Marketing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM - ClickDimensions Blog

Guest Post: Limiting Form Submissions Per Visit

Thank you to Matthew Monaco of The Hanen Centre for today's guest post!

Some companies have large CSS files that are used to style their website. A common problem in this scenario is that it can take slightly longer for embedded content – like a ClickDimensions form, survey or subscription management page – to redirect. Subsequently, you may have respondents click the submit button multiple times, trying to force the page to load faster, which in turn results in multiple submissions.

If having your website administrator consolidate these files to optimize performance isn't an option that is immediately available to your team, there's a little bit of JavaScript that you can add to ClickDimensions web content records to disable the submit button once it's been clicked, and some CSS that you can use to take this a step further and visually gray-out the button as well.

After implementing this code, you should see a significant decrease in any duplicate submissions. Additionally, this method saves you time and your system resources from having to create a custom workflow to search for and remove any duplicate records.

The steps for implementing this process are as follows:

1. Create your form, survey or subscription management page to your liking.

2. Click the Code Editor button in the designer menu.

3. Add the JavaScript below to the corresponding section of the code editor.

4. Then, do the same with the CSS below.

5. Save your changes within the code editor and the designer itself.

That's it! You're all set to save yourself some time and frustration.

Please note that this code is provided as-is. ClickDimensions support is not able to support custom code requests.

Serving the Public Interest: How Government Entities Deliver Educational Content with ClickDimensions

Did you know that 45 percent of government agencies list "driving audience engagement with content" as their top communications challenge? That stat from a GovDelivery survey shows not only the need for compelling content that can drive engagement, but also a need for effective distribution of that content – for government entities and organizations of all kinds. In our example scenario below, we outline how one government agency shares their content and analyzes results.

The Finn County Department of Public Health (FCDPH) has long been known for educating the public on matters of public health and safety, but wanted to streamline that process and make their communications more effective.

Using ClickDimensions, the FCDPH marketing team created a campaign automation, which allows them to send out targeted emails over time, for their new Home Safe Home awareness campaign.

The campaign automation includes several emails, all made with the easy-to-use ClickDimensions drag and drop email editor. Using the social media links and social sharing features within the editor, FCDPH can also easily connect their email and social efforts.

Within the campaign automation, email recipients are invited to download a safe home workbook to help them address common household safety threats. Using ClickDimensions, FCDPH created the landing page and form used for this download – no coding required!

FCDPH also published several informative blog posts as part of the Home Safe Home campaign, and the ClickDimensions RSS to email connector allows the department to expand their blog's reach by automatically sending posts to marketing lists at set times.

Using the ClickDimensions content pack for Microsoft Power BI, FCDPH is able to analyze data and share insights with data visualizations and dashboards to better understand the performance of their Home Safe Home campaign.

In addition to campaign automation, email marketing, landing pages and forms, and reporting, ClickDimensions gives you a wide variety of tools that can be incorporated into educational outreach campaigns – or any other marketing efforts! – including surveys, SMS messaging, event management and web intelligence.

Happy Marketing!

Setting up a Double Opt-In Subscription Management Campaign Automation

Recently, many of our customers have been asking how to set up a double opt-in process for subscription management. It is a requirement for email marketing in many countries, but it is a recommended practice worldwide. It helps you to confirm interest and keep your marketing lists clean. If you require people to respond to an email before you add them to your marketing lists, it will weed out invalid email addresses. It also means less spam complaints, as everyone has signed up and confirmed that they meant to sign up.

With the addition of the Submitted Subscription trigger in the ClickDimensions campaign automation builder, you can now easily manage subscription preferences, adding and/or removing subscribers from the correct marketing lists. The great thing about campaign automation is that you can lay out the flow of actions and easily adapt them for your needs.

To set up the double opt-in process, you will need to create all the elements that you will include in your subscription management campaign automation.

• Marketing lists. You will need both contact and lead marketing lists for each subscription.
• Subscription lists. You will add your marketing lists to your subscription lists to associate them according the subscription preferences. With subscription lists, you can divide your email campaigns based on categories of interest or by frequency of emails. For example, you may have a monthly newsletter, but another subscription list could be used for special announcements, like event invitations or promotions.
• Form. The form will be embedded on a web page or ClickDimensions landing page. Include, at minimum, the following required fields: first name, last name and email address. You can also include other important fields that you would want recorded on a new visitor's lead or contact record. This would also be a good place to include a checkbox field that requires people to accept your terms and conditions for your company to collect their personal data and for them to receive your emails. In an HTML component on the form, you can link to an article hosted on your website or a landing page, giving all the details of your terms and conditions. If you would like this checkbox to be mapped to the lead or contact record, you will need to add a field in your CRM to the lead and/or contact form.

