Web Hosting Blog | Heart Internet Official Blog

13 vital tips for successful email campaigns

Jenni — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:12:36 +0000

This post forms part of our Science of Hosting campaign. View more Science of Hosting posts.

One of the most established forms of online marketing, email is an inexpensive and proven method for increasing sales and brand support when done properly. It’s hard to get right, but here are some essential tips for increasing the success of your email and eshot campaigns.

1. Keep text to a minimum

Unless you’re sending something designed to be informative (like a newsletter), keep information to a minimum. All emails benefit from teasers, and don’t post whole blog articles or give an exhaustive list of information about a product or service – you want to give the reader a reason to click through to your website. Your landing page should have all the information the reader needs to make a decision – think of the email as the trailer, and the landing page as the full-length movie.

2. Target recipients as closely as possible

A well-targeted database will help you direct your emails at the right people and boost your click-through rates and conversions as well as reducing your unsubscribes. Divide your customer base up into areas of interest, and send each group of customers a specifically targeted email. This is easy to do if you have customers who buy a particular product or service. If you cover multiple areas of interest and have a mixed customer base, then create a sign up page where customers can choose which areas they’re interested in to determine which emails they receive.

3. Track, track and re-track

The more stats you have at your fingertips, the easier it is to improve your email campaigns. Have a look into software or services to help you track email opens, clicks, unsubscribes and so on. Are you getting a relatively high amount of opens? Then you’re doing a great job with your subject lines. Do you have a low click-through rate? Then assess your content – maybe the reader is feeling overwhelmed, confused or bored. Experimenting is crucial, so try A/B testing with different subject lines, content or text to see which styles are the most popular. You can try sending two different emails to a small sample of people and see which generates the most response before sending it to the rest.

4. Timing is everything

Send out emails within traditional working hours. It’s also a good idea to avoid lunchtime (12-2pm) and after 3pm, particularly if your database consists mainly of people’s work email addresses. A lot of companies also avoid Fridays completely. If you have the time and resources, do a series of tests at different times of day to see what works well for you.

5. Use emails sparingly

Everyone hates spammers, so avoid bombarding your recipients with emails. The more frequently you send out emails, the higher your unsubscribe rate is likely to get. A good way to test if you’re sending the right number of emails is to get a friend to register for your mailing list, and get their feedback on whether you’re sending too many or too few.

6. Keep your database up to date

If emails bounce, then it’s a good time to review contact details. If you’re working with a huge number of subscribers, then remove bouncing email addresses from your list. If you’re working with a relatively small number of clients, then it’s probably time to follow up on their change of contact details, particularly if the same email address is used for important notices or payments. Leaving your database for long periods of time is an easy thing to do, but it will become less useful to you over time if you don’t cultivate it.

7. Proof read emails carefully

Customers are quick to spot mistakes in emails, so proof read carefully! It’s always best to get someone who hasn’t read it before to give it a thorough checking before you send it. Don’t forget to check all the links carefully as well, particularly if you’ve gone through several different revisions or have built the email using local or internal links.

8. Use attention-grabbing subject lines

More specifically, use relevant attention-grabbing subject lines. Whilst the title is the first factor in determining a reader’s interest, it’s useless to ‘trick’ people into opening your emails through using unrelated, crazy titles. They’ll just feel disappointed when they read the email and find out that you’re actually promoting hard drives instead of pet unicorns. Depending on your customer base, you may also end up with a very confused and/or disgruntled set of clients!

Also avoid spammy-looking headlines, e.g. all caps, multiple exclamation marks, ‘££££’. Get the theme of your email across quickly and succinctly, and use teasers carefully.

9. Give your readers options

Offer different versions of emails for your recipients – plain text, HTML, and browser versions provide plenty of choice and make life easier for readers. If you run a regular or timeless feature, then think about putting copies of past emails in an online archive for people/customers to access when they wish (be careful how you promote this as you may find people unsubscribe).

However, don’t use alternative viewing methods as a reason to cut cross-browser and cross-client compatibility checking – your email is a reflection on you and your company, so always test as much as you can across all the big clients to avoid embarrassment!

10. Provide clear calls to action

What do you want your reader to do? Don’t send them in too many different directions by including lots of links/messages, particularly if you’re sending an email to promote a single product or service. It’s too confusing and overwhelming. For single-focus emails, include a clear link or button fairly near the top to grab the more impatient readers, and one at the bottom so people reading to the end don’t have to scroll back up. If you can get away with only a few sentences that don’t go below the fold of the page or screen, then take that approach.

