Posts Tagged email marketing
What do your latest email subscribers think of your latest email campaign?
This summer, I unexpectedly found myself planning a cruise. Not a bad gig, I know. As always, I was handing out my email address when I inquired about trips, curious to see the email campaigns of another segment of the email marketing world.
That was early July.
Now, it’s nearly October, and I’m just now getting the first email campaign from one of the cruise brokers. Three months ago, I would have loved to have seen the specials. Today, I opted out.
How can you make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to your brand? Here are 3 quick ideas.
-> Send a welcome email note. People are most interested in your newsletter right when they sign up for them. Sending an automatic welcome note (through your email service provider’s trigger email or autoresponder feature) matches the timing of your message with your subscriber’s interest.
-> Send regularly. The ideal email frequency varies for each sender, in unique industries, based on individual goals. But letting three months go between email campaigns can cause once-interested subscribers to forget why they wanted your updates to begin with. If you’re not sure where to start with email frequency, try sending every three weeks and adjust accordingly.
-> Think about new subscribers every time you send an email campaign. It’s easy to think of your upcoming email campaign as the next in long line of emails you’ve sent, but remember that it’s also the *first* campaign that some folks will see. Look at your email from the perspective of a first-time reader, and see how that mindset shapes your content.
What are you doing to shape your a subscriber’s experience in the first few weeks of joining your email list?
Ten ways stylish artists can use email
This week, we’re sponsoring Next Big Nashville right here in our fair city. It’s a music festival showcasing the best bands in Nashville’s music scene, but it’s also a conference with sessions designed to help artists use technology to promote their music.
We’ve been talking about the reasons that artists should add email to the ways they stay in touch with their fans, and I thought we’d share ‘em here on the blog:
1. Promote an upcoming show, CD release, tour, video, or limited edition rocker headband, if that’s how you roll.
2. Upload songs, videos, pictures and more, then link to them from your email campaigns.
3. Create web-based email signup forms to capture your audience on MySpace, your website, your blog, or anywhere else your fans watch you (in a normal, fan-like way, of course).
4. Use zip-code radius segmenting tools to find the folks within 50 miles of your next tour stop.
5. Send a welcome email that automatically thanks new subscribers with a song download, merchandise discount or perhaps a thank-you haiku of some kind.
6. Promote your signature style with HTML emails featuring images of your latest merchandise and shows.
7. Make it easy for people to visit your blog, website, or MySpace page — and use response tracking to see who’s clicking, opening, forwarding and more.
8. Keep your fan lists organized with audience groups — one for your street team, one for your CD release show RSVP list and one for your mom.
9. Turn listeners into loyal fans by offering email-only news, ticket prices and merchandise discounts to your newsletter subscribers.
10. Focus on specific sets of your fan base, creating unique messages to appeal to your fans based on their gender, age, purchase history, or any other information you know about them.
Join us at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer!
There are all kinds of things to look forward to in October. Cooler weather, of course. Halloween, obviously. Columbus Day, maybe not so much. But we’re also eagerly awaiting the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Scottsdale on October 22-23, where lots of marketers are going to be gathering to talk about email, search and social media. We’re sponsoring the event, but we’re also looking forward to all the sessions, presented in the stylish way that the ‘Profs pull off so well.
If you’re thinking about going, you can save $200 on your registration just because you know Emma and you’re reading this right now. Get more details and register here, or sign up elsewhere and use the code ESPNA08.
And perhaps the $200 you save might be a nice starter fund for a certain Columbus Day party you were hoping to throw?
[tags]MarketingProfs, Digital Marketing Mixer, myemma.com, Emma[/tags]
Is my email campaign any good?
In our latest Ask Emma (that’s our email marketing Q&A newsletter, which you can sign up for here), we’ve published a 5-point checklist that’s designed to help you give your email campaigns a quick review before you hit send.
It’s *also* designed in 5 different colors, so you can download your favorite, print a copy to pin-up by your desk, then color-coordinate your checklist with your favorite pantsuit. Or jumpsuit. Or windsuit.
Okay, seriously, lose the windsuit already.
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What are the things you *always* review before sending our your campaigns? We’d love to hear ‘em…
[tags]email marketing, checklist, ask emma, myemma.com[/tags]
Learning from our podcasting friends.
I’m at the New Media Expo in fabulous Las Vegas this week, where hundreds of online content creators – bloggers, podcasters and the like – have gathered in 108-degree weather to talk about ideas, new technologies, best practices, and how friggin’ hot it is. Tomorrow, I’ll be teaming up with Greg Cangialosi over at Blue Sky Factory to talk about email marketing, but today I sat in on a podcasting basics class given by Scott Whitney at Podworx.
I was struck by the similarities between the process of creating an email newsletter and creating a podcast. For podcasters, you start by identifying yourself and your brand at the outset, much like email’s From Name and From Address. You follow that with a short audio teaser about the upcoming podcast designed to entice curious listeners without giving too much away – a subject line of sorts. But I had to stifle a squeal when he flipped to the slide with ideas for episode content. If you’re just getting started with email marketing, if it’s been awhile since you sent an email because you aren’t sure what to send, or if you’re looking for new content ideas to help you move beyond an email newsletter, this list is the perfect starting point:
1. Interview an executive.
2. Create a series about your product/service.
3. Write educational, how-to tips and articles.
4. Interview a customer (or member, or fan).
5. Write about an event you’re attending, from the event.
6. Share some behind-the-scenes information about your company or product.
7. Promote thought leadership articles.
8. Share company successes and awards.
9. Repurpose content from a seminar.
10. Showcase a partner company or service.
11. Interview an employee.
12. Broadcast news from your industry.
Hope this list gets you to thinking about your next campaign – or heck, your next twelve. If you’ve got another content type to add, please leave us a comment and let us know what you’re up to.
