Tag Archives: Email
5 Ways B2C Companies Can Leverage Email for Better Results
4) New and Updated Product Launch Emails
Good businesses are constantly releasing new products, services, and features. Great businesses are able to disseminate that information to their customer base in fun and innovative ways that lead to better engagement and more sales opportunities.
Whenever your company releases a new product or updates an existing product, you should include a strong email marketing campaign as part of your holistic go-to-market strategy. Think about it: your existing customers are already invested in some aspect of your company and offerings, so there’s a very good chance that they’d also be interested in what’s coming next!
New and updated product launch emails are designed to do more than generate sales; when done properly, they help foster connection to your entire brand. You’re advertising your bright, shiny, and new offering, so you want to create a real sense of enthusiasm that you can transfer to your existing customers. This means using big, sharp images and clever, concise copy. Most importantly, you want to make sure your branding elements jump off the page while also tying seamlessly to your new product.
Use the subject line and preview text to let your audience know that they’re about to view or learn about something new and exciting, being as explicit as possible with the limited characters at your disposal. Include a prominent CTA that clearly states the desired action, and make it easy for your customers to access the new or updated product by redirecting them to a clean and simple landing page where they can request a free trial or purchase the new item outright.
5) Use Email to Gather Customer Feedback
Successful B2C companies are constantly innovating and improving upon their product and service lines. And one way they can do that is by understanding what is and isn’t working. Sending emails prompting customers to take a survey or leave product feedback can help your company gather the data you need to develop and deliver the best possible offerings and experiences.
Obviously, you want to make sure you’re sending survey emails to customers who have actually purchased something from you in the past. So, a common best practice is to send these emails as part of a trigger campaign following a sale or interaction with customer support. These emails empower your customers to voice their opinion of your products and services, which helps to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Further, it allows you to understand where you’re succeeding and where you might have missed the mark, so you can continue to improve your offerings with each new iteration.
In addition to surveys, which usually limit the interaction to objective yes/no or multiple-choice questions, you should encourage your customers to give more detailed feedback by inviting them to leave a review or testimonial. You can leverage great reviews by sharing them on your website, product pages, or social media platforms. Or, you could even follow up with the customer directly to see if they’d like to participate in a more involved case study or success story.
Even negative reviews can be extremely helpful as they give you the chance to improve your product and reach out to the reviewer directly to help make the situation work to your advantage. In some cases, these reviews (and your responses) can help your other customers solve their problem, which could save you from additional negative reviews in the future. For example, a customer trying to decide if they want to buy a pair of jeans might notice a negative review suggesting to size up, which would prevent them from making the same mistake.
If you aren’t getting much traction with your customer feedback emails, consider adding additional value to incentivize your customers to participate. This might include a standard discount with a simple user code or maybe a free trial to your next product release. Make sure the offer is included in the subject line to inspire your audience to click through to the email.
The 5 Tools Every Email Marketer Needs to Succeed
Katelyn Merendino, AMO Marketing, Retail and Bronto
Email has been around for a while, but it’s still king of the marketing world. For every $ 1 spent, email marketing generates $ 44 in ROI.
Today’s consumers expect relevant, personalized engagement from the businesses they choose to interact with. If you’re relying on “batch-and-blast messages,” you’re likely missing out on opportunities to capture your audience’s interest—and consequently, to drive more revenue.
Here are five tools that’ll help take your email marketing program to the next level.
Grow Your Lists with a Pop-Up Manager
Until someone signs up for your emails, you’re limited in the marketing messages you’re able to send to them. Contacts who aren’t subscribers can only be sent transactional emails and most email marketers believe marketing messages in a transactional email should be limited to 20% of the content. While you can encourage people to subscribe at checkout or through a transactional email, those options won’t capture website visitors who don’t convert. For this, you need to consider using a pop-up.
