an easily avoidable issue. It basically creates everything on a grid system, and you tell it what each cell should contain to give you total freedom across a page.

 

How complex can the PDF designs be?

You have control over the major elements of any design so it should be possible to create professional looking documents or replicate any existing document to a high degree using this auto-generator.


Fonts

Besides the standard font families you would expect, you can include your own fonts based upon .ttf, .otf or .pfb files. You just need a font definition file link. You can choose whatever size you need your copy to be, variable across the document sections, and style your text how you want with usual modifiers like bold, underlined and italics. There is no reason you cannot stay on brand.

 


Images

You simply need to link to a hosted image, set your dimensions and you can drop them in wherever you like. JPG, PNG and GIF are the currently supported image types.

 


Colours

You can change the colour of text, borders and the background using the whole array of RGB values. You can even change colour mid-sentence if you like, which is useful for example for highlighting a link.

 

 


Links

You can add hyperlinks to the document encapsulating both text and images.

 

See it in action

Want to see a PDF document generated on the fly? Filling out this form will replace the action of pre-selected information sent to the PDF generator inside an email, just to show how quick and painless the process is. There may even be a reward in it for you…

 

Design your email







Through this demonstration you can see the control you have over fonts (font sizing, colour and decoration), images, page orientation, borders, links, page and line breaks. You can find the full range of functions available here.

Just get in contact if this project is of interest on +44 (0)131 557 7780, via our online form or email us directly and we’ll be happy to help.

Data

Subject Line Analysis at your fingertips

3 minute read
Mel Jewell Mel Jewell

Subject Line Analysis Tool

In some ways, a subject line can be the most important part of your email. If you don’t entice people to open your email, then they won’t click through to your website, which is pretty much the point of an email marketing campaign!

It can sometimes be tricky though to come up with the perfect subject line, and this is where A/B testing can come in – testing different types of subject lines against each other and picking the winner.

But are companies just stopping there, and not absorbing each newly gleaned bit of information about their subject line performance to trickle down to the next one? There is a wealth of information at your fingertips from historical campaigns if you just know where to look.

Well, we know where to look! Our subject line analysis tool lets you compare a planned subject line with your previously used subject lines to gauge how well it may perform.

We also have the ability, for non-clients, to compare subject lines against our entire database, which we can share the results of, whilst keeping everything anonymous.

And if that’s not enough, we can also take subject lines from your ESP campaigns and slot them into your own version of the tool.

How does it work?

All you have to do it enter your subject line (and if you are planning on using personalised fields add those inside {{ }} so they are flagged). Your proposed subject line will then be analysed by our algorithm for its component parts, including:

  • Length
  • Use of emojis
  • Use of personalisation like first names
  • Characters like exclamation marks or question marks
  • Capitalised words
  • Social media hash tags

This will then be compared against your database, and against the benchmarks set by all available data we have, so you can see how your data compares against the masses.

Then you can make an educated guess about just how successful your subject line may be.

Results and Insights

Looks like emojis are a good idea…

Emoji results

Social media too…

Social Media results

Maybe lay back on the exclamation marks…

Exclamation Mark Results

Let’s see how the top matches did…

Top Matching

Of course the more data you have, the more insight you can extract. If you’ve only ever sent one campaign with, say, an emoji it can unfairly skew the results. You need to build up a big enough pool to make tangible comparisons from to help guide your subject line building processes. Speaking of guides, we have a great one for the best way to conduct A/B testing.

Generic Insights

Maybe you haven’t started yet and just want to get a feel for what generally does or doesn’t work for subject lines. We have pulled together some more generic stats:

Generic Comparison

True, this one is a bit obvious, but we have many more where this came from – we can’t give away all the goodies for free!

If this tool piques your interest, why not contact Mike, mike@displayblock.com, or Tony, tony@displayblock.com for more information, or call 0131 557 7780.