• Subscription management page. Include all subscription lists on your subscription management page so subscribers can pick based on interests or frequency of emails.

• Email template. The email template will serve as a confirmation that the recipient is interested in receiving additional emails from you. It will contain a link to the subscription management page.

Once you have all the pieces ready, you can set up your campaign automation. There are many variables that can influence the layout of your campaign automation, but we will cover a few common options.

The Double Opt-In

For a standard double opt-in process, set up your steps in this order:

1. The entry point. Use the Submitted Form trigger. The form, which is embedded on a web page accessible to visitors, will allow you to collect a bit of personal data, such as name and email address. It can also include a checkbox to accept your linked terms and conditions for collecting personal data and sending emails to subscribers.

2. The first series. This will include a Send Email action. This is where you will use the email template containing a link to the subscription management page.

3. Submitted Subscription trigger. This trigger checks to see if someone has submitted the subscription management page that was linked in the email. You can set this to wait a set amount of time before sending participants down the negative path. In my example, I set it to two days to give people plenty of time to check their email and click through to the subscription management page.

4. Positive path decision node. Here I have connected the decision node to four series. I want these series to contain actions relevant to the subscription preferences indicated on the subscription management page. Since I have two subscription options, newsletter and special announcements, I want separate series to handle adding and removing members of the corresponding marketing lists. If you have more subscription options, you will need to include additional series to include actions for those preferences.

5. Negative path series. For anyone who did not submit a subscription management page within my two-day period, they will be sent down the negative path. You can include actions in this series, such as Notify User. Since this person did not submit their preferences in time, we can assume they were not truly interested in receiving additional emails, so you may not want to add them to a marketing list or send them another email.

Happy Marketing!

Written by Veronica Kyle, ClickDimensions Marketing Success Manager

How to Display Code in the Body of an Email

Depending on the kind of content that you include in your emails, there may be times when you want to send an email that displays example code within the email's body. While this sounds easy enough, it can be a little tricky due to how different mail clients will render code that is included within an email's body. Thus, you will often find that simply pasting code into your email's body will result in inconsistent rendering across clients – the code will not be displayed, some characters will be missing, extra characters will be added, etc.

In this post, I outline each step of a technique you can use to consistently display code within the body of an email across Outlook Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. As a test case, I will show how you can display the basic structure of a website or HTML email within an email:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
This is the basic structure of a web page or HTML email.
</body>
</html>

First, as an Illustration, if you simply copy and paste this code into the body of an email this is how the email will display in Outlook:

You can see that all of the tags have been removed and only the line of text is visible in the email.

There are three steps that you can follow to make the code display in your email:

1. Wrap the code in <pre> tags.

2. Enclose each angle bracket, forward slash, tag name and phrase within its own set of <span> tags.

3. Encode the brackets of the tags that you want to display.

Here is what each step looks like:

Note: you will need to use the ClickDimensions free style, block or custom HTML editor to access your email's source code. This cannot be done with the drag and drop editor.

Wrap the code in <pre> tags.

This will ensure that you don't have to add any extra code to force the template editor to keep your lines separated. It also gives you an easy way to apply styles to the whole code block, if that is something you would like to do:

<pre>
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
This is the basic structure of a web page or HTML email.
</body>
</html>
</pre>

Enclose each angle bracket, forward slash, tag name and phrase within its own set of <span> tags.

This, combined with the following step, ensures that Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo interpret the tags as text to be displayed, rather than as tags that contribute to the structure of the email:

<pre>
<span><</span><span>html</span><span>></span>
<span><</span><span>head</span><span>></span><span><</span><span>/</span><span>head</span><span>></span>
<span><</span><span>body</span><span>></span>
<span>This is the basic structure of a web page or HTML email.</span>
<span><</span><span>/</span><span>body</span><span>></span>
<span><</span><span>/</span><span>html</span><span>></span>
</pre>

Encode the brackets of the tags that you want to display.