Pop-ups are one of the easiest and fastest ways to accelerate list growth. For example, The Duck Store, the University of Oregon’s book store, increased its subscriber base 71% in just one year using pop ups. All the potential subscriber needs to provide is their email address, so the barrier to entry is low. Yet, having that single piece of information lets you start delivering relevant messages. A pop-up management tool that allows you to control the look, feel, timing and placement of your pop-ups—and deploy different versions on desktop versus mobile—is key to providing value to the customer. With a well-customized pop-up, you can offer incentives, share content or provide information on current sales or upcoming events, all while gathering subscribers.
Recover Lost Revenue with Cart Abandonment Messages
Cart abandonment messages are vital to the bottom line. Forrester Research estimates that up to 87% of consumers abandon their carts, resulting in $ 18 billion of lost revenue annually. However, by automating email sends after a shopper leaves something in their cart, you can quickly, easily and economically bring in some of this outstanding revenue.
Turning abandoned carts into sales is most effective with a tool that can identify abandoned carts in near real time and respond to these shoppers by dynamically inserting cart information into messages.
Convert Online Window Shoppers with Browse Abandonment Messages
How many times have you browsed a site without making a purchase? Probably more than you can count! According to the Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly Report, Q1 2018, more than 95% of visitors leave your site without converting, but triggered browse recovery messages can nudge them to return.
Many businesses worry that automating these emails will be viewed as intrusive or increase unsubscribe rates, but times have changed. Ninety-one percent of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize, remember and provide relevant offers—in other words, brands that convey value directly to each customer. To ensure a personalized experience, you need to use a browse recovery tool that allows you to configure how often customers receive messages, regulate which SKUs to highlight and capture and match page views to current or future contacts.
Drive Efficiency and Visibility with Seamless Integrations
As your business grows, using a number of stand-alone applications that each handle short-term, tactical needs creates functional silos and lowers efficiency and visibility. The ability to easily transfer data from your ERP or ecommerce platform to your email platform (and back) is important to developing a more sophisticated approach to email marketing.
If sharing information between your email marketing platform and other systems is arduous or time-consuming, it’s harder to create targeted, hyper-personalized messages. A built-in connector seamlessly syncs contact, order, product and opt-in data between all platforms, enabling you to gain deeper insight into your customers’ behaviors and send more relevant emails that drive them to engage.
Expand on Email with SMS Text Messaging
Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging is an increasingly utilized tactic among marketers now, as 98% of texts are read within two minutes and consumers are increasingly opting in to receiving text messages from brands. Sending emails and texts from a single platform allows you to reach the customers who engage most with each channel while delivering a unified, consistent user experience.
As part of your email platform, your SMS tool should enable you to display dynamic content based on list, segment, or keyword membership and expand your existing automation to include SMS campaigns within the same multi-channel workflows.
Sophisticated Email Marketing Made Easy
Enhancing your email marketing program doesn’t have to be complicated with the right tools in your arsenal. To learn how the Bronto Marketing Platform can help your business gain subscribers, grow revenue, and drive engagement, check out the on-demand webinar below that applies to your industry.
Watch these webinars to learn more about email marketing for retailers, email marketing for software companies and email marketing for nonprofits.
by NetSuite filed under
How to Grow Your Email Marketing List
3) Develop Great Content Marketing to Entice Your Audience
Nothing I’ve written so far is going to matter much if you’re not consistently pumping out great content that reflects your brand’s tone and positioning. This requires a proper SEO audit of your existing content across all of your digital properties to establish a baseline of your current state. Once that’s complete, continue to work with your in-house SEO specialist (or, if you don’t have an SEO pro on staff, check out Moz, SEMRush, and/or the Google Keyword Planner) to develop SEO campaigns that reflect your business direction and goals and that will facilitate the process of having your prospects find you (instead of the other way around).
Here are just a few ways you can spruce up your content to help grow your email marketing list:
Blogging About Thought Leadership and Product Features and Benefits
Your blog should be the sharpest tool in your inbound demand generation arsenal. It’s your best chance to get your organization out in front of the right audience by honing in on their primary interests and pain points — and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Each blog should follow a strict editorial process (from topic ideation through posting) and include:
- High-Level SEO research
- Editorial calendar creation
- Topic-Specific SEO research
- Drafting
- Editing
- Edit implementation
- Staging
- Final review
- Posting
- Social sharing
- Email distribution
Don’t focus too much on your organization’s products or services. No one wants to be sold constantly. Instead, approach each topic from a thought leadership perspective and then gradually filter in content that explains how your company executes these best practices and innovative techniques.
