Author Archive: Suzanne Norman
5 ways to get your email marketing ready for the holidays
Even Santa needs a plan.
Looking for a strong showing in your email results this holiday season? Craft a plan now with our tips, featuring special appearances by North Pole guests.
If you haven’t started your holiday plan yet, you still have time. And there’s a tremendous opportunity during the year-end months for you to make the most of email marketing. You numbery types might like to know, for example, that email-driven sales were up 11% from 2008 during the 2009 holiday season.
Of course, your holiday email goals may not be sales-focused. Perhaps you’re out to drive donations, promote an event, or just share a festive little greeting with your customers. A little holiday campaign planning really does go a long way. (Insert “making a list, checking it twice” joke here.) So, ask the big questions first. What do you want your holiday emails to accomplish? What are the main messages or offers your customers will connect with over the next few months? And how can email help drive the holiday initiatives you’re planning offline?
Effective use of elfin charts.
1. Look for trends in recent response data.
As you’re crafting your holiday sending strategy, spend some quality time digging into data that’ll tell you what’s been most and least effective over the last few months. For example, if you notice that click-through rates are higher in your more graphic-rich emails, design your holiday campaigns accordingly.
How to: In your Emma account, your Response page displays interactive charts of your mailing results that help you spot big trends at a glance before you drill down to see who’s opening, clicking and more. If you’d like some help interpreting those charts, see some real-life scenarios and advice elsewhere on the blog.
Set the right pace with your emails.
2. Consider your sending frequency and volume.
In 2009, we saw the Emma community’s overall sending volume increase 29% in the holiday-packed final quarter of the year. But think about your email frequency carefully — every fatigued subscriber who opts out in December is someone who won’t see your emails at all next year. Send an email now that gives your subscribers the option to manage how frequently they hear from you, or start slowly ramping up your frequency now (and keep a close eye on ye olde opt-out rate).
How to: Your readers can update their own subscriptions by using the “manage your preferences” link at the bottom of your Emma stationery. You can find more details on customizing that subscription form in our Help Guide. Emma’s survey feature provides another way to learn more about your subscribers, and we’ve got some helpful tips for creating effective surveys.
Reindeer can be sooo chatty.
3. Keep your emails social.
People stay busy during the holidays, but not too busy to keep up with their social networking. In fact, according to Experian, traffic from social network sites to retail sites during the holidays was up 37% last year. So make sure your subscribers have an easy way to share your emails with their friends and followers, and add easy-to-spot links to your organization’s social networking sites, too.
How to: With Emma’s simple built-in social sharing feature, recipients can share your emails with their friends and followers, and you can track your email’s online reach. Read our 5 reasons to embrace social sharing, and then check out the video overview in our our Help Guide for more details about how it all works.
Find the right enticement.
4. Give folks a reason to join your list.
Are you planning on sending exclusive offers and content to your email subscribers during the holidays? Update the language on your website’s email sign-up form accordingly.
That way, your casual site visitors will spot that juicy incentive and become more loyal email subscribers. Just to be clear, you may not want to involve actual juice with your incentive.
How to: You can customize your Emma-powered signup form and publish it to your website, blog or Twitter feed. Our Help Guide provides handy instructions for customizing your form and posting it anywhere you have an online presence.
Make newcomers feel at home.
5. Welcome new subscribers right away.
Here’s one thing you can count on. When someone signs up for your email list, you know they’re interested in hearing from you. Probably right then and there. So build a strong relationship with new subscribers right away with an automatic welcome note. Set a great foundation now, and you’ll have more loyal subscribers through the holiday season. If you’re already sending a welcome note, good for you, and also, take a fresh look to see if it could use a little holiday-specific tweaking.
How to: Welcome emails are a snap with Emma. See real-life examples, or check out the Help Guide for instructions on how to set up any campaign to send automatically whenever someone joins your list. For extra bonus points, consider creating an entire welcome series.
One last thought about your holiday planning: Consider special holiday creative. Since your subscribers get more and more emails in their inboxes during the holiday season, fresh and festive design can focus even the most fruitcake-addled attention spans. Rework your standard template design with a few holiday touches, or put together a memorably designed holiday card or greeting. Need email design help? Emma offers affordable custom holiday designs.
And happy holiday planning from all of us at Emma!
Illustrations by Taylor Schena, Emma designer extraordinaire
Social Sharing is officially here!
Today, we’re thrilled to announce the arrival of Social Sharing for your email campaigns. Our latest feature makes it easy for your audience members to share your emails with their friends and followers on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It’ll exponentially increase the reach of your emails. And we’re not the best at math, but we’re pretty sure exponents are a good thing. You’ll be feeling like a social media superhero in no time.
Here’s how it works:
+ You click an Add Social Sharing Options button as you’re creating your campaign and select which social network icons you want to appear on your emails.