This, combined with the previous step, ensures that Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo interpret the brackets as characters to be displayed, rather as parts of tags that contribute to the structure of the email:

Note: The encoded forms of < and > are &lt; and &gt; respectively.

<pre>
<span>&lt;</span><span>html</span><span>&gt;</span>
<span>&lt;</span><span>head</span><span>&gt;</span><span>&lt;</span><span>/</span><span>head</span><span>&gt;</span>
<span>&lt;</span><span>body</span><span>&gt;</span>
<span>This is the basic structure of a web page or HTML email.</span>
<span>&lt;</span><span>/</span><span>body</span><span>&gt;</span>
<span>&lt;</span><span>/</span><span>html</span><span>&gt;</span>
</pre>

And that's it! When I send an email where I have added the above code to the <body> in my email's source code, here is how it looks when opened by the recipient:

If you'd like to add styling to your code snippet, you can do so by adding styles to the <pre> and/or <span> tags as needed.

Happy Marketing!

Written by Weston Packard, ClickDimensions Lead Product Specialist

ClickDimensions Welcomes New Employees

ClickDimensions is excited to welcome the following new team members:

Curtis Stallings, Marketing Success Manager

Curtis was born and raised in Cumming, Georgia, and later attended Georgia College & State University where he earned a bachelor's degree in theater. Curtis began his career as a Stage Manager at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and after that he managed the Boy Scouts of America in Gwinnett County. Outside of work, Curtis enjoys learning about new technology and working on personal creative projects.

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Hancher, Marketing Intern

Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, Laura recently graduated from Lambert High School and will be attending Georgia Tech in the fall of 2017. She served as the president of Lambert High School's marketing club and worked as her school store's promotional manager. In her free time, Laura enjoys running, cooking and hanging out with her friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

William Patrick, Marketing Intern

A native of Atlanta, William is currently a senior at Kennesaw State University. He has worked in customer service positions throughout his career. In his free time, William enjoys reading about history and non-fiction. His favorite football team is the New England Patriots and Die Hard and Blues Brothers are tied for his favorite movies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dan Chapman, Senior Director, Business Operations

Dan is originally from Atlanta, but was lucky enough to live in Hawaii for awhile. He received his bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech and went on to get his master's at Emory University. Dan loves helping software companies use data to make better decisions. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with his family and friends, listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and watching Christopher Nolan movies.

 

 

 

 

The Latest on Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL)

Since Canada's Anti-Spam Law (CASL) was enacted in 2014, we have known that there would be big changes to the law over the planned three-year rollout. The final phase of that rollout, which is just days away on July 1, 2017, was intended to include two significant changes to the law: the grace period for opt-in lists ends and private right of action takes effect.

The Canadian government has recently changed course and announced that the private right of action provision will be suspended indefinitely while the government reviews the legislation. This provision would have allowed individuals and organizations to file lawsuits against those who violated CASL.

This new development means that now only the opt-in provision will go into effect on July 1, 2017. After that date, if you don't know the source, circumstances and language used to obtain opt-in from an individual, you will want to refrain from sending commercial electronic messages (CEMs) to that person or run the risk of violating the law. CASL requires businesses to be able to show where, when and how consent for being contacted via commercial electronic messages was obtained for every individual that receives CEMs from that organization.

ClickDimensions' email marketing and marketing automation tools can help you keep your organization compliant with CASL through:

Consent

Use ClickDimensions forms to collect consent when a recipient joins your mailing list or requests your emails. Our form builder contains a variety of different form fields, so you could include a checkbox, radio button or text field to capture the recipient's information and their express consent. The date and time the recipient gives consent is captured with the posted form, helping to prove compliance if needed.

Identification

Using the ClickDimensions drag and drop editor, you can easily create email templates that include your contact information in the header or footer. Dynamic content can automatically add the sender's contact information into the message.

Unsubscribe Mechanism

ClickDimensions' subscription management tools allow recipients to choose which emails they would like to receive from you by letting them opt in or out of your lists. The subscription management page will show the recipient their current email preferences and allow them to change them, including unsubscribing to all emails. Links to the subscription management page can be included in your email templates.

To learn more, see our white paper on Canada's Anti-Spam Law.

Please note: Information contained in this article should not be considered legal advice; it is for informational purposes only. We assembled this content to educate marketers and better assist them in their efforts. Consult your compliance department or legal counsel for specific guidance.