Lastly, if you want to make serious SEO headway and attract new prospects to your blog to help grow your email marketing list, you should be posting at least two new blogs each week. Recent research suggests you should shoot for roughly 1,900 words in each blog to satisfy our Google overlords, but anything between 1,500 and 2,200 words should place your article in the sweet spot when search engines crawl your site.
Informative Webinars for Prospects and Customers Alike
Webinars are one of the most effective ways to build your organic email marketing list because they offer your prospects something substantial. You can promote upcoming webinars on your website, in your newsletters, and throughout your social media platforms. You can also create dedicated paid campaigns to attract more attendees. Not only that, but once you have this valuable contact information, you can place these potential prospects and existing customers into targeted trigger and nurture campaigns.
Best of all, after the webinar, you can continue to collect new contacts by repurposing these online events as on-demand webinars and promoting them across your site, social media platforms, newsletters… heck, you can even place them on your blogs and in your topic-based email campaigns. An extremely effective method of collecting information is by gating the webinar after a predetermined amount of time spent watching, thus leaving your audience wanting more and generating even more form conversions!
Webinars are such a dynamic content source. Make sure to leverage them to the fullest before, during, and after the fact!
eBooks, Infographics, and Datasheets… Oh, My!
Also known as marketing collateral, these content assets are the proverbial carrot to your list generating stick. These are the elements you’ll want to gate behind a contact form in order to build that list. But if your content isn’t up to par, no one is going to bother completing the form in the first place. Everything from your paid advertising copy, landing pages, subject lines, title, abstract, images, and design needs to be spot on.
To start, you need to go back to the SEO research you conducted for your blog, refocus your efforts on topic ideation, and then work on creating longer, more detailed assets to release as gated PDFs. These pieces should go through a rigorous editorial process similar to the one taken during blog creation and should have much more of a design elements with quotes, callouts, graphs, images, icons, etc. When finished, these eBooks should really shine and offer great information to move your prospects and customers through the sales funnel.
Again, the goal here is to educate, illuminate, and entertain — not to sell. People do not want to be sold to (at least not at this stage). They want the information they need to make informed decisions that eventually lead to more productive conversations with sales reps. So position yourself as a credible thought leader that also just so happens to solve your target audiences’ pain points.
By creating better, more engaging marketing collateral, prospects and customers will be more inclined to trust that you deliver awesome material and continue to complete more forms — giving your sales reps more detailed information to help them close the deal!
What Is the Difference Between Email Marketing and Marketing Automation?
You’ve probably heard the buzz around marketing automation but are wondering why you need to invest in it if you already have an email service provider (ESP). Although marketing automation platforms and ESPs have many of the same features, marketing automation is designed to help you go beyond email marketing to provide customers with a more tailored and unique experience, improving your engagement rates and ROI.
Sure, things might be going just fine with your ESP, but why settle when there’s a better alternative? Marketing automation can help you move beyond random one-off emails to deliver your target audiences with a more personalized and holistic customer journey. By drastically enhancing the customer journey, you can expect improved engagement and even better results while saving your organization time and resources. Who doesn’t want that?
If you’re not convinced, keep reading to learn a few key ways marketing automation helps you go beyond email marketing.
Move Beyond Random Acts of Marketing Through Segmentation and Personalization
Savvy marketers know that marketing is not a one-size-fits-all deal. While one email message might inspire one customer to open, read, and engage, the same email message can motivate another to delete it or unsubscribe from receiving communications from you altogether.
That is because different customers will want different things based on their specific pain points and where they are in the sales funnel. You can also expect different recipients to need different tools and resources to help them make a decision based on criteria such as industry, pain points, job title, preferences, and budget — just to name a few. In order to gain that final sales conversion, it is your job as a marketer to segment your customers and deliver them targeted and relevant content that keeps them moving along from one stage of the sales funnel to the next.