+ After they receive your email, your recipients click an icon (or more than one, if that’s how they roll) and share a link to your email with their friends and followers.
+ Then you hop over to your Response page to see which audience members are sharing your email, and which networks are generating the most traffic to your campaign.
More to Explore: 
Watch our video
See exactly how Emma’s Social Sharing feature works with step-by-step instructions in our help section.
5 reasons to use Social Sharing
Emma’s own Jim Hitch shows how you can be a social media superhero for your organization. (Tips involving capes not included.)
Join the conversation
The ever-savvy Emma community is finding interesting ways to add our latest feature to their social media strategies. Join the conversation and share your ideas, won’t you?
So log in now to get started … or, if you’re new to Emma, inquire now to learn more!
‘Lost’ with Emma? Just this once
If Google’s Ms. Pac-man hasn’t provided enough Friday diversion for you, we’ve just launched a special limited edition of our 404 page for “Lost” fans. (That’s the webpage you see if the page you try to visit on our site doesn’t exist.)
It’s up for this weekend only, in honor of the series finale of “Lost” on Sunday night. You can also see it by visiting any non-existent page on the site, like www.myemma.com/smokemonster.
Thanks to front end web developer and “Lost” devotee Jeff McKeand for, ahem, hatching this little idea.
Post-Finale Update: We’ve had a little trouble letting go, if you know what we mean. So while our main 404 page is back to its normal, mustache-themed self, we’re keeping the smoke monster page alive.
Happy Earth Day!
It’s Earth Day, and as such, it seems like an appropriate day to recognize just how much paper — and how many trees — the Emma Community helps to save each and every month by sending email newsletters and campaigns instead of printing ‘em.
If everybody in the Emma community printed a campaign for each recipient instead of sending an email, here’s how that paper would add up in just a single month:
+ Stacked end to end, the paper would cover the distance of a three round-trips between New York and Paris.
+ Folded into little origami swans, those little origami swans would form a line as long as the Earth’s diameter.
+ Turned magically from paper into pocket-sized Etch-a-Sketches, we would be able to give everybody in Finland 27 pocket-sized Etch-a-Sketches.
+ The Finns just really like to doodle, is all.
And if that weren’t enough, the Emma Community has helped us plant more than 55,000 trees since we first starting planting 5 trees for each new customer back in December of 2007. Here’s one last number to ponder, then: If each of those 55,000 trees were turned into a small squirrel, then that would be kinda uncool, because squirrels are neat and all but we’d rather have the trees.
How are you celebrating Earth Day? Share your favorite environmental causes in the comments, and here’s to making the world a little shadier, in a good way.
From SXSW: What’s your email’s ah-ha moment?
We heard Daniel Burka (of Tiny Speck, formerly creative director at Digg) and Rob Goodlatte (product designer at Facebook) give a talk about how important the first fifteen minutes of your experience with a product is. It was great content for us, of course, as we’re always trying to make Emma’s service easy for folks to use from the moment they first log in. But among the many great points they made, one seemed as relevant for email marketers as it did for software developers.
What’s the ah-ha moment?
Goodlatte told the story of Facebook’s user testing as they tried to improve the registration process. Their research and development team recorded the eye movements and faces of folks as they signed up for Facebook for the first time. In one woman’s case, they watched her have a not-so-great experience. She got lots of error messages. She had an invalid email domain. She was confused. That was all before the ah-ha moment. She got to the point in the registration, after she’d filled in her high school and college information, that Facebook showed her pictures of folks she might know. When she recognized an old friend from high school, her face lit up, she leaned forward in her chair and she grinned for the rest of the registration process.
It was an ah-ha moment for the Facebook team, too. They got to see this woman realize how their technology was worth her time. In fact, she stopped relating to Facebook as technology altogether and saw instead the value of reconnecting with old friends. With her in mind (and a lot of other users), they redesigned the setup process around that notion and eventually saw a 5% lift in the registration process.
So, what’s the ah-ha moment in your email campaign? It’s the moment folks stop relating to your email as just another email and instead find something that’s worth their time. Have your ah-ha moment in mind when you first start your email design and content, so you can introduce it in a way where your subscribers will find it in the first few seconds of reading your email.
Maybe it’s an article that speaks to a problem they’re dealing with at work. Maybe it’s a discount or a special offer. Maybe it’s hand-drawn illustrations that accompany each news story. Or it’s something less tangible, like a certain tone you write with or the unique way you personalize your campaigns. It’s different for every organization, and it may change from email to email, but it’s about connecting the point of your email to the delight of your subscribers. After all, you’re not just sending an email. Like the team at Facebook, you’re designing an experience, connecting with people and inviting them to engage more with you.
