SiteGround Email Marketing tool keeps getting better and better! This month alone, we launched several exciting new features that make it even easier to collect leads, create emails and send campaigns, and get results!
Integration with Elementor Pro and Contact Form 7 plugins
Our main mission is to help you collect and turn website visitors into paying customers using email marketing. That is why we created a Lead generation plugin for WordPress that makes it easy to add subscription forms to your site. Plus, we are proactively building integrations with other popular WordPress lead generation plugins that will automatically add new leads to your SiteGround Email Marketing tool, and have more options to grow your list.
Our latest integrations serve the users of Elementor Pro forms and Contact Form 7. If you have any of these plugins installed on your website, you need to add and activate SiteGround’s Lead generation plugin, which will start doing its magic and automatically populate your leads from Elementor Pro or Contact Form 7 into the Email Marketing tool.
Use any domain to send emails with our tool
You can now send email campaigns through our Email Marketing tool using any domain, even for websites not hosted by us. This means you can add SiteGround Email Marketing to all your sites, regardless of where they are hosted. This new feature extends our services to a broader range of domains, offering you more flexibility and options to grow your marketing efforts.
Free AI-generated image gallery
The success of your emails equally depends on your copy and your images. While email copy writing is already really easy with our integrated AI writing assistant, getting fancy images for your emails has been a wild card. Many users would either shop stock photos or hire photographers to create custom looks for their campaigns. Pretty costly and time-consuming. That is why we are now excited to introduce our free AI-generated image gallery – with tons of images across topics and styles, it allows you to build engaging emails easily, quickly, and at no extra cost!
Save your custom email templates
By popular demand, SiteGround Email Marketing users can now save custom templates. Imagine you create an email design you love. Now, you can save it and use it again whenever you want. This means you don’t have to start from scratch every time you send an email, and your emails will look consistently awesome!
Add bullet points and numbered lists
You can now use bullets and numbered lists to organize and structure your content in a more easily readable format. Bulleted and numbered lists break down information into manageable chunks, making your emails easier to skim and understand, which is very important considering the attention span we people have nowadays. And it also highlights key points, increasing the likelihood of your audience taking the desired action. This feature is designed to improve user experience and engagement, ultimately boosting your email’s success.
As we wave goodbye to the passing year, we invite you to take a moment and reveal the amazing transformation of millions of websites, hosted with SiteGround.
See how websites changed in 2023, explore website speed, security, sustainability, and more. View your customized report per website by clicking the Login button on our Website Year In Review page. Here’s a sneak peek of the milestones we achieved together this year. ❤️💪
Faster and Better-Performing Websites
In 2023, an impressive 85% speed boost was experienced by 82% of websites that migrated to SiteGround, thanks to our hosting infrastructure and numerous website optimization technologies. We continued to help clients make their websites faster after hosting with us.
Performance stats were delivered directly to our clients’ inboxes showing them what exactly they could improve on their websites, which led to an average 70% monthly performance score for SiteGround-hosted sites. The expansion of our global data center and CDN network was another milestone we’re proud of as it also contributed to improving the performance and loading speed of clients’ websites.
Even Stronger Website Security
We ensured extra peace of mind for website owners by keeping their sites safe on multiple levels. Every day, our AI brute-force prevention system blocks an average of 670,000,000 harmful requests, and our Spam Protection solution filters 12 million spam emails. We also proactively update our server software when major web threats appear to keep clients’ websites safe.
Thanks to this approach, in 2023, our users remained unaffected by the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Attack, Exim’s mail vulnerability, and many others. On top of that, our customers achieved a 70% monthly security score on average, following the actionable tips regarding our suite of security tools, received in their monthly reports.
Empowered Small Businesses & Creators
In 2023, we were committed to helping clients not only with quality hosting but with more tools to grow their businesses online. With the launch of the SiteGround Email Marketing tool, we helped them elevate marketing communication easily, with no technical or design skills. Over 7,000 enthusiasts learned how to start their online business in just 30 days with our email course.
Greener Websites & Planet-friendly Initiatives
Minimizing websites’ carbon footprint was another priority for us. We’re happy that in the past 12 months, we provided sustainable hosting and multiple speed-boosting features to our clients that led to 3 times less CO2 emissions of the websites hosted on our platform, compared to the average site.
With the help of our customers and followers, we also planted a forest with 11,400 trees. With our support for the platform Tree Nation, a tree was planted for every single share of our Sustainability Report on social media. Isn’t that amazing!
Thank You for the Recognition!
Along with making clients’ websites greener, faster, and safer, in 2023, we made sure to support our users all the way. Our award-winning Customer Care and Support teams solved over 965,214 website requests this year with an average resolution time of 15 minutes on chat, and 20 minutes on tickets! No wonder they got a bronze Stevie Award for Customer Service Department of the Year after competing with teams from 61 nations.