Congratulations to Our Newest ClickDimensions Certified Professionals

We are pleased to highlight some of the outstanding individuals who have recently become ClickDimensions Certified. Congrats to everyone featured below and everyone else who recently passed our certification exam!

Eline van 't Ende, Ifunds

Ifunds has more than 20 years' experience with CRM solutions for non-profits. As a Marketing Trainee at the company, Eline hopes to use ClickDimensions to connect and communicate with their non-profit organization customers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jorge Franco Garro, Tecnocom

Jorge is a Senior Consultant at Tecnocom in Spain and has many years of experience in Information technology. He has worked with other Microsoft products, like SharePoint, and has been working with Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM since 2016, taking part in many projects that give him the opportunity to grow professionally.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kavita Wishart, Community Reinvestment Fund, USA (CRF)

Kavita works for a non-profit organization that takes pride in empowering people, improving lives and strengthening communities through innovative financial solutions. With her ClickDimensions certification and the skills she has acquired, she hopes to improve the Community Reinvestment Fund's marketing strategies so the organization can help more people and more communities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Bradshaw, Crimson Limited

Michael is new to Microsoft Dynamics, having started at Crimson Limited in January 2017, and has since passed a Dynamics 365 exam and is now also ClickDimensions Certified. He is very happy with his achievements in the IT sector so far!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jasmin Peart, AlfaPeople

Jasmin is an established communications professional with more than six years of experience in digital marketing, social media and public relations. She has a proven track record of delivering a wide range of marketing and advertising initiatives from concept to delivery for companies across a breadth of industries including consumer, food and beverage, apparel, manufacturing, nonprofit and education. Jasmin graduated from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with a master's degree, where she majored in business.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aurora Sanchez-Mariscal Garcia, Tecnocom

Aurora studied telecommunications engineering at Polytechnic University of Madrid. After being part of a technology startup for two years, she joined Tecnocom as a CRM Consultant, where she specializes in migrations with integration services. She recently had the opportunity to learn ClickDimensions, which has allowed her to deepen her knowledge of the marketing world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Felix Tapia, Robison Oil/Original Energy

Felix is the Director of Marketing for Singer Holding Corp., the owner of Robison Oil, Original Energy, Bright Home Energy Solutions and 911 Restoration. With his insight, the company has elevated its communications, marketing and customer relationship management, maintaining Singer as Westchester & Putnam's premier energy services company and expanding its product line of offerings. He was recently named a 2017 "40 Under 40" Rising Star by The Business Council of Westchester. Felix also uses his marketing prowess as a volunteer with various youth sports leagues assisting in their outreach and promotional efforts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Courtney DeSpelder, Grotenhuis

Courtney graduated from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan with a degree in communications. She is excited to explore the world of email marketing and is looking forward to working with Microsoft Dynamics and ClickDimensions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Reid, Sysco Software Solutions

David is a marketing professional with 10+ years of international experience developing brand presences, increasing product awareness and minimizing operational costs using a combination of video, web, online and traditional marketing techniques. He now serves as Head of Marketing at Sysco Software Solutions, Belfast and Dublin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Erica Hakonson, Maven Collective Marketing

An experienced, passionate and data-driven B2B Digital Marketing Strategist and Founder of Maven Collective Marketing, Erica has practiced B2B Marketing for more than 12 years. She has worn a plethora of hats, helmets and toques during her career as a strategic consultant, marketer, copywriter, SEO/SEM strategist, nurture marketing architect, conversion optimizer and paid advertiser; as well, she is a proud Management of Technology MBA alumna of Simon Fraser University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jessica Myren Downey, Heat and Control

Jessica is a digital marketing professional who recently joined Heat and Control, a world-leading equipment manufacturer serving an ever-growing list of food and non-food industries. She graduated from Indiana University Bloomington and spent several years in healthcare marketing before landing at Heat and Control. She is excited to use what she learned from ClickDimensions Academy to improve the company's digital communications.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dana Kleinman, Highland Capital Brokerage

Dana serves as the Marketing Communications Manager at Highland Capital Brokerage, a life insurance brokerage firm. Having recently celebrated her ninth year with the company, Dana manages a variety of email marketing automation campaigns for Highland's offices across the nation, all while providing training and oversight to the sales team. Dana is the point person for the company on email marketing with ClickDimensions since launching the platform three years ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Boyle, Trinity College Dublin