Support relief work in Haiti with your email campaigns.
Invite your email subscribers to be a part of the relief efforts in Haiti. Emma’s endlessly talented graphic designers put together a suite of donation badges that are yours to add to your next email campaign. Here’s how it works:
1. Download the badge that suits your style.
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2. Add it to your email campaign.
3. Link it to this donation page we’ve put together with the help of the fine people at Network for Good:
http://www1.networkforgood.org/emma-haiti-relief, or pair it with your own program.
There you have it, and here’s to doing some good with our email campaigns.
Give back with a vote — help decide this year’s Emma 25 honorees.
Every year, we award free Emma email and survey service to small, deserving non-profits that our customers tell us about.
Today, the nominations are in — over 100 fantastic groups doing fantastic work around the world — and we’re asking *you* to vote for your five favorite groups anytime between now and the end of January.
Vote now at www.myemma.com/emma25, and tell folks you know to get involved in the giving back good times, too.
Here’s to sending some email and doing some good!
Nominate a deserving nonprofit for free Emma email marketing service!
When we say it’s the most wonderful time of the year ’round these parts, we’re talking about Emma 25 time. It’s the annual program (now in its sixth year) where we team up with our customers to award free Emma service to deserving non-profits — 25 around the world, and 25 in the cities Emma calls home (Nashville, Portland, Denver and Austin).
If you’re an Emma customer, why not nominate your favorite non-profit for free email marketing and survey services from Emma? It’s a fantastic way to help those groups use email to stay in touch with volunteers, find donations, send newsletters, manage events and more.
Come early January, we’ll post all the eligible groups and invite the whole world to vote for their favorites. But for *your* favorite group to be an honoree, *you’ve* got to nominate ‘em.
It just takes a few minutes, and you’ll have that warm, fuzzy feeling that no amount of delicious gingerbread lattes can rival. Go on and get to nominating!
Two fabulous notes from the Emma community, post Arbor Day
Last week, we had a little fun on Arbor Day, crafting, um, totally fake notes from a few of the 28,000 trees the Emma community has helped plant this year. In reply, a few of our (always stylish) customers let us know of a few great tree-related programs in their *own* worlds, and we thought we’d share a couple of them with you now:
From Meryl Dorey at Fountain of Beauty Cosmetics in Bangalow, Australia:
Dear Emma folk,
This is not a support request – just a thank you! When I signed up for Emma (only a few days ago), I had no idea of your involvement with planting trees – but what a lucky coincidence. My husband is editor of the Big Scrub Rainforest Landcare newsletter and has spent the last 20 years planting about 15,000 rainforest trees native to the far North Coast of NSW where we are (the Big Scrub). I thank you for what you do to help the environment of North America – my home for the first 30 years of my life – and am very glad to have joined an organisation that cares for nature as well as providing such good service.
And from John Spady at Countrywide Community Forums in Seattle, WA:
I wanted to draw attention to a project that my 86-year-old father has been managing for over 10 years! The “Plant a Tree for Citizenship” project is sponsored by the Bellevue Overlake Rotary Club in District 5030. Here is a short blurb about it from their club site:
One of the most memorable and impacting hands-on project that is ongoing is our Plant a Tree For Citizenship program led by Dick Spady. Plant a tree involves elementary students growing evergreen trees from seeds and conducting a tree planting ceremony a year later.
Just another good story from an Arbor Day / Earth Day perspective!
Fun editorial note: Dick Spady, the man who started the program (also, John’s dad), is the same Dick Spady who started Dick’s Drive-In, the famous restaurant chain in the Seattle area. Burgers *and* trees. Clearly our kind of guy.
Thanks to Meryl & John for sharing their stories (and lives) with us, and here’s to all the great work being done around the world on behalf of our tall, leafy friends. Cheers!
Happy Arbor Day from Emma!
In honor of National Arbor Day, we decided to send an email campaign to the stylish Emma community highlighting all the trees they’ve helped us plant through our 5 Trees program. (We plant five trees for every new customer who chooses Emma as their email marketing service.)
Since the program began back in December 2007, we’ve planted more than 28,000 trees. And we decided to feature thank-you notes from 5 of those trees. Here’s an example:
See how pine, hackberry, apple and cypress trees say thanks, too. The full campaign is online here. Oh, and Happy Arbor Day!
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Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group. Copyright © 2003 - 2012 Emma. All rights reserved.
deciduous, produces medicinal bark, really into early-80s Bowie
"Hello, everybody, it's me, Ash. I just wanted to say thanks. By helping trees, you're supporting our efforts with photosynthesis, converting harmful carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen. But did you know that you're also supporting our efforts with photosynthesizers, converting lifeless keyboard melodies into catchy jazz flute renditions of bossa nova riffs? It's just nice to know you're making a difference."