Our AI assistant also helped deliver detailed information instantly, answering more than 110,000 questions just within the first couple of months since its release in 2023. But for you, the true impact of all these efforts is measured in client feedback. So we couldn’t wait for the results from our annual client survey to start coming in!
For a sixth consecutive year, our annual survey revealed a 98% Client Satisfaction Rate for our overall hosting service. It is based on our customers’ evaluation of our website security services, loading speed, server uptime, customer support, range of tools, additional services, and value for money. Thank you!
At SiteGround, we always take proactive measures to identify and address potential vulnerabilities promptly. This was the case with the latest critical vulnerability for WordPress sites using the popular WP Fastest Cache plugin. By upgrading the vulnerable WP Fastest Cache plugin to version 1.2.2, we remedied a critical SQL injection vulnerability within an hour since it was reported.
Understanding the Vulnerability
The WP Fastest Cache plugin is widely used to enhance website performance by generating static HTML files. However, versions prior to 1.2.2 of this plugin were found to have a severe SQL injection vulnerability, reported last week. This vulnerability allowed unauthenticated attackers to inject additional SQL queries into existing queries, potentially compromising the security of the website’s database.
This security flaw scored 9.8 out of 10, indicating its critical nature. As a result, it was crucial for us to take immediate action to protect our clients’ websites.
Upgrading the Plugin for Enhanced Security
To safeguard our clients’ websites, we proactively upgraded the WP Fastest Cache plugin on their behalf. Our dedicated team upgraded over 98% of the plugin users on our servers to version 1.2.2 . The mass upgrade was completed within an hour, effectively eliminating the critical SQL injection risk.
However, a very small portion of WordPress websites did not receive the plugin upgrade despite multiple attempts. If you are using the WP Fastest Cache plugin, please check your current version from the WordPress dashboard of your website. We strongly advise you to take action immediately and either manually upgrade the plugin to version 1.2.2 or remove it from your website altogether. With this upgrade, we ensure that your websites are protected against potential exploits and unauthorized access to sensitive information.
If you’re looking for a reliable alternative to the WP Fastest Cache plugin, we recommend trying the SiteGround WordPress Optimizer plugin. It’s trusted by over 1,000,000 WordPress webmasters, and is ranked among the best WordPress performance plugins by the WordPress community. It’s pre-installed by default for all SiteGround clients, and completely free and available to download on any other hosting provider, if you have WordPress websites hosted elsewhere.
Our Commitment to Website Security
At SiteGround, we continuously monitor the security landscape for potential vulnerabilities. We prioritize addressing critical security issues, even in the event of third-party plugins – like the SQL injection vulnerability in the WP Fastest Cache plugin. Our proactive approach in upgrading the plugin for our clients demonstrates our commitment to providing a secure hosting environment.
If you have any questions or concerns about the security of your website, our dedicated support team is available to assist you. We are here to ensure that your WordPress website remains safe and protected.
The shopping season is upon us, and screens worldwide are about to start glittering with attractive deals. But here’s the burning question: How does your business break through the clutter and make those sales?
Well, email marketing is your powerful ally and here at SiteGround you have the perfect tool to capture its potential. Designed for ease, our tool ensures even beginners can create and deliver professional emails that drive results. Even more, right on time for Black Friday, we are launching fresh-out-of-the oven features – from special, pre-made Black Friday and Cyber Monday email templates and an AI email writer to smart scheduling options and a sprinkle of playful emojis.
Black Friday & Cyber Monday Email Templates That Help You Sell
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are fast approaching! And with so many preparations to do in so little time, your email marketing could be up for a challenge. But don’t worry, we’ve got you! To make sure your email campaigns are a success, we’ve made a set of pre-designed templates, which empower you to launch impactful email campaigns with just a few clicks. Dive in, make a few finishing touches and send away with ease.
AI Email Assistant That Writes For You 🤖
Have you ever sat down to write an email and found that the words just won’t come? We’ve been there, staring at the black screen, the clock ticking away. But here’s the good news. With our powerful AI email writing assistant, those frustrating moments are a thing of the past. Just share a bit about what you want to say, set the mood, and watch the AI email writer craft the perfect message for you.
Scheduling Emails To Reach Your Audience At The Perfect Time ⏰
In the world of email marketing, timing can be the difference between engagement and being overlooked. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce our new scheduling feature. Now, you can plan your email campaigns in advance, having the freedom of sending them whenever you want and ensuring they reach your audience at the perfect time. Whether you’re targeting early birds or night owls, different time zones or else, this feature ensures your emails land in the inboxes at just the right time.
Supporting Emojis, Supporting Your Freedom of Expression 😍
In the digital age, emojis are the new universal language. And guess what? SiteGround’s email tool is now fluent in it! We now support emojis, allowing you to add a bit more character and flair to your emails. Whether it’s a smiley face to brighten someone’s day or a thumbs up for a job well done, let your emails speak louder and more expressively.