Use clear, instructional text such as ‘Click here’ or ‘Find out more’ to direct readers to your landing page/website. Buttons and large text are more eye-catching, but use sparingly for best results.

11. Place your unsubscribe link carefully

An unsubscribe link at the top of your email makes it easy for recipients to unsubscribe without even thinking about it. Get them to at least give the content a glance by placing your unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email.

12. Streamline the design process

Design and develop a template (or two) which you can easily modify for your emails. One of the biggest problems with sending emails is cross-client compatibility, so having a template that you don’t need to extensively test every time will help you avoid major headaches. It will also help your emails look more consistent. If this is something you’ve been putting off because it’s a lot of work, now’s the time to do it – it will save you a lot of time and hassle in the long run.

A useful foundation for a basic email template is to make good use of space and coding, so that you can simply replace banners, buttons, colours and images for a completely different look without too much effort.

13. Get feedback

Ask a few friends to register for your mailing list, then get their feedback on what they thought. If they can’t even remember that you sent them an email, then it’s time to work on your subject lines! You may also want to ask what they liked and didn’t like about the content and presentation. This is a particularly useful exercise to carry out over a long period if you have multiple mailing lists and/or groups, because it’s easy to neglect one without realising.

Have you got any tips or experience of using mailing lists and email campaigns? Let us know in the comments!

Name:Jenni Brown

About:One of the newest members of the team, Jenni is Heart Internet's SEO & Social Media Marketing Executive. Responsible for Heart Internet's Twitter and Facebook engagement, Jenni is a social network enthusiast and has been blogging for almost a decade.

Posts by Jennifer (15)

Resellers: Buy new Domain Privacy for just £2.49 during September!

Jenni — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:37:06 +0000

Heart Internet Reseller Pro customers can now buy Domain Privacy on a domain for just £2.49 (reduced from £4.99). This limited-time offer is available for new purchases this month, and presents a great opportunity for sales with increased margins.

Domain owners are required to provide contact (WHOIS) information, but this leaves you open to spammers and other third parties abusing your contact details, including your address. You can protect your own domain names using our Domain Privacy product and offer this service to your customers as well.

How does Domain Privacy work?

We will protect your real identity in the domain WHOIS databases by providing generic contact information using our domain name identity-secured.com. So rather than your address, your phone number and your name being displayed, all they see is identity-secured.com. The same is also true for all your customers who buy Domain Privacy.

What are the benefits?

•   Personal contact details (including your address) aren’t on display to the world, and won’t be sold on.
•   You and your customers don’t have the hassle of unsolicited emails.
•   You’re in control of how people contact you via your website.
•   Our generic contact information and identity-secured.com website have no Heart Internet references or branding for easy integration into your own hosting services.
•   You can order Domain Privacy on any .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz or .name domain name.
•   Using our domain privacy product does not impact the ownership of your domain names, or your customers’ domain names, in any way.

To be eligible for this offer, you must be a Heart Internet Reseller Pro customer buying new Domain Privacy on a domain. Please note that the standard price will be applied at the time of renewal.

To get started, log in to your Heart Internet Control Panel. Domain Privacy can be found in the “Add-ons” section.

Alternatively, if you use HostPay and you do not already offer domain privacy or you wish to change your pricing, go directly to the “Add on Products” page in HostPay.

Name:Jenni Brown

Posts by Jennifer (15)

The Web Hosting Periodic Table

Matthew — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:06:47 +0000

The Science of Hosting is made up of many elements, some of them essential for any website to function (e.g. web space), and others more approrpriate to specific websites (e.g. WordPress one click install). At Heart Internet we approach each element as being just as important as another, offering the latest web hosting technology at great prices.

The Heart Internet Web Hosting Periodic Table (Click to enlarge in a new window and then click to zoom in)…

What is The Science of Hosting?

Matthew — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:39:21 +0000

Web hosting has to be much more than just providing space on a server in a data centre. Creating and maintaining a truly world class web hosting service is a science, and that is the approach we take at Heart Internet. We believe that the science of hosting is based around the six disciplines of:

a) Features
b) Flexibility
c) Stability & security
d) Control
e) Growth
f) Innovation

With so many elements to consider, a web hosting service that masters one discipline at the expense of another will ultimately fail, and that is why we never sit on our laurels. We are always investigating new ways to improve each of them.

Features
Unlimited web hosting (and reseller hosting) product features such as unlimited web space, bandwidth, databases and email provide the infrastructure for Heart Internet customers to build their website without worrying about hitting any limits, and to focus on turning their website in to a success.

