2010 August

The Yin and Yang of Yoga Marketing

August 19, 2010 By Amanda Gagnon

In ancient times, yoga was practiced by ascetics seeking higher consciousness.

Today, everyday folk perform asanas in your studio – if they can find the time. Amid the thousand responsibilities of work and home, yoga can be overlooked.

But sometime in their day, your customers probably check their email. Finding a message from you can help bring their practice back into focus.

The Yoga Garden is a studio that email markets with a combination of diversity and sameness. Apply this balance to your own email marketing campaigns to keep your customers engaged, responding and staying on the path to enlightenment with you.

Do Your Words Scare People Away?

August 17, 2010 By Amanda Gagnon

“Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That’s the only thing.”
- Ernest Gaines

You write words in your marketing emails. Many or few, you use them to communicate your ideas.

But you don’t write words to communicate alone. You write them to request an action. Sometimes it’s subscribing, responding, purchasing – whatever you want readers to do.

The words that carry most of the weight of the request are the few at the end, where you normally provide a link to proceed: your call to action. This is the decision point. The words you use here could sway readers either way.

So how can you know which ones to use? You can guess, based on your own preferences. Or you can know for sure by running a split test.

A Case of Textual Turn-Off

The Cabot Heritage Corporation, a stock advisory, ran a split test on two opt-in buttons. The buttons were identical in design and location. The difference was in the wording: one read “Send My Free Report”; the other, “Start My Free Subscription.”

Just two words changed, but that change had a powerful effect. The “subscription” button decreased conversions by 22.9% in the span of just two days.

What Happened Here?

Different words trigger different associations, and those can make or break the response.

In the above case, it looks like readers associated “send my report” with a single contact and “subscription” with regular communication, requiring more commitment.

But your readers’ responses will partly depend on your subject and the relationship you already have. The phrase that crashed and burned for Cabot Heritage might take your opt-in rate soaring.

That’s why you need to test for yourself. But when you do, don’t forget to…

Think About the Long Run

In Cabot Heritage’s test, it looks like people preferred the idea of one mailing to regular updates. But whichever button they pushed, they were added to the same mailing list.

It would be interesting to see how people who didn’t expect regular mailings reacted when they started getting them. Did the unsubscribe and spam report rates go up with the opt-in rate?

When choosing the words you want to test, keep in mind that you need to set correct expectations. A well-informed subscriber is a happy subscriber.

How To Test Your Call to Action

Your first step is to write several options that set those expectations and fit the usual “voice” of your brand – how you usually represent your brand in writing.

There are several approaches you could take:

You could go with a simple directive.

You could put words in the subscriber’s mouth.

You could restate the benefits that the subscriber will get.

Once you’ve designed a few options, split test them against each other. (If you use AWeber, here’s how to test your web forms and your broadcasts.) Soon you’ll know just what phrase calls your audience to action best.

Who Answers When You Call?

Are you getting the response you want from your calls to action? Are the subscribers you collect interested and engaged? Do they click and purchase?

Have you split test your call to action in the past? How could you test it now for an even better response?

Share your thoughts below!

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Filed Under: autoresponders, Email Marketing Tagged With: aweber, Cabot, Conversions, Decision Point, Ernest Gaines, Free Subscription, Guess, Heritage, mailing list, Marketing, newsletter, People, Phrase, Readers Responses, Relationship, Span, Split Test, Stock, Subscription Button, Words Mean Nothing

Email and Facebook: In a Relationship

August 12, 2010 By Rebecca Swayze

“Email – I can’t imagine my life without it – is probably going away,” Sheryl Sandberg Facebook’s COO boldly claimed at the Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference earlier this summer.

Obviously, We beg to differ!

On the contrary, it seems obvious to us that email is stronger than ever – particularly when used hand-in-hand with social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

In fact, in our recent survey of email marketers, we found that:

33% reported integrating social media and email marketing has increased their subscriber base.
30% reported after integrating social media and email marketing they saw an increase in friends/fans/followers.