We can’t wait to see how these new features transform your email campaigns and business results! As always, our mission is to make your online journey as delightful as possible, and we’re here to support you every step of the way.
Just in time for Black Friday, let’s see how effortlessly you can launch promotional emails or newsletters with our SiteGround Email Marketing tool – no marketing expertise required.
We hosted an insightful live webinar with our Innovations Director, Hristo Pandjarov, alongside Kiril Tsankov, the Lead Product Manager for our Email Marketing tool who showcased the simplicity of our tool, but also shared best practices for email marketing that are designed to help your campaign’s success.
If you did not have a chance to attend, or you simply want to rewatch the session, you can now catch up with the recording of our Email Marketing live webinar on YouTube.
We also got a great deal of interesting questions, so we summarized the most popular ones, as well the ones that we didn’t have enough time to answer during the live webinar in the blog post below.
Integration and Compatibility
Is there a plugin for WordPress that people can sign up with and automatically be added to email groups?
We have designed a Lead Generation Plugin for WordPress specifically for our Email Marketing tool that allows users to easily create sign-up forms and automatically add people to email groups. Clients using the Email Marketing tool can download the plugin from the interface and it will soon be available in the wordpress.org/plugins repo. This streamlines the process of growing your email list and ensures that your audience segments are organized from the outset.
Can we use the email feature while having a Google Workspace with the same domain?
Yes, you can use our Email Marketing tool while having a Google Workspace with the same domain. The DNS change required for the setup of both products is completely different and there is absolutely no conflict in using the two products simultaneously.
Is this service only compatible with WordPress websites?
SiteGround’s Еmail Мarketing tool is not limited to WordPress websites. It offers flexibility and can be integrated with any type of website, providing a robust solution for your email marketing needs regardless of the platform you use. Do bear in mind however, that our contact generation plugin is currently only available for WordPress websites.
List Management and Segmentation
Can this service handle an email list of 20,000 or more?
Our tool is capable of managing large email lists, including those with 20,000 and up to 50,000 contacts. This scalability ensures that as your business grows, your email marketing efforts can expand accordingly.
Can you segment lists with tags?
Yes you can! In SiteGround Email Marketings “tags” are called “Groups” and offer a simple, yet effective way of segmenting your audience. Using Groups, you can separate your contact list based on different demographics or interests and engage your subscribers with more personalized communication. A common example of this is creating one group for your Leads and another for Existing Customers. Using this approach, you can offer ongoing subscription benefits to your existing customers, while advertising a first-time sign-up incentive for your leads.
Email Design
Can we customize and add our brand logo?
Yes, you can customize and add your brand logo to the emails sent through SiteGround’s Email Marketing tool. This ensures that your emails are not only visually appealing but also reflect your brand identity, building trust and recognition among your recipients.
To customize your brand logo, all you need to do is go to the Email Marketing > Sender Details page and scroll down to the Brand Identity section and upload your logo. Bear in mind it’s a good idea to upload a high-resolution logo, so it does not appear pixelated on high-resolution devices. Even if you need to upload a larger image, fret not, as we will resize it appropriately to make sure it looks great in your campaigns. You can find all the extra details about what size logo to use in our knowledge base – here.
What if we have different styles for different groups; can we configure different template styles?
Not yet, but it will be available in the next few months.
We know how tempting it can be to experiment with different designs targeting different segments and we are working to give you the flexibility to do so. However, we have to emphasize that for brand awareness purposes, it is better and quite important to adopt a single style of sending emails. That way you keep reinforcing the same brand visuals and your users get used to recognizing your brand.
To achieve such a single style, users can conveniently tick the box “Apply this design to future campaigns” when sending an email, to ensure future campaigns are consistent with the chosen design.
Email Campaigns
Is this only for Black Friday campaigns?
No, SiteGround’s email marketing tool is not limited to Black Friday campaigns or other seasonal promotions. You can utilize this powerful tool for any project, be it announcing new product launches, sharing valuable content, or nurturing customer relationships throughout the year. We have focused our communication on the Black Friday topic since this is a prime time for email marketing campaigns, for which we have added special thematic layouts in the tool.
User Experience and Accessibility
Can we add alt tags to the images?
With SiteGround’s Email Marketing tool, you can easily add alternative text (alt tags) to images in your emails. Alt tags not only ensure that visually impaired recipients can understand the content of your emails but also improve your email deliverability and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Is there an option to “Unsubscribe” from these emails when clients desire to do so?
Yes, there is an unsubscribe link which is automatically added to every email you send through the tool, which recipients can use to unsubscribe from your list. Respecting your recipients’ preferences is crucial for maintaining a positive brand image and complying with email marketing regulations.Therefore, once a recipient has opted out of your mailing list, we will automatically exclude them from your future mailing attempts. Recipients can subscribe again to your email list by using a form on your website. Additionally, provided a recipient has consented to re-join your mailing list, you can send them a double opt-in Re-subscribe email through the system.