Kim oversees the planning, development and roll-out of mass communications and marketing via Microsoft Dynamics CRM and ClickDimensions for Trinity's Global Relations Office. This entails cross-team and departmental collaboration to deliver a high-quality standard of activities to targeted international audiences across multiple markets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rebecca Leon, Robins Kaplan LLP

As a website and content marketing specialist, Rebecca is happy to be ClickDimensions Certified so she can utilize the tool in her role to execute superb communications on campaigns determined by the marketing and business development strategies of the firm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neill Li, GrainCorp Limited

Neill is the Business Systems Manager for Logistics and Safety at GrainCorp Limited, a leading Australian agribusiness with the largest grain storage and logistics network in eastern Australia, spanning regional storage facilities, rail/road and bulk grain ports. He manages the operational support and system enhancements of GrainCorp’s SAP, Microsoft CRM, Rivo and several customized applications. Neill looks forward to expanding the use of CRM and ClickDimensions across the entire GrainCorp organization.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are you interested in becoming ClickDimensions Certified too? Learn more about the online ClickDimensions Academy here.

Using Suppression Lists to Let Your Contacts Decide Email Frequency

Have you ever noticed that some businesses ask you how often you want to be emailed? It's a great way to allow people to limit the number of emails they receive instead of getting frustrated by the frequency of emails and resorting to unsubscribing entirely. The good news is that you can quickly set this up using ClickDimensions.

We will use a subscription page, form and dynamic marketing list. And you will set up a custom field on the contact/lead record to hold a value from your form submission. In my example here, I'm going to use the contact record, but you could certainly replicate this on a lead record.

To begin, you will need to create a subscription page and have it redirect to a form upon submission. That process is described here, so we will skip those steps and begin with setting up our custom field.

Step 1: Adding a Custom Field

We will start by adding the custom field because the later steps in this process will rely on the value being stored in our custom field. So, open any contact record in your CRM, click on the ellipses menu and select Form (or Form Editor).

Click New Field and then start setting up your custom field. In our example, we're going to create an Option Set field (see settings below) so that our subscribers can choose to receive emails on a monthly or weekly basis.

Once the field is set up, save and close it. Then back on the Form Editor window, add your new field to the contact form by dragging it from the right sidebar onto the form. I added our field to the Contact Preferences section so I could keep this similar information together.

Save and publish the form. Our new field is now available on the contact record.

Don't forget to publish metadata so that your field is completely ready for the next step.

Step 2: Creating the Form

Next, we will need to set up our form. Basically, this form is going to ask subscribers how often they want to receive our emails. They will fill out the subscription page to opt in or opt out of our subscription lists. Then when they submit the subscription page, they will be directed to this form.

For our form, I'm simply going to include an email field and then a list field that will map back to our custom field from Step 1 above.

Note: You can include other fields or components on your form. For example, I added an HTML component so that we can tell our subscribers the purpose of this form.

The mapping for the list field should be set to Override in CRM and should map back to the custom field we set up in Step 1. Because that custom field is an option set, you will see the corresponding options pulled through into your form field. Don't change the value for the options at all; altering that could break the mapping of the field.

The only value that should be changed is in the Contact Picklist Value dropdown; we need to set the value in that dropdown list to the corresponding option from the field on the contact record. In the screenshot below, you can see that the form field's Monthly option has the corresponding Monthly value chosen in the Contact Picklist Value dropdown. That is a correct mapping.

Step 3—Setting up the Suppression List

Any marketing list can be used as a suppression list, so we're going to set up a dynamic marketing list to function as our suppression list.

Go to Marketing > Marketing Lists to create the new marketing list. When setting it up, set its type to Dynamic.

Once the new list is saved, click on Manage Members. Since we are working with a dynamic list, this will open a window that allows us to set the criteria that should be used when the list queries for contacts.

In that window, set the criteria shown below. In the following screenshot, I'm showing how we can set up the suppression list for the monthly subscribers, so if you are using a different timeframe, you would need to alter the criteria accordingly.

Based on the criteria shown above, this list is going to pull any contact who has a) selected the Monthly option in our Newsletter field, and b) already received an email this month. To save the criteria, click the Use Query button.