With email and social working hand-in-hand, how could email possibly go away?

The Allegation

Just as the Wall Street Journal made the claim that 2009 was “the end of the email era,” Sandberg spoke for Facebook, suggesting that the use of social media will bring about the demise of email.

Our Rebuttal

Email is still alive, thriving and only helping social media become an even more powerful tool than it already is.

The Nielsen Company, the same organization that held the conference that brought about the controversial claim, agrees. The results of their 2009 study of email and social media use indicate that “social media use makes people consume email more, not less…particularly for the highest social media users.”

“If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today,” Sandberg touted.

So let’s take a look at what they are doing today. In a 2009 survey of people 18-24, the Participatory Marketing Network and Pace University found that the majority of those surveyed would rather abandon social networks long before they stopped using email.

Generation Y spends a large amount of time on social sites. Their average time spent on social networks each month is 33 hours, making them high social media users.

When they were asked which activity they would least like to give up for one week, only 9% said social networks, as compared to 26% for email.

Graph from Marketing Charts via WebProNews.

That doesn’t sound to us like email is going anywhere any time soon. In fact, take a look at what positive effects the respondents of our recent survey have had with email and social media:

Clearly, there’s a correlation between the two mediums, and there is some truth to Ms. Sandberg’s presentation. As she attests, “Facebook connects people in really extraordinary ways.”

There are 400 million people who use Facebook worldwide. It obliterates communication barriers and can put you in touch with people all over the globe who otherwise would never have come in contact with your business or brand.

Working Together

When it comes down to it, people are people. Whether you are growing your email list or looking for people to “like” your brand on Facebook, any and all eyeballs on your service are welcome.

You have to remember that social networks rely on email in the most basic sense. Facebook requires an email address to log on, and their emails notify you of updates, friend requests and comments.

Rather than deny the importance of email, Facebook should embrace it! The two make a rather powerful pair – both play a significant role in that relationship.

They have the potential to increase awareness of the other and encourage users to participate with both mediums and they cultivate and nurture true brand advocates.

If you use social media and email together, or have ideas of your own for using Facebook or other social media sites along with email to create the biggest buzz, please share them!

Filed Under: autoresponders, Email Marketing, social media Tagged With: Allegation, aweber, Controversial Claim, Demise, Email Marketing, facebook, Followers, Generation Y, mailing list, Marketers, Marketing Network, Media Users, newsletter, Nielsen Company, Pace University, Participatory, People Email, Rebuttal, Sandberg, Social Networks, Subscriber Base, twitter, Wall Street Journal

Why Email Marketers Heart AWeber (& You Will Too)

August 11, 2010 By Zachary Reese

Recently we asked users to submit videos of how they use AWeber to run their
email marketing campaigns.

The response was extraordinary. There were videos for just about every industry imaginable, from non-profits to e-courses and everything in between.

We decided to edit a few together into a video showcasing the unique personalities of our amazing customers.

Thanks To All Our Wonderful Users!

You guys are the reason I get off the couch in the morning and come in to work.

Check out the full list of contributions below:

Filed Under: autoresponders, Email Marketing Tagged With: Adair, Adventurer, Amp, aweber, Charity, Elbee, Email Campaigns, Email Marketing Campaigns, Jarom, Jonathan, Jonathan Thompson, mailing list, Marketer, Marketers, newsletter, Ollie, Personalities, Richard Lang, Rockwood, Services Llc, Synagogue, Wills, Yoga Instructor

Email Preferences Make Readers Happy

August 10, 2010 By Rebecca Swayze

Email marketing blogs are constantly buzzing with talk of value; they go on and on about all of the different ways you can add it to your campaign.

But how can they possibly know exactly what readers find valuable? As Mark Brownlow attests, “value is defined by the reader and not by you.” It doesn’t matter how valuable you think your messages are. If a reader doesn’t find your content to be of interest, they’re going to stop opening your emails.

In fact, a recent survey found that 85% of consumers prefer that companies ask about their e-mail preferences at sign up. So instead of playing the value guessing game, read on to learn how to use email preferences to let your subscribers decide what they deem to be valuable.