As a leading provider of web hosting services, at SiteGround we continually strive to offer the most advanced and reliable solutions to our customers, with a strong focus on website security. In our latest Website Horror Stories series for #cybersecuritymonth, we even gathered real stories of webmasters who suffered some kind of website attack or hack, which could have easily been avoided with our suite of website security services. Now we’re excited to announce a new feature addition to our security features – ‘Under Attack Mode’, part of SiteGround in-house CDN.
Our hosting services already encompass robust network attack protection. Our Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection effectively blocks a significant percentage of malicious traffic, ensuring your websites remain accessible and secure. But despite the effectiveness of all our website protection systems and security features, some HTTP attacks are more sophisticated and can circumvent traditional solutions. To further fortify your website’s defenses against these advanced threats, we’ve developed the new ‘Under Attack Mode’ feature, now part of our SiteGround CDN service.
Understanding SiteGround’s ‘Under Attack Mode’
SiteGround CDN’s ‘Under Attack Mode’ adds an additional layer of protection against potentially malicious HTTP traffic. If your website is under an HTTP attack, it’s immediately overloaded with fake traffic requests, usually coming from malicious bots, which makes it inaccessible for real users.
When turned on, our Under Attack feature challenges website visits with an automatic CAPTCHA, verifying that they are humans and not bots. It leverages JavaScript to perform automated mathematical calculations in the visitor’s browser. While these calculations are being processed, the end visitors see a loading message for a few seconds. Once the challenge is solved, indicating the visitor is most likely a real human, the system automatically redirects them to the website. This means your website will remain accessible to your real users even if it’s under attack – legitimate traffic will be allowed to proceed to your site, while we block the fake bot traffic.
How to Enable Under Attack Mode
Our ‘Under Attack Mode’ is available as part of our Premium CDN plan. If you’re looking for a way to further enhance the security of your website against sophisticated HTTP attacks, our paid plan now offers this advanced feature, together with a myriad of speed and security enhancements.
Once you’re using SiteGround CDN’s Premium plan, enabling the ‘Under Attack Mode’ is simple. It can be activated per domain name from the Site Tools management interface. Once enabled, the ‘Under Attack’ mode feature operates for a period of 24 hours, after which it is automatically disabled by the system.
Please note that while ‘Under Attack Mode’ is enabled, some third-party website analytics tools may not function correctly, as they may not be able to pass the challenge. This is why the feature is automatically disabled after 24 hours – to prevent any prolonged disruption to your website analytics.
SiteGround CDN’s ‘Under Attack Mode’ applies to all website visitors and all traffic towards the domain. This means all requests – from real users, bots, to API requests from third-party systems – are challenged, ensuring comprehensive protection.
Conclusion
Our latest SiteGround CDN security feature, the ‘Under Attack Mode’ is a testament to SiteGround’s commitment to providing superior security for our users. We understand the evolving nature of web threats and continually innovate to offer features that keep your website safe and accessible. Stay ahead of the curve with SiteGround CDN’s ‘Under Attack Mode’.
In the dynamic world of cybersecurity, it’s not unusual to encounter new challenges. Recently, a novel vulnerability, dubbed the “HTTP/2 Rapid Reset” attack, was discovered. Given that HTTP/2 is considered a relatively new protocol, we see more modern and more clever ways to perform attacks every day. But this latest vulnerability has the potential to disrupt web services at an unprecedented scale.
Before we dive into the details, let’s break down what this means for website owners.
What is the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Attack?
HTTP/2 is a protocol that helps your website load faster and handle more visitors simultaneously. HTTP/2 allows clients to request multiple website resources (CSS files, JS files, pictures, etc.) with a single query. However, some clever attackers found a way to exploit this mechanism. They developed a technique to send a request to a server and then immediately cancel it, repeating this process at an extremely high rate. This stream of requests and cancellations can overwhelm a server, causing it to slow down or even crash – a classic Denial of Service (DoS) attack. The attack not only overloads the web server offering HTTP/2, but all backends that are also involved in the handling of website requests – such as PHP executions, application servers, static files delivery, etc.
Imagine a call center and a caller dialing the call center and then hanging up immediately after an operator picks up the call. The operators waste precious time handling the bogus calls and cannot handle legitimate requests. The whole call center comes to a halt and cannot handle actual clients requests. That’s exactly what this new attack was causing on a server scale.
SiteGround’s Rapid Response
At SiteGround, we always try to be steps ahead in terms of website security. This time makes no exception, and we were among the first web hosting companies to address this vulnerability. As soon as the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack was reported, our security engineers jumped into action. The official announcement was posted no more than 24 hours ago – on October 10th, 2023, with Google, Amazon and CloudFlare simultaneously announcing the problem. The web server software that we use for all hosting servers, Nginx, also released a blog post.