[tags] email campaign ideas, email marketing, NewMediaExpo2008, podcasting, Podworx, Scott Whitney [/tags]
What makes an email personal, anyway?
We toss the word “personalization” around a fair amount in email marketing, and most people associate it with “Dear Bob” personalization — that technological parlor trick of dropping a first name placeholder into the greeting of an email. But the people getting the best results are the ones going beyond first name personalization and customizing emails based on geography, loyalty, purchase history and more.
How do I know this? I’ve read the Aberdeen’s report on email marketing, which Emma helped to sponsor. They identified the companies with high open, click and conversion rates in their campaigns, and they found the patterns of how those companies have set up their member databases, copywriting strategy and internal processes to create truly personalized emails.
My favorite part: They acknowledged that the best campaigns don’t stop at personalizing the *content* of emails — they also personalize the *delivery,* using trigger emails to send campaigns based on recipients’ schedules and actions. I was thrilled to read that 33% of those top-performing companies were putting triggers to work in their overall email strategy, basing the timing of their campaigns on a customer’s behavior (buying a product, clicking a link, subscribing to the newsletter). By comparison, only 10% of the lowest-rated companies used trigger emails, which indicates that a triggers play some role in overall email marketing success. Of course they do. A feature that lets you send emails even while napping *has* to be great.
Even if you lack/can’t afford/fear the technology behind personalizing emails, it’s still easy to make sure your emails are written and designed with people in mind — friendly, conversational, human. Nobody wants to read an email that sounds like it was written for robots. With the possible exception of actual robots. For more inspiration on relating to your subscribers as *people,* read Mark Brownlow’s excellent post on the matter here.
How do I get new subscribers to join my email list?
It’s a question we hear often ’round these parts, particularly from folks who are just getting started with their email marketing efforts. And there are some pretty standard answers – add a signup form to your website, have your salespeople ask for email addresses on the phone, or add a fishbowl at the retail counter for business cards. And of course, in our best practices talks and Ask Emmas, we always encourage folks to think about what’s unique at their organizations and consider some creative options ways for asking people to join their lists.
Today, I witnessed one such creative option.
I was at a Nashville-area restaurant for lunch (the stylish Mambu, for you local types), and when I went to freshen up in the ladies room, this is what I saw in the bathroom. Specifically, ahem, in the bathroom *stall.*
It’s funny, a) because bathrooms make things funnier and b) because it works for the same reason those other more traditional, “sanitary” methods do – you ask people when they’re already at your store or your site, when they’re likely to say yes, and where their choices are limited to do anything else *but* subscribe. Props to Mambu for capitalizing on the ultimate captive audience.
What creative ways do you ask people to join your list?
Calling all email superheroes.
Or would-be superheroes, anyhow. We just posted our latest Ask Emma Q&A newsletter, featuring three quick ways to be the office email hero with our latest recent audience activity feature. The cape is entirely optional.
Help us plant 326 trees.
If you’re new to Emma’s blog, you might not know that we plant 5 trees for each new customer that chooses us as their email marketing service provider. You also might not know that we ask our fearless blog readers to help us choose where each month’s batch of trees should go. Ohio was the winner of last month’s poll, so we’ll be working with Plant-It 2020 to plant half of May’s 1,630 trees in the Buckeye State and the other half in the equatorial region of Plant-It 2020′s choice.
Of course, it’s a new month, which means it’s time for a new poll:
[poll=6]
Thanks for voting, compadre…
How long should my subject lines be, anyway?
If you often peruse email marketing statistics (which is perfectly fine, by the way, but maybe the kind of personal information you’ll want to gloss over at parties), you may have run across a fair amount of research on the length of subject lines. MailerMailer reported that shorter ones perform better than longer ones. Then MarketingSherpa’s research just came right out and said that 35 characters was the magic number. But we experimented with subject lines here at the Emma shop and found just the opposite – our longer subject line boasted both higher open and clickthrough rates than its shorter counterpart.
So I was thrilled to see some new research on subject lines hit the wires this morning, from Mediapost’s Email Insiders’ Summit. One of the conference speakers, Dala Quist, presented his own research about subject line length. He reinforced the idea that shorter subjects – 50 characters or so – garner better open rates, but he didn’t stop there. His research showed another spike in performance for subject lines around the 80-character mark. The slump in open rates happened in the middle range (60-70 characters).
From the article at MediaPost:
Research culled from 250 million messages sent over the past two years, with 660 different subject lines, has led him to believe that a 50-character subject line touting a “powerful” offer is appealing (30% off Spring Getaway flights to Florida on Delta).
And a longer 80-character-plus line describing a newsletter in enticing fashion works (Find out Secrets to Spice up your Barbecue this weekend and all Summer Long and enter to win a New Weber Grill.)
It’s great news for a couple of reasons – one, it helps me feel better about our own longer subject lines, of course, but second, it recognizes that the ideal subject line’s length depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with your campaign. If it’s an offer you’re promoting or a particular call to action you want people to take, shorter’s better. But if you’re using your email newsletter with an eye toward retention, relationship-building and content, a longer subject line will give you more chances to tease the content that’ll get your readers engaged with your email.
Not sure what’ll work for you? Try splitting your audience in half and try two different subject lines for the same campaign, and let us know how it goes…
Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
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