Give Them What They Want

The easiest and least time consuming way to learn what information subscribers want to receive is to simply ask. Hershey’s Chocolate does this exceptionally well on their email subscription page.

They require only the most basic information…

and then leave the important choices of which emails to sign up for up to the subscriber:

You Can Do This With Your Web Form, Too!

Your potential subscribers are accustomed to making choices both on and offline, and they’re used to having things their way. After all, they can customize everything from their cars and coffee drinks down to the sneakers on their feet online with Mini, Volkswagen, Starbucks and NikeiD.

Since they are used to the convention of customizing the things they are most interested in, your prospective readers will be way more likely to fill out your form when you offer preferences because they’ll feel like they are in control.

Decide What Messages You Want to Send

This might be as simple as breaking up your content into a monthly newsletter, a weekly special and a daily deal. Or, your content could be entirely different for each choice, but that will depend on your business offering.

Regardless, you have to commit to sending these messages, so don’t give yourself an impossible workload. Choose a manageable number of messages that you can easily keep up with without becoming overwhelmed.

Create a Web Form with Checkboxes for Each Message

Each field on your form will represent a different email. This way, when the selection comes in with a new email sign up, their preferences are saved in your account and you know exactly which emails they want to receive from you.

Save a Segment for Each Email

With the choices saved as fields in your account, you’ll then create segments that automatically update whenever someone is added to your list.

When searching for fields that were added via checkbox, you must enter “yes” to indicate that the box was checked.

Send Specific Messages

As sign-ups start rolling in, you’ll send your separate messages only to those subscribers who checked certain boxes when signing up.

This way, readers will get what they asked for, and your content will be right on target and true to what they requested from you.

Will You Try This Tactic?

By offering a few simple preferences, your email campaign will be more professional and customizable and your website visitors will be happy to subscribe to it because they can control what they’ll be receiving.

Let us know if you’ve tried this before, or what kind of response you get when testing it out!

Filed Under: autoresponders, Email Marketing, list building, segmentation, web forms Tagged With: aweber, Chocolate, Choices, Coffee Drinks, Consumers, Different Ways, E Mail, Email Marketing, Email Preferences, Guessing Game, Hershey, Information Subscribers, Mail Preferences, mailing list, Mark Brownlow, newsletter, Nikeid, Prospective Readers, Sneakers, Starbucks, Subscription Page, Survey Found That, Volkswagen

How To Reengage Inactive Subscribers

August 5, 2010 By Rebecca Swayze

Your subscribers are busy people. It’s completely normal for a percentage of your messages to go unopened each time you broadcast – that is just the nature of email marketing.

But for all of the busy people on your list, there are also email addresses that belong to genuinely disinterested subscribers and it is difficult to separate them from the busy ones.

A reengagement campaign can help you identify those subscribers that still want to hear from you and part ways with the ones who don’t.

Inactivity and Why It Matters to Your Campaign

Inactive subscribers include all contacts who haven’t opened or clicked through your messages over an extended period of time.

With all of the emails that your subscribers receive on a daily basis, it is easy for them to lose interest in your campaign for a variety of reasons – from bland subject lines and irrelevant message content to a change in their lifestyle or financial situation.

It’s a reality that you must accept: if subscribers no longer fit your target audience, they will quickly become inactive and take up space on your list.

According to a study by Merkle Interactive Services (PDF), subscribers who receive permission-based, promotional messages delete 55% of those emails without ever opening them.

That is over half of all requested email!

You want your subscribers to open your mail no matter what when they request it, but if you don’t address the truth that subscribers interests change over the course of your campaign, you run the risk of losing subscriber attention and damaging your deliverability and reputation.

As the late Stefan Pollard points out in an article about engagement and deliverability for clickz.com, the “top metrics generated from activity that make up a sender’s reputation include bounce rates, spam complaints, and recipient interaction.”