Our dedicated team of security experts worked tirelessly to patch all our web servers within an hour of the vulnerability’s disclosure. This rapid response ensured that our customers’ websites remained secure and operational, with minimal disruption. Right now, mere one day later, all SiteGround servers (web hosting servers and CDN) use patched Nginx code which protects all websites using our services.
Bottom Line
The HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack is a serious threat, but thanks to our rapid response and commitment to security, SiteGround customers can rest easy. We’ve got your back, and we’re always ready to tackle whatever new challenges come our way. At SiteGround, your security is not just a priority – it’s a promise.
Picture this: a lively party, a toddler’s bedtime routine, a road trip – this is what three of our security engineers were in the middle of on that particular Saturday, September 30th. Suddenly, their phones beep at the same time in unison, even though far apart, cutting through the noise of the party, the hush of the nursery, the hum of the highway, respectively. It’s a report of a critical security issue with Exim, the mail server used by 56% of all mail servers on the internet, including SiteGround’s. Despite their different settings, all three of our security engineers cut their plans immediately, summoned for a response – a testament to our unwavering commitment to security.
What’s Exim and Why Should We Care?
Exim is like the mailman of the digital world, responsible for delivering your emails from one point to another. An issue with Exim could potentially mean serious trouble for your emails, and not only. To give you an idea of the scale, Exim is the most popular mail server in the world, used by more than 342,000 mail servers. That’s over 56% of all mail servers on the internet. Naturally, it’s the mail server software we at SiteGround rely on entirely for the delivery of outgoing messages and incoming mail for all our customers.
Given that email services are a crucial part of our hosting offering, used by the majority of our clients, we’re consistently working on maintaining our email security, deliverability, and reliability. It all starts with a heavy customization process, which is our usual approach to all software we use to make sure it meets our client’s needs better, while it gives us more control to keep it extra secure and always up to date.
The Exim Issue and SiteGround’s proactive response
The problem, tagged as CVE-2023-42115, was in fact a combination of six different zero-day exploits against Exim. A zero-day exploit means all servers using this particular configuration are immediately at risk. We got the report as soon as it was issued and immediately dived into all six issues to assess the risk for our clients.
The good news was, since we heavily customize all software on our servers, these particular parts of Exim that were affected, are not even used on our servers. However, our work did not stop there. Here is a breakdown of all issues, why SiteGround clients were safe, and what we did to ensure this remains so.
Three of the reported Exim exploits related to different types of email authentication, namely SPA/NTLM and EXTERNAL auth. Simply put, they deal with proving the Mail Server who you are and then allowing you to send emails. The new vulnerability meant that an attacker could craft a special request, use the security holes in the authentication mechanisms and gain access to the server which runs Exim. Even more than that, the attacker could gain full access to the server – not only Exim as a mail server but all data residing on the server. On SiteGround servers, however, we don’t use any of these authentication methods, so SiteGround clients were not affected.
The fourth exploit was related to a proxy problem, and was very similar in nature, and the fifth issue resided in a library called “libspf2”, used for certain checks related to email SPF records. Since we don’t use proxies in front of our Exim mail servers at SiteGround, nor do we use the problematic library, we were not affected by this vector of the attack, either.
The last problem was related to how people perform DNS lookups. Many people just use third party DNS resolvers and they cannot be sure if the DNS resolvers validate the data they receive. SiteGround uses our own DNS resolvers and we validate the data we receive. So this did not affect us as well.
All in all, we were lucky for most of the vectors of the attack but it took us a substantial amount of time to double and triple-check every one of those bullet points. And, of course, we went beyond that.
Usually, there are two ways to go about a vulnerability: you assess if and how it affects you, and if it does not, you can simply waive it off and sit this one out. The smarter way to go about it, though, is to think ahead, and even if a particular vulnerability, or a number of those, do not directly affect you, to still be proactive about installing the patches just to be safe in case it develops and opens the doors to more exploits that could potentially turn out to affect you at a later stage.
So this is exactly what we did – despite not being directly at risk by any of the vectors of this particular attack, our security engineers didn’t just sit back. In addition to meticulously checking and testing all exploits to make sure they do not affect SiteGround servers, as soon as a new, safer version of Exim was released (version 4.96.1), we immediately upgraded all our Exim mail servers. It’s our way of ensuring your peace of mind, and a testament to our proactive approach to security.
Wrapping Up
We hope this post helps you understand our approach to security through the lens of a real-life and most recent serious issue with a software used by half of the servers on the internet. Rest assured, at SiteGround, we’re always ready to leap into action for any potential issues that could affect your data. We’re committed to keeping your data safe and your mind at ease. If you have any questions or concerns, we’re here for you. Thanks for sticking with us, and here’s to staying safe and secure with SiteGround.