While segmenting your audience and delivering targeted messages is possible through an ESP, the manual process involved in those outdated platforms is very labor-intensive and prone to error. The many hours involved in exporting and importing lists might not be worth the effort when you only see a small spike in improvement.
The great thing about marketing automation is that it allows you to do this better and with much less effort. For example, Act-On has adaptive segmentation which enables you to automatically move contacts into tightly targeted list segments as you find out more about them and they meet certain criteria. As they do, you can automatically enter them into automated nurture campaigns to ensure they receive relevant and useful information that will keep them engaged and motivate them to take action sooner rather than later.
But why stop there? With marketing automation, you can replicate this personalization beyond email so you can improve your marketing and see better results across the board. You’ll gain valuable insights that will enable you to develop more targeted landing pages, forms, and content.
Deliver the Right Message at the Right Time
Email marketing success is highly dependant on sending the right message to the right person at the right time. Marketing automation platforms allow you to send behavior-triggered messages, such as onboarding emails, that are automatically launched whenever your contact fills out a form, downloads an asset, or completes any other action worthy of a follow-up.
Act-On’s Adaptive Sending takes this practice one step further by tracking each contact’s behavior and learning their preferences, enabling you to email each individual in your database at the most optimal time.
Improve Your Ability to Track ROI and Enhance Your Email Marketing Efforts
It’s easy for our email marketing efforts to remain stagnant when we don’t have the insights and resources to figure out how to make them better. While ESPs might provide you with a limited overview of what’s working, the results you gather simply aren’t granular enough for you to make significant improvements.
Marketing automation enables you to perform A/B Testing on everything from subject lines, CTAs, email design, copy, and more — so you can pinpoint which email elements are catching your audience’s attention. You can use the insights you collect to make your emails better and better each and every time.
We practice A/B testing ourselves here at Act-On and meet every few weeks to review our results and talk about how we can enhance our future email marketing efforts. We recommend you do the same on a regular basis, even if it just means updating a subject line or CTA that did not perform as well.
Target the Best Opportunities Through Lead Scoring
Even if you’re seeing leads coming through the door thanks to your email marketing efforts, you should be asking yourself how you can continue to improve. How do you know what else they need? Where are they in the sales funnel? Are they ready to talk to Sales? Piecing this information together is difficult when all you have is open and click-through rates gathered through your ESP.
Marketing automation gives you greater visibility into the status of your leads by allowing you to identify criteria that indicate when a lead is ready to move to another stage in the customer journey and then score your leads accordingly. Lead scoring not only allows you to keep track of where prospects are in their journey, but it also improves your ability to transfer the most qualified leads to your sales team so they can focus on the best opportunities.
Empower Your Sales Team to Have More Impactful Conversations
One of the most valuable aspects of marketing automation is that it enables you to provide each target customer with a personalized buying experience. That means that you have the tools and insights to deliver targeted solutions from the moment your contact first becomes known to when they’re ready to chat with a member of your sales team.
Marketing automation integrates with your CRM so that your sales team is able to gain a detailed view of your target customer’s behavior and engagement history, empowering them to appeal to their specific pain points and product interests. This leads to better collaboration between marketing and sales and, in turn, helps your salespeople close more deals, all while allowing you to attribute marketing ROI. When was the last time your ESP helped you do that?
Marketing Automation Success Is Closer than You Realize
Let’s be real. Investing in new technology is not a decision that comes easy or cheap, and it’s hard to part with your ESP, even if it’s not getting the job done. With the right knowledge, tools, and strategy in place, however, you can make sure you’re generating the best return from your marketing automation investment from the beginning.
If your organization is considering marketing automation and wants to start off on the right foot, you should check out an eBook that we wrote with our friends at London Research. It’s appropriately titled “Making Marketing Automation a Reality” and gives a comprehensive but easy-to-follow overview of how and why to implement marketing automation.
We also interviewed several high-profile digital marketing thought leaders, and their views and advice are threaded throughout the resource to help you make better, more informed decisions about the next step in your digital marketing journey.
Check it out below!