Flexibility
Heart Internet web hosting has all the features you need to create any website you want, from a small hobby site up to a high traffic database driven ecommerce website. Additionally the white label reseller hosting is fully customisable and brandable through out and every element is up for change. It is yours to make it how you want.

Stability & security
Our platform is designed in such a way that if any server fails another server automatically and without delay takes over that server’s workload. As well as this, all data is stored in two large network disk arrays.Each array is also backed up each night to a separate backup cluster which is then written to tape and stored offsite.

Control
All the tools you need to fully manage your web hosting and reseller hosting online with one of the world’s most advanced hosting control panels. Purpose built in-house just for our web hosting, we don’t rely on 3rd party suppliers to manage our hosting.

Growth
Heart Internet hosting grows with your website, backed by high spec products and clear and easy upgrade paths.

Innovation
With over 1,000 new product features introduced since launch and new products launched based on customer demand our products never become stale. All upgrades become available to existing customers as well as new ones.

Visit our labs for more information about the science of hosting

Name:Matthew Telfer

Posts by Matthew (182)

Reseller hosting API update

Rik — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:56:09 +0000

To make our resellers’ lives a little bit easier we have made a couple of changes to our reseller web hosting API today. If you are using our API you can now use it to order and delete these additional products; MS Exchange mailboxes, premium mailboxes and MS SQL databases. As well as these new products, with this update you can also associate a direct debit with the API so that chargeable services can be ordered through it. The Reseller API is free with the Heart Internet Reseller Professional.

Key features include:

Setup, delete, deactivate and reactivate hosting packages.
Lookup, register, transfer and renew domain names.
Add web hosting features, list web hosting packages, resend welcome emails.
Auto authenticate customers into hosting and domain control panels.
XML Interface with code examples in Perl, PHP and Ruby.
Extensive documentation to help you get started.

Your exclusive API activation code and the supporting documentation can be found in your Reseller Control Centre: https://customer.heartinternet.co.uk/manage/api

Name:Rik Brown

About:Rik is one of Heart Internet's System Administrators. Having worked at the company for the past couple of years, Rik is responsible for looking after webservers, mailservers, upgrades and security.

Posts by Rik (2)

6 steps to writing a newsletter that people will read

Jonathan — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:56:14 +0000

A couple of years ago we re-launched the Heart Internet customer newsletter to great success. All the metrics we use to benchmark newsletters went through the roof; open rates, click through rate, conversions and revenue. Here’s the approach we took to make this happen.

Before we get on to the ‘how’, I’d like to quickly touch on the ‘why’. Customer newsletters, in my opinion, should be a no brainer. A good newsletter that is sent regularly will increase sales and revenue for immediate purchases, keep you in contact ready for future purchases and provide customers something to pass on and share.

1. Segment your customer base
If you sell multiple products which are targeted at different audiences don’t group them all in to one mailing list. Each audience has different levels of knowledge, different motivators and varying degrees of interest in a subject. A newsletter that goes to all your customers is only partially relevant to each segment.

2. Content that benefits them
A newsletter is not an excuse to copy and paste your press releases, write about the MD’s thoughts on the industry or provide a detailed explanation of widget X’s specifications. Give your customers content they want to read and keep these two questions in mind; “Is it interesting?” and “Is it useful?” This could be promotional prices, articles to help them improve an aspect of their business/ life, competitions/ prizes, new products/ services/ features they can use etc.

3. Take your time
The customer newsletter should be given the same care and attention as any other marcomms. You wouldn’t quickly knock up a magazine advert in 10 minutes and send it out, and you shouldn’t do the same with your newsletter. I receive newsletters from design agencies that have clearly only been written and built minutes before they are sent (or at least they look like it). At Heart Internet it takes a week from starting the first draft through to it being sent out.

4. Keep it short
No matter how long you spend on it and how ground breaking the content is, no one will read an email that rivals War & Peace. Short punchy paragraph are the order of the day with links taking people to a full article hosted on your site if they want to read more. Get straight to the point and skip the introductory paragraph about your company, they are your customers, they know who you are.

5. Clear calls to action
Research has found your newsletter has only got 51 seconds before the reader loses interest and only 19% of recipients will fully read a newsletter, the rest will scan the page. With such a short time and general lack of involvement, make your calls to action (e.g. click here to buy) prominent using buttons, highlighted text, arrows and any other disturber that fits in with your design.