Whether you have a small personal or portfolio site, an eCommerce store, or are just starting up a small business website, there is one thing that can effectively boost your online presence at every stage – email marketing.
To help you get started and grow your email marketing efforts, right on time for the upcoming holiday season, we organized an #SMBGrowthChat on Twitter Spaces along with Alessandra Farabegoli (@alebegoli), Digital Agency Owner & Email Marketing Expert, and Emanuel Cinca (@emanuelcinca), Marketer, Entrepreneur, Creator of Stacked Marketer. If you missed the live event, we’ve got you covered. Here are their expert tips on how to build and grow your email list, choose the right email marketing solution, optimize your email campaigns, and other key elements for your emails’ success.
Is email marketing right for you
Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is not only for companies with huge budgets, “Email marketing is for everybody who wants a long-term relationship with their customers,” Alessandra Farabegoli, Digital Agency Owner & Email Marketing Expert, points out.
Email marketing is your direct communication channel with your audience that helps you grow, engage, nurture and eventually convert the people interested in your company – whether you’re a blogger, an artist, an NGO, a b2b company, or an event organizer.
“Depending on what resources you have and what strengths you already have within your marketing team, maybe email marketing is not the first thing that you think about doing, but in the long-term, it’s for everyone,” says Emanuel Cinca, Marketer, Entrepreneur, Creator of Stacked Marketer.
Before sending any email marketing campaigns, you need to start gathering subscribers to reach out to. To effectively grow your email list, the main thing you need to do is know your ideal subscriber.
“Know the people who want to join your list, because you have to know where to look for them, how to advertise your list (maybe on social networks), where the people you want to join your list are,” Alessandra Farabegoli advises.
Once you know your audience well, your next step is trying to understand what will trigger them – what kind of interesting and relevant content or reward to offer to these people who are thinking of joining your list. Build your promise around that and tell it effectively – explain what they’ll get, if they join your list.
It’s then crucial to deliver on your promise – “make sure that whatever you promise in any lead magnet or any reason you give people to sign up, the content you deliver, or the information, the products continue to be within that sphere,” Emanuel Cinca points out. For example, if you get people to subscribe to your list through a lead magnet on how to create social media campaigns, but then you deliver content around SEO, that might not be a good idea, adds Emanuel Cinca.
At the end of the day, it’s not the numbers, it’s the quality of your audience, as Alessandra Farabegoli notes. “You want to grow your list with people who actually want to stay with you and continue to read and be engaged in the long-term,” she adds.
If you’re wondering where to find these high-quality readers of your future email campaigns, Emanuel Cinca advises to look for other email lists for people who are already engaged with different newsletters, because in general, newsletter readers read other newsletters. Alessandra Farabegoli adds that guest posts and guest newsletters are also a great way to make you known by other newsletter readers.
If you’re a SiteGround client, using our Email Marketing tool, you can easily add a subscribers form on your website and start building your email list with our Lead Generation plugin for WordPress. It’s a great opportunity to create a lasting relationship with your site visitors, nurture them and turn them into loyal customers.
To collect email subscribers easily and efficiently, it’s crucial to choose the right email marketing solution.
Choose the right email marketing solution
Choosing an email marketing solution that best fits your goals will actually depend on your business needs.
For example, if you’re doing an eCommerce project, you “need automation features that allow creating automated workflows, such as an abandoned cart, or complex welcome series that can segment people and differentiate messages,” Alessandra Farabegoli says.
On the other hand, if you’re doing a newsletter, look at newsletter-focused features – you need to have highly-customizable templates that are easy-to-use, good team member permission to have different roles for different team members (to add and do reports, view and send newsletters), Emanuel Cinca advises. He adds that it’s also important to have an integration with WordPress or any other solution you use. Other crucial features include the view of the email editor, the ability to segment subscribers and send relevant messages to the right people, Alessandra Farabegoli points out.
At SiteGround, we understand that ease of use is key. That’s why our Email Marketing tool is user-friendly and integrated into the SiteGround Client Area, allowing seamless management of your website and email campaigns in the same place. You can choose from our highly-converting layouts, customize them to suit your brand and send your campaign in a matter of minutes.
Top strategies for sending email marketing campaigns
Now that you’ve built your email list with subscribers, you have to start communicating with them directly via email. Here are our experts’ top tips for sending successful email marketing campaigns:
Types of email campaigns you need to send
Our experts are of the opinion that the most important campaign is the welcome email or the welcome series emails, because when a subscriber enters your list, it’s the peak of interest moment. Alessandra Farabegoli advises you to build upon this interest still with the first emails that will make people think it was worth subscribing to your newsletter, as you’re sending them interesting content.
According to Emanuel Cinca, another important type of email you should have is the re-engagement email to clean up your list. If someone disengages after a long period of time (period is based on the emails they’ve received, not on time), send them a re-engagement email. If they still don’t engage with you, he advises you to consider segmenting or unsubscribing them, so that they do not receive as many emails as everyone else. Otherwise, this might hurt your email reputation.