Best Practices for Email Marketing Automation
Segment Your Lists and Provide Personalized Email Content
List segmentation is one of the principal benefits of email marketing automation and separates marketing automation platforms from email service providers (ESPs). Segmenting according to engagement level, areas of interest, and demographics allows email marketers to tailor their messaging to target their audiences with compelling content when and where they’re looking for it.
Compared with the traditional batch-and-blast approach used by ESPs, segmented sending produces exceptional open rates, engagement, and return on investment. It also results in fewer unsubscribes and spam complaints because the content being sent via email has been written for each specific audience — and increased relevance leads to increased resonance every time.
Yet, while segmentation is crucial in the modern digital environment, many companies continue to struggle to group their audiences properly. Here are three ways to ensure accurate audience segmentation and increased engagement through personalized content.
1) Learn Your Audience’s Pain Points
As marketers, sometimes we have a tendency to overcomplicate things, which is only natural considering the tools at our disposal. However, one proven way to learn more about your audience’s challenges and interests is to simply ask them! When you seek your initial or follow-up opt-in, include a checklist of 5-10 pain points or areas of interest for them to complete. Once armed with this valuable information, segment your lists accordingly and work on developing relevant content for all stages of the sales funnel.
2) Collect Website Visitor Data
The great thing about digital marketing is that skilled marketers are able to gather tons of meaningful data and then leverage that data to segment their marketing lists and deliver content that pushes prospects and customers through the sales cycle. First, you’ll have to create intuitive email reporting dashboards in your marketing automation platform so you can see which emails certain recipients are opening, reading, and engaging with. From there, you simply divide and conquer with compelling content delivered to the appropriate inbox.
3) Market Based on Location
Depending on the type and size of your company, knowing where your customers live, work, and shop can be a major competitive advantage because, more often than not, geography influences purchasing patterns. Email marketing based on location also helps senders optimize for multiple time zones, execute regional promotions, and deliver geo-targeted content to different audience segments. One particularly powerful way to do this is to send emails with testimonials from satisfied customers who live close to your intended recipients. Understanding where your customers and prospects live will help you understand what makes them tick and empower you to foster trust and nurture relationships.
Report Parameter Support for Paginated Report E-Mail Subscriptions are Now Available
The Paginated Reports team closes out May with another “New Feature Friday” blog post announcing one of the biggest enhancements to e-mail subscriptions in Power BI to date. With today’s update, Paginated Reports users can set up an e-mail subscription for themselves and their colleagues and choose the parameter values they wish to use for each e-mail subscription they set up! Just as they’ve been able to do in SQL Server Reporting Services for years, customers can select their parameter values for the specific view of the data they want and send it to themselves and others as one of six different attachment formats. Want to set up three subscriptions with different parameter combinations for each group of recipients? Now you can!
To get started, head to one of your paginated reports in Power BI and click on the “Subscribe” button in the toolbar
You’ll see a new drop-down menu in your subscription pane that allows you to select one of two values when you’re creating your subscription if you have selectable parameters in the report. By default, it will use the current parameter values you have selected to view your report. Make sure you select your values and run your report prior to creating your subscription to ensure the correct parameter values are captured. If the report author has setup default parameter values for all of the selectable parameter options, you will have the option to use those instead.
Now, when your e-mail is delivered to its recipients, it will always reflect the parameter value(s) you’d selected to be associated with that particular subscription.
Because this feature was so highly requested amongst our preview customers, we released this as soon as we felt comfortable, but a few additional capabilities aren’t quite there yet. These include the ability to edit the parameters for your subscription and being directed back to the view of the report with parameter values set from the link in your mail. These are both coming in the next couple of weeks, and we’ll update you accordingly when they’re available.
Thanks again for all the great discussions to date about the Paginated Reports features and posts. Please be sure to continue to provide this feedback in the comments below, and have a great weekend!