Our suppression list is all set to use.

Step 4: Using the Suppression List

Now on any email send, we can add our monthly subscribers suppression list. On the send record, click the related menu, select suppression lists and add our monthly list as shown below.

When the email is sent, any contact who fits the criteria for that suppression list will not be included on the send.

You can follow these steps for other timeframes or suppression reasons that you may have.

Happy Marketing!

Written by Carolynn Carriger, ClickDimensions Marketing Success Manager

ClickDimensions New Release Webinar: Tuesday, June 27

Interested in seeing the latest in ClickDimensions? Join us for a new release webinar on Tuesday, June 27!

ClickDimensions 8.7 Release Webinar

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

10:30 – 11:30 AM EDT

REGISTER

In this session, we will cover the latest features, updates and improvements available in ClickDimensions version 8.7, including many updates to campaign automations, such as new ways to see statistics and more. A recorded version of the webinar will be sent to everyone who registers.

In the meantime, read our 8.7 release sneak peek blog post. You can also sign up to get email notifications about our new releases here.

Happy Marketing!

6 Ways to Cut Through Inbox Clutter

Did you know that, according to Radicati Group research, 269 billion emails are sent every day? Whether you already knew that stat or not, you know from your own daily email experiences that competition for attention in the inbox continues to grow. As marketers, that means we have to work harder to get our email marketing messages opened and acted upon. Here are six effective ways to cut through the inbox clutter:

1. Permission-based marketing. First and foremost on this list is permission-based marketing, which means that the individuals that you're marketing to have directly granted your organization permission to do so. In email marketing, this means that your email recipients have "opted in" to be on your list. Permission-based marketing is one of the best ways to get noticed in the inbox; after all, if someone has said they want to receive your messages, they are more likely to open them. In addition, it violates some SPAM laws and ClickDimensions' terms of use to not engage in permission-based marketing.

2. Segmentation. Let's say you enjoy running and that you have subscribed to receive emails from your favorite sporting goods store. That store could send you a general email about their merchandise and promotions, but they would be more successful at capturing your attention by sending you an email tailored for runners. List segmentation allows you to better match your messaging to your leads' or customers' interests, thus increasing the effectiveness of your email campaigns. For segmentation to be most effective at garnering email opens, be sure that it's conveyed to recipients. Using our running example, a potential subject line could be "Runners: Don't miss our hottest shoe deals" or "Race on over for these running shoe deals."

3. Personalization. Imagine that you're in a crowded room and you want to get your friend's attention. You could try yelling, "Hey!" but you are likely to have more success saying "Hey Sally!" The same goes for email personalization. Using dynamic content in the subject line, you can create email subjects that stand out in the inbox like "Sally, look what we've picked out for you" or "A special offer for Sally." In addition to names, you can use geographic locations, company names or any other customer or lead data you have stored in Microsoft Dynamics 365. And remember to use personalization in the body of your email too to get recipients clicking and converting.

4. Sender name. In our crowded inboxes, we all tend to hone in on messages from people that we know and are important to us, either professionally or personally. That's why generic senders such as "info@company.com" or "Sales" often get ignored. The "From" identity should be someone that the reader knows (their account manager), recognizes (the CEO or other notable person within an organization) or would be expecting an email from (Customer Support). Try to keep the sender consistent so the recipient will recognize the name when they get your emails.

5. Subject lines. First impressions matter, and an email subject line is one of the few pieces of information people see when they first glance at their inbox. In this post, we have already touched on a few ways to use this valuable real estate with segmentation and personalization. Even if you don't go either of those routes, there are a few email subject line best practices to keep in mind. To help ensure your email doesn't trigger spam filters, avoid words like "free," "guarantee," "reminder" and "help." In addition to these spam trigger words, avoid using all caps and special characters. Once they've successfully made it to the inbox, the most successful email subjects are under 50 characters. Questions, call to actions and subject lines that convey a sense of urgency are also effective at improving email open rates.

6. Split testing. Split testing, or A/B testing, is a method of testing two versions of an email against one another to see which one performs better. You can use the results of these tests to improve future email marketing efforts and send emails that really resonate with your audience. What should you change in your email variations in a split test? To help cut through the inbox clutter, try testing different send times, sender names and subject lines to see how even small changes like this can have a big impact.

Happy Marketing!