6. Cross reference across all channels
Rather than duplicating our efforts writing content just for the blog and just for the newsletter, we regularly run blog articles through the newsletter. This catches customers who don’t read the blog and raises the awareness of our blog. After each newsletter we see a clear increase in visits to our blog.

Name:Jonathan Brealey

About:As a Director and Co-founder of Heart Internet, Jonathan developed the company based around innovative features, user-friendly functionality and excellent customer support. Jonathan has been a key player in shaping the UK web hosting industry since 1997, having co-founded WebFusion with Tim Beresford.

Posts by Jonathan (74)

Design our magazine advert: THE WINNER!

Matthew — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:29:30 +0000

First, a big thanks to everyone who took the time to create some fantastic designs and take part in the competition. We had another great year of high quality entries and it really showed us how creative our customers are. We will be showcasing the designs that nearly made it in a future blog post, but for now we’d like to focus on this year’s winner David Wildish.

Why we chose the winner
David’s design stood out from the minute it arrived in our in-box. What drew us to the advert was how unique it would be for a web hosting company to run an advert like this. Ignoring the traditional boxes and lists, David managed to use an eye catching graphic without diluting our key selling points and forgetting who our target audience are. We believe people flicking through a magazine will stop at this page, engage with it, understand what we are selling, why they should buy it and where to go to buy it, which is exactly what we want from our magazine adverts. Its also pretty funky!

David has won a 27″ iMac, a 32GB iPod touch, a year’s free reseller hosting and a free domain name, all worth over £2,000! The advert will also be used in one of the biggest digital creative magazines in the coming months.

The winning advert:

We really enjoy running this competition and there is a good chance it will be back for a 3rd year in 2011, so get your thinking caps on

Name:Matthew Telfer

Posts by Matthew (182)

Resellers: Now you can back up multiple sites from your control panel!

Ben — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:31:21 +0000

Heart Internet resellers can now quickly back up multiple websites with our new control panel feature. We’ve had a lot of requests for this functionality, so it should be pretty popular!

How to back up websites

You can back up multiple websites in just a couple of clicks – click here to get started.
We’ve also been asked how to bulk back up MySQL databases for customers – you can do this by going to the MySQL Databases Backup page.

Why use backups?

Backing up websites on a regular basis is just good practice. The most common problem website owners experience when making changes to a website is not backing up their files before committing changes, in case anything goes wrong. Those who have backed up their website when a new script pulls everything down can restore their previous version in minutes. Those who didn’t will have that sinking feeling as they realise all their work is potentially lost! As well as self-inflicted problems (which are by far the most common), backing up your websites is essential to offset the headache of data loss in a worst case scenario, such as a website being hacked through stolen passwords.

5 ways to limit data loss

1. Keep regular backups of websites (download the zip files via your control panel).
2. Store backups on at least two different hard drives.
3. Make sure you keep any scripts/software you’ve installed up to date (particularly for security patches).
4. Keep a record of all the scripts you’ve installed for each of your own websites – especially if you have websites which you rarely update – so you don’t forget upgrades.
5. Ensure your customers understand the importance of backing up their files and websites on a regular basis.

Name:Ben Scott

About:As Senior Web Designer, Ben oversees all of Heart Internet's design, usability, SEO and conversion optimisation. Since joining the team in 2009, Ben has redesigned the Heart Internet website as well as the newsletters, HostPay templates, control panel and much more.

Posts by Ben (69)

The latest Heart Internet news and features

Jenni — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:00:48 +0000

Over the past few weeks we’ve added a lot of new features for our web hosting, reseller hosting and dedicated server customers, so here’s a roundup of everything that’s been happening at Heart Internet recently.

PHP 5 is becoming our default version in September

We’re changing our default version of PHP from 4 to 5. If you’re running legacy software that won’t work on PHP 5, you’ll need to add a line of code to your .htaccess file before 6th September – see our blog entry for more details.

Microsoft Exchange 2010 mailboxes now just £4.99 per month for resellers

Heart Internet reseller hosting customers can now resell Exchange mailboxes for just £4.99 per month (previously £10). Ideal for customers who want business email hosting, each mailbox comes with 4GB of space, free Outlook 2010, enterprise-class spam and virus protection, and more.

For further details, check out the blog post or the Resell Exchange Hosting page.

Resellers: Get an exclusive 25% off new dedicated servers

Resellers can now enjoy 25% discount on any new dedicated servers (either monthly or yearly). This is a permanent price reduction to help you take advantage of more competitive pricing and bigger margins when selling to customers.

To find out more, check out our blog entry or the Reseller Dedicated Servers page.