Enhanced Attachment Support for Paginated Reports E-Mail Subscriptions is Now Available
“New Feature Friday” returns for the latest feature update for Paginated Reports. We’ve just rolled out support for five new attachment options for your e-mail subscriptions in Power BI. In addition to PDF, you can now choose one of the following new attachment types for your subscription(s) –
- PowerPoint presentation (PPTX)
- Excel Workbook (XLSX)
- Word Document (DOCX)
- CSV file
- XML
To choose one of these new attachment types, head to one of your paginated reports in Power BI and click on the “Subscribe” button in the toolbar
You’ll now see a new dropdown menu in your subscription pane that allows you to select an attachment type format when you’re creating or editing your paginated report subscription.
Your subscription will now include the attachment type you’ve selected each time it’s delivered to your inbox.
In addition to these new attachment types, we’ve also raised the attachment file size limit to 25 MB for paginated reports to provide new options for popular customer scenarios like scheduled large data exports.
We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below about your experiences with Paginated Reports. Stay tuned for another announcement soon around new features for both paginated reports subscriptions and a BIG new update for Power BI Report Builder.
Thanks and have a great weekend!
Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement – How to choose System Settings and Personal Options for automatic Email tracking
System Settings and Personal Options controlling Automatic Email tracking are described in several docs, most recently Aaron explained it in Part 3 of his blog series on Dynamics 365 App for Outlook. While individual settings are descriptive, commonly asked questions are on which combination of settings to use for achieving desired automatic email tracking. Here I am covering how a specific requirement would map to a combination of System and personal options settings for Emails.
|
Desired automatic Email Tracking behavior |
Settings Combination |
Comments & Recommendations |
|
No automatic email tracking from user Inbox into Dynamics 365, but manual tracking is required |
User Personal option:
System Settings
|
With this setting combination users can manually track emails via App for Outlook. Other options to turn off automatic message tracking for a user is to set Incoming Email Synchronization Method to None on the Mailbox form. This method also disables manual tracking from the App for Outlook. |
|
Automatically track all emails from user Inbox into Dynamics 365 |
User Personal option:
System Settings (correlation method of choice, compatible with Email system)
Note correlation is not for determining if email will be tracked |
All Emails Personal option is intended to track all emails, system doesn’t rely on correlation for tracking decision. However, recommendation is to use suitable correlation method to relate RE/FW with existing emails in Dynamics 365. Typically, this combination is suitable for queue mailboxes, like info@contoso.com. |
|
Automatically track emails from user Inbox into Dynamics 365 only when sender is Contact, Account or Lead |
User Personal option:
System Settings (correlation method of choice, compatible with Email system)
|
Correlation method is not mandatory as system uses sender email address to decide auto tracking. However, recommendation is to use suitable correlation method to relate RE/FW with existing emails in Dynamics 365. |
|
Automatically track emails from user Inbox into D365 only when sender is email enabled record. |
User Personal option:
System Settings (correlation method of choice, compatible with Email system)
|
Correlation method is not mandatory as system uses sender email address to decide auto tracking. However, recommendation is to use suitable correlation method to relate RE/FW with existing emails in Dynamics 365. |
|
Automatically track emails from user Inbox into Dynamics 365 only when it’s a response or forward of an email existing in Dynamics 365. |
User Personal option:
System Settings (correlation method of choice, compatible with Email system)
|
When all correlation methods are checked system evaluates Incoming email in this order:
Tracking Token is most accurate out of all correlation options. |
|
Automatically track email into Dynamics 365 from specified folder(s) in user mailbox but none from Inbox |
User Personal option: System Settings
|
With this setting combination manual tracking from App for Outlook to Dynamics 365 is also available. |
Misc. configuration for automating tracking:
How to enable tracking token and/or smart matching without correlation?
Tracking token provides 100% tracking accuracy compared to other two methods (ref, section “Configure folder-level tracking and email correlation”). However, the System Settings dialog allows enabling smart matching and/or tracking token only after enabling correlation. This results into inevitable usage of email header properties (Exchange conversation index and in-reply-to properties). There could be business needs to use only tracking token. For such requirements, a new OrgDBOrgSetting can be used to alter this default behavior.
IgnoreConversationIndexAndInReplyToForCorrelation setting is available in version 9.02.1719 or later(ref). If using OrgDBOrgSettings Solution, updating the solution might be required to use this setting. When set to True, the System ignores the conversation index and in-reply-to for automatic email tracking, effectively using tracking token and/or smart matching.