Alessandra Farabegoli points out that if you’re selling online, there are then some more types of emails you need to send, such as post-purchase emails, abandoned carts, winback flows, etc. which you can set up in order to nurture your customers, have them use your products better, and maybe cross-sell and upsell.
An important thing to keep in mind, though, is that you must have a plan, Alessandra adds. This goes to say that you need to create an email calendar with the topics you want to build on and their schedule. “Find a regular schedule to send emails, because consistency is key. Your newsletter must be an appointment. People should know – today, this newsletter is coming and I want to read it,” Alessandra notes.
How often should you reach out to your subscribers
Indeed, it’s important to have an “appointment” with your readers and send them emails regularly. Yet, how often should you reach out to them so that they don’t consider you spammy?
Our experts agree that there’s no one size fits all. The timing will depend on your subscribers’ list, their reading habits, their expectations, what content you send and the purpose of your email. However, there are some general factors to consider when sending emails:
What defines the right moment to press “send”?
Nowadays, everybody checks their email every day – from when they get up until night, but what’s the right moment, when they’re ready to read your message, when they will be interested to read about the topic, or consider buying your product, Alessandra Farabegoli asks. The simple answer is that it depends on your message.
For example, if you’re sending a news email, you can send it in the morning, when most people are reading the news. If you’re sending a sales email and you want the reader to make a right-away purchase decision, mornings are not the best time to do so. For instance, sending an email about planning a trip would perform best outside working hours.
In Emanuel Cinca’s experience with a Monday to Friday newsletter that includes marketing news and the latest case studies, Monday to Thursday still gets the same engagement, because they’re providing readers with information related to the subscribers’ jobs, they are reading it as part of their work routine.
As Alessandra Farabegoli points out, you need to avoid busy times of the week, e.g. Monday mornings are generally not the best moment to send b2b campaigns, but there’s an exception to this rule – for example, welcome emails or post-purchase emails should be sent immediately.
Segment and personalize your email campaigns
Once you’ve identified when to hit the “send” button, you might also want to segment and personalize your email campaigns before sending them out, for better performance and results. Our experts give valuable advice on both the eCommerce and non-eCommerce side of things:
eCommerce projects
“If you work on an eCommerce project, the most obvious segmentation is between people who are already customers and people who are not,” Alessandra Farabegoli says. She explains that there are two main factors to keep in mind – engagement and source.
Engagement is key for eCommerce projects and you need to clean your list regularly – avoid putting people that are less engaged, even though they are customers. You can still write them for sales, Black Friday, special offers, or new product launches, but you need to lower the frequency of sending emails, so that they don’t mark you as spam or unsubscribe from your list.
The source is also very important, according to Alessandra Farabegoli – “if you realize that people, who come from a lead acquisition campaign, don’t buy anything in the end, you may reconsider if this campaign is the right place to advertise,” she says.
Newsletter publishers
Emanuel Cinca gives insight on the non-eCommerce side – for newsletter publishers, you can have segmentation by frequency (when they want emails to be delivered) and activity (re-engagement of subscribers on a regular basis). You can also segment based on the source where people came from – not necessarily to personalize for them, but to know how things are working: ROI generating, readership status, sales numbers, etc., he explains. One more way of segmentation is interests, as Alessandra Farabegoli adds. “Ask people what they are interested in, or use the interest from where they clicked on,” she points out.
With the Email Marketing tool, SiteGround clients can target specific audience groups and add a personal touch with dynamic content variables, such as the first name of the recipient, etc. Our system also automatically suppresses hard bounce email addresses to keep email lists healthy and improve open rates and reputation.
Best practices for optimizing your email campaigns
After sending your email campaign, you’d need to make sure that your deliverability and open rates are as high as possible. Our experts have some valuable advice on how to achieve that, what other key metrics to track, and how to optimize your email campaigns for even better results.
Ensure higher email deliverability rates
According to Alessandra Farabegoli, the main factor is your sender reputation. “To ensure you reach the inbox, keep your promises and send relevant content. The main thing is how you keep the relationship with your subscribers, so that they continue to think your emails are worth opening, clicking and reading,” she explains.
Emanuel Cinca also points out some other important algorithms behind email deliverability. Generally, if you follow the rules of most service providers, you’ll usually not go into the spam folder, unless you’re truly spammy. However, your email can go to the Promotions tab, where less people will engage with it. Emanuel Cinca has a fix for this issue: “The best thing to do is get high engagement on your very early emails, e.g. try to get replies on your welcome email – offer a bonus lead magnet in exchange for replies,” he advises. If you get that high engagement early on, it’ll help your emails go to Updates or the Primary inbox, which means that people get a notification when you send them an email. What’s more, the inbox will be the default one for the new subscribers to begin with, unless they start to become disengaged,” Emanuel Cinca explains.