New Simple SSL certificate only £49.99, and ExtendedVerification SSL certificate price drop

We’ve added a Simple SSL certificate to our range for £49.99 per year (equivalent to just over £4 per month). If you’re looking for something more substantial, we’ve reduced the price of our ExtendedVerification SSL certificate from £299.99/year to £249.99/year (equivalent to just over £20/month). Existing customers will receive this new price upon renewal.

SSL certificates provide site visitors with an encrypted, trustworthy connection and can be bought by both web hosting customers and Heart Internet reseller hosting customers.

To view our full range and find out more, click here: SSL certificates.

One-click WordPress 3.0.1 and BuddyPress 1.2.5.2 now available

Our web hosting customers can now take advantage of a one-click install of leading blogging software WordPress 3.0.1 and the social communication script BuddyPress 1.2.5.2. Simply log into your eXtend panel and scroll down to ‘CGI scripts’ for a fresh install in just a few seconds.

For more information on this change, click here: WordPress and BuddyPress one-click installs.

One-click Zen Cart v1.3.9f and Drupal 6.19

We’ve also updated the one-click installs of Zen Cart and Drupal so you can take advantage of the latest releases. The software can be found in the ‘CGI scripts’ area of your control panel, and our one-click install means you can enjoy great ecommerce and content management systems within seconds.

Free web hosting template

We’ve created a web hosting-themed CSS/HTML template for resellers (and anyone else who wants to use it), which can be downloaded via our blog: free web hosting template download.

Finalists in the PC Pro Awards

We’re happy to announce that we’re finalists in the PC Pro ‘Best Web Host’ category for 2010. When we tweeted about it, we had several great responses from people offering their support – sadly there’s nothing you can do to help us win (short of keeping your fingers crossed or trying cosmic ordering), but we’re grateful for your support!

Silver sponsors of NACONF

Heart Internet is a silver sponsor of new UK web design conference NACONF (“New Adventures in Web Design”), which is taking place in January next year. Find out more through our blog post.

Name:Jenni Brown

Posts by Jennifer (15)

What makes a cool brand?

Matthew — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:21:40 +0000

In many cases, what is and isn’t cool can be quite subjective, with not everyone agreeing on the answer. However, there are many brands and websites where the large majority would agree “Yeah, that’s cool”. Brands falling in to this category that spring to mind at the time of writing are Bose, Apple (yeah, Apple), Dribbble, Tag Heur and HBO. These brands, and all ‘cool’ brands, share common characteristics that can be applied to any website, product or service. These are; Premium Price, aesthetics, originality, exclusivity, targeted advertising.

Premium price
I can’t think of one cool brand that doesn’t charge a premium within its category. Cheap brands can become what I’d describe as “ironically cool”, i.e. so crap people pretend the brand is somehow cool because of it. However, any brand that is genuinely cool is to a certain degree aspirational. Either we want one or we want to be like one. If your website is informational and/ or free to consume you can still feel expense through an exclusive web design and high quality content e.g. www.webdesignerwall.com. The conundrum is, is a brand cool because it is expensive or is it expensive because it is cool?

Aesthetics
People like to look at beautiful things, be it other people, products, websites, paintings etc. It keeps our attention and makes us desire it. I find myself navigating around my iPhone with no real purpose but just because it’s a joy to use. That’s cool! Glossy, high res, non fussy, consistent designs backed up by confident copy combine to create products, services and websites that make us want to interact with the brand.

Originality
The cool brands are original in what the offer or in the way they offer it. They aren’t necessarily the first to market, but the way they package and present what they offering instinctively draws people towards them. For example, web design showcases are nothing new and the market is pretty much saturated, but dribbble.com is making a big splash through its original approach to showcasing work. There use of invites to become a member leads us nicely to…

Exclusivity
A brand feels special when we feel like we are a member of an exclusive club. This can be through a high price (e.g. Rolex), an invitation only model (dribble.com) or a limited number available (e.g. iPhone at launch). Creating a critical mass of followers waiting to get their hands on your brand is a tried and tested marketing technique to generate both buzz and demand and one Apple plays very well. The downside to this approach is when the product becomes available to everyone and the exclusivity diminishes e.g. Twitter.

Targeted advertising
Essentially branding by association, you can utilize the coolness of an existing website by being seen to advertise on it. Mailchimp.com does this through advertising on the likes of smashingmagazine.com and other leading web design blogs. On the flip side, if you are seen on poor quality sites, you will as equally be associated with them.

Name:Matthew Telfer

Posts by Matthew (182)