How to restrict users automatically tracking All Emails?
HideTrackAllOption OrgDBOrgSettings is available in version 9.0.2.1719 or later. When set to true, it removes the “All email messages” option from Personal options drop down menu. This can be useful in scenarios when organizations needs to avoid unintentional selection “All emails” option by users. However, administrators can still choose this setting for selective users via SDK or User Settings Utility.
How to prevent tracking of specific response or forward email from a tracked conversation?
RestrictIRMEmailItems OrgDBOrgSettings is available in version 8.2.2.0840 or later. When set to TRUE, the result is that SSS will not synchronize ALL emails those are marked as IRM emails. This can be useful to avoid tracking of emails with sensitive information. In addition to configuring RestrictIRMEmailItems value, user education and action is necessary to make effective use of this setting.
Refer Office 365 Message Encryption and Set up new Office 365 Message Encryption capabilities. When configured, users can use the Permission button to send encrypted or rights protected messages. SSS ignores a Rights protected message when RestrictIRMEmailItems is set to true.
When we click the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook button focused on a protected message, the following message is shown to users so manual tracking is also restricted.
Thanks to Srihari Srinivasa and Maya Dumesh for inputs.
Hope this helps!
Oracle and Teradata data source support and hourly e-mail subscriptions for Paginated Reports now available
For the fifth week in a row, we’re pleased to announce two new features on “New Feature Friday” for Paginated Reports in Power BI. We’ve added support for two new data sources, Oracle and Teradata, and also added the ability to schedule your e-mail subscriptions on an hourly basis.
Oracle and Teradata Now Supported
We added Oracle and Teradata data source support to Power BI Report Builder in early April so report authors could connect directly and begin creating reports with these popular data sources. Now, you can publish these reports to your Premium workspaces in Power BI. These data sources require the on-prem data gateway to be setup, just as SQL Server and SQL Server Analysis Services data sources do today. All regions have support for these data sources fully rolled out, so you can take advantage of these providers right away in your Power BI tenant.
Hourly E-Mail Subscriptions
In addition, we’ve added the ability to set an hourly cadence for your e-mail subscriptions in Power BI. You’ll see it as an additional option in the frequency dropdown for your paginated reports within the next few days. You can setup multiple hourly subscriptions per report, allowing you to receive the latest data in your inbox as often as every 15 minutes. And with Paginated Reports always receiving the latest data from your underlying data source, you and your users can always have the latest report data delivered right to their inbox.
While the hourly frequency option is only available for paginated reports currently, we’re adding this option for all content types and all users in Power BI in the coming weeks, so watch out for that in a coming post!
We’re taking a bit of break the next couple weeks around new feature announcements, but there’s plenty more coming as we head towards GA of Paginated Reports.
Thanks and don’t forget to leave your feedback in the comments below!
What’s in an Email? Great Email Content Leads to Great Engagement
Email and content are two of the most effective tools at a marketer’s disposal. Yet, due to the many complexities that determine inbox placement, the two are often at odds. What often makes for a great piece of standalone content doesn’t always work in email form, resulting in poor deliverability and engagement.
For instance, the most common mistake marketers make is regarding the longer copy within an email as the most important piece of email content. However, it’s usually the smaller details that determine whether your emails are properly delivered and opened. When developing content for email, marketers should think beyond the body copy and keep elements such as HTML, design, and CTA placement top of mind.
With so many moving parts influencing engagement and deliverability, it’s difficult to determine how to best optimize content to improve email engagement and deliverability. Thankfully, with the right strategy, you can ensure your email and content work together harmoniously to help you meet your marketing goals.
Today’s mission is to equip you with a few best practices to optimize your email content for improved engagement, inbox placement, and even better results.
Remember That “From” Addresses, Subject Lines, and Preview Text Matter
The elements of your email that your recipient sees before even opening your message –– which include the “from” address, subject line, and preview text –– greatly impact your overall success and effectiveness of your email marketing strategy.