Another factor that matters significantly is the sender itself. “Your own domain, your sender – that’s the key to your subscribers’ inbox,” Emanuel Cinca points out. However, he adds that some email service providers don’t let you completely set up all authentication, SPF, etc. through them, and then you cannot add your custom domain which is essentially the key to the inbox.
Again, it comes to your choice of email marketing tool. At SiteGround, we take care of the technical side of your campaign sending to make sure your emails hit your audience’s inbox. We have one-time domain authentication that boosts the odds of sending your emails right in your audience’s inbox. The more emails that get delivered, the better your reputation gets.
Make sure your users open your emails
Now that your email has landed in your subscribers’ inbox, what would make them open and read that email? According to Alessandra Farabegoli, here are the top 3 factors that would make people open an email:
Sender’s reputation
“The sender is the first thing we’re checking when browsing through new emails – if this person or company is regularly writing interesting content, then I can give them my attention,” Alessandra Farabegoli says. If not so, people tend to skip, archive or even delete, without reading.
Subject line
Next, you need to write engaging subject lines, because the subject line is the first thing they’ll read. Emanuel Cinca’s experience shows that all their newsletters regularly have very short subject lines, literally 1 to 3 words, which are slight teasers of what is inside.
Preheader text
The preheader text is right next to the subject line and it’s important as it helps readers see what they will find inside. According to Alessandra Farabegoli, the preheader can even be left blank, because in this way your email will stand out, with a bit of space around it.
“I always say the subject line and the preheader text are the ambassadors of the email, but the most important thing is to keep a good relationship with your reader,” Alessandra Farabegoli concludes.
Track key metrics to measure your email campaign success
The key metrics that you need to track are those that are important for your business, such as sales or conversions – a download of a document, an actual purchase and others. Then, you need to check “what builds these sales – is it clicks from the website, is it opens, how many subscribers you have,” Emanuel Cinca explains.
However, Emanuel Cinca warns that nowadays “you should be careful about considering open rate as a very important metric – it’s relevant, but you need to have context behind it, because Apple mail privacy protection, for example, opens 100% of your emails over time”.
Both our experts agree that nowadays click-to-open rate (CTR) is really important, because it shows if you’ve built the right call-to-action (CTA) – if people who opened your email, decided to take it a step further, Alessandra Farabegoli explains. “Look at your CTR, are people clicking on what you want them to click, especially if you have a call to action,” Emanuel Cinca concludes.
Perform A/B tests to optimize campaigns and improve results
In case you’re not happy with the performance of your email campaigns, there’s a way to improve the results by performing tests of different email elements.
The first thing to consider, before performing any tests, is your list’s length. Alessandra Farabegoli points out that you need numbers to get relevant and statistically significant results. “You need at least maybe 20K subscribers to get a decent result from an A/B test on subject line, or sender, or timing, for example. If you want to test some content element, such as the CTA, you need at least 10 times that number,” she explains.
Emanuel Cinca agrees that if you send a newsletter one time and you have 1000 subscribers, A/B testing the subject line for them for that one time, won’t yield any results. Yet, he has a workaround, if you don’t have the volume now – you can A/B test your welcome sequence and subject line, if you have such automations or sequences. Start testing from the beginning, even if you have a few hundred subscribers – the important thing is to run this test all the time. Then, after 6 months, you might reach a statistically significant result.
To improve the content you send, you need to receive feedback from your actual readers, Emanuel Cinca advises. One thing you can test is your content structure, he adds – somewhat longer articles, bullet points, etc., split up your content as much as you can. Emanuel Cinca gives a bonus tip, in case you cannot A/B test directly and get the data– to run a survey to your audience.
Our experts agree that email marketing is a powerful tool that everyone can leverage, not only big business owners. Follow their professional tips in this article to make the most of your email marketing campaigns.
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October, the month of pumpkin spice latte and spooky tricks, has another significant aspect to it – it’s officially Cyber Security Month. This year, at SiteGround we are excited to bring you something that underscores the vital importance of website security in a truly hair-raising way.
We’re thrilled (get it?) to announce our Website Horror Stories campaign, where we’ve gathered real-life stories of digital nightmares caused by neglecting website security, but, thankfully, fearlessly busted by SiteGround. From defaced websites, malicious file uploads, email frauds, bot traffic and vengeful former employees to long-forgotten applications that became hacker gateways – we’ve seen them all, and they all carry a crucial message: Each story is a stark reminder of the potential threats lurking in the digital shadows, ready to exploit any security oversight. Let those cautionary tales remind you of the importance of website security and using all tools and services you have to protect your website at SiteGround.
Celebrate #CyberSecurityMonth, share the Website Horror Stories campaign to spread our message about the importance of website security, and keep your site safe with SiteGround’s multilevel website security tools and services.