To start, the “from” address used can affect whether your audience and various ISPs perceive your message as spam. In general, you should avoid using generic addresses such as nonreply@, postmaster@, admin@, and similar entities. Instead, try using “from” addresses that clearly convey who you are and what your message is about. Sticking to this practice will help you ensure your email doesn’t immediately get flagged by ISPs and encourage trust and engagement from your audience.
Subject and preview lines also play a crucial role in helping you generate interest and establish credibility with your audience. To encourage your recipients to open your email, you should aim to craft these two pieces of text to be catchy but also convey the overall purpose of your email. If you’re lacking ideas on how to craft subject lines and preview text that improve your open rate, a good place to start is by looking at your analytics for top-performing keywords and conducting A/B testing to see which phrases resonate best with your audience.
In short, if you want to make sure your messages land in the inbox folder and get opened and read, take some time to think about how you can make a good first impression with your audience.
It’s Not Enough to Have a Good Call To Action
For years and years, it’s been ingrained in our minds that a strong call to action is the key to better results. In the world of email, simply asking your audience to complete an action is not enough. Aspects such as placement and design can significantly impact whether your call to action gets seen, captures the attention of your audience, and inspires them to click-through.
To help achieve increased CTA conversion rates, you should first aim to place these above the fold where your audience can easily see them. You should also make it clear to your audience what it is and what they are expected to do. Generally, having an eye-catching button that includes engaging copy that motivates your reader to take the next step is a good recipe for email marketing success. In contrast, hiding your CTA within an image or another part of your email will be interpreted as spam by both ISPs and your recipient.
Less Is More When It Comes to Content and Design
Copy that is concise and to the point is the key to all good content and is especially important in the world of email. Your recipients are likely inundated with tons of emails each day, so your copy should be written in a way that effectively communicates your message.
In addition to keeping your content short and sweet, you should also present it in a way that is easy to digest. This will help your recipients quickly understand what it is you’re trying to convey and what you want them to do, which will lead to improved engagement.
Finally, make sure to design your emails to be mobile-friendly. According to Fluent, 75% of consumers use their smartphones most often to check their email (1), so failing to make the viewing process enjoyable will likely dissuade them from engaging with your email. Tools, such as Act-On email composer, can help you easily create responsive emails that look great and are easy to view on all ISPs and mobile devices.
Avoid Elements That Can Land Your Emails in The Spam Folder
Hidden email content is just as important as what you see at first glance. Elements such as HTML, links, images, and even certain phrases can send your emails straight to the “spam” folder and should be avoided.
Double-check the following before clicking “Send”:
- Links: Make sure all links are clear and easily identifiable. Hiding links can damage your reputation with customers and increase your spam placement. In addition, always use “HTTPS” links to secure sites and ensure that any third-party links are not blacklisted.
- HTML Cleanliness: Ensuring that your HTML is clean before clicking “Send” is important because it can affect inbox placement. Spammers try to hide content in URLs, so ISPs often interpret messy email HTML as a red flag and send these emails straight to the “Spam” folder.
- Copyrighted Images: You must have permission to use any images placed within the body of your email. Copyright infringement is monitored by ISPs, filtering companies, data centers, and blacklists, so this is a surefire way to get your email shut down.
- Avoid Spammy Phrases: ISPs scan for certain phrases that are frequently used in spam emails and, even if your intentions are good, using them will likely get your email flagged. Phrases that will trigger ISPs to label you as spam include “free,” “100%,” and “last chance offer,” to name a few.
- Privacy Policy on Domain Website: A privacy policy is a requirement in the world of deliverability. Therefore, you should ensure that any domains referenced in your email have one available.
The Perfect Content and Email Marketing Strategy Can Yield Great Results
Aligning your email and content strategies may be a challenge, but investing time to achieving that goal will yield great results for your organization. When your email content is optimized for deliverability and engagement, it will only help you improve inbox placement, drive conversions, and build solid, long-lasting relationships with your target audience.
To learn more about how you can optimize your email content, check out our eBook Deliverability 101: Your Guide to Developing a Content Strategy to Maximize Email Deliverability, which is also linked below.