Many ISPs now look at what recipients have been doing with your emails when deciding whether your messages belong in the inbox. All interactions (both positive and negative) are noted so that the ISPs can get a better idea of your individual reputation as a sender.

You always want your subscribers to interact positively with your messages so that they are delivered consistently. A bloated list full of inactive addresses will not perform well and could negatively impact your sender reputation.

How to Handle Inactive Subscribers

Assess the Situation

How often are you sending emails? Is the information about your product or service something that a subscriber would value? The frequency and relevancy of your messages go into a subscriber’s decision to stop interacting with you.

There are lots of ways to investigate the activity on your list, but segmenting and sending surveys is a good place to start.

Identify the Inactives

On the Search Subscribers page in your account, you can find out exactly who hasn’t opened your messages in a certain amount of time.

Perform a search for “No Opens” since a previous date. Most marketers find that 90 days without opening is an appropriate time-frame, however you can always adjust the length to suit the needs of your campaign.

Finally, save the segment so that you can send emails only to those subscribers.

Send a Series of Reengagement Messages

Even back when your inactive subscribers were engaged, they didn’t open or click on every single message from you. And they won’t all open/click on your first try at reengaging them.

To find the people who are really still interested in your campaign, set up a series of three broadcast messages that make it easy for them to take action.

Send the second message to people who didn’t respond to the first one by creating a new segment after you send the first message, and then send the third message to people who didn’t respond to the second.

Note: with Broadcast QuickStats, targeting non-responsive subscribers is a simple process.

For example, to email non-openers, click the “Unopened” button:

Then scroll down and click the “Send Directly to These Subscribers” button:

Make it very clear starting with the second message that if they do not take action you will remove them from your email list. If they still haven’t responded by the third and final message, use urgency tactics to let subscribers know that they will never, ever hear from you again unless they take immediate action.

Not sure what kind of information to include in your emails?

Send a survey, asking them to provide feedback and offer suggestions for content that they would like to see.
Create a whitepaper or a download about your particular service or specialty.
Reward subscribers for (hopefully) taking action: include exclusive coupons or discounts for products.

Know When to Say Goodbye

Going into this task, you must accept that there will be people who don’t respond to your reengagement messages. Although it’s hard to let go of those subscribers, you want the most responsive and interested list in the long run.

Stay firm with the decision to remove inactive subscribers. Run one final search for people who haven’t opened your messages and delete them from your list for good.

Ever Run a Reengagement Campaign?

What was your experience? Was it hard to let go of subscribers in that final moment?

We’d love to hear all about it!

Filed Under: autoresponders, Email Marketing, segmentation Tagged With: aweber, Broadcast, Daily Basis, Deliverability, Email Addresses, Financial Situation, Inactivity, Inbox, Interaction, Interactive Services, Isps, Lifestyle, mailing list, Metrics, newsletter, Open Mail, Period Of Time, Pollard, Reputation, Subject Lines, Subscriber, Subscribers, Target Audience

New QuickStats for Email Newsletters

August 3, 2010 By Justin Premick

If you’re like most people reading this blog, you love data. Not this Data, but the kind that paints a picture of what is and isn’t working in your email marketing.

The trouble with data, of course, is that sometimes it’s hard to know which data is important and worth focusing on. Not to mention that for it to be valuable, the data has to be actionable, too.

Last week we leaked some information about a soon-to-be-released tool that not only helps you see how your email marketing campaigns perform, but also makes it easy to take action to increase your response rates and conversions.

And now, it’s here.

Announcing Broadcast QuickStats

QuickStats makes it easy to understand how your broadcasts performed by showing you:

Opens
Clicks
Web Hits/Traffic
Unsubscribes

Some screenshots of QuickStats (click to see full-size images):

Even better, you can use the data to identify responsive and non-responsive groups of subscribers – those people who:

Opened the email
Didn’t open it
Clicked a given link
Didn’t click that link
Made a purchase (did you know that you can track email-driven sales in AWeber?)

Not Only Are QuickStats Useful and Easy-to-Read… They’re Actionable, Too!

This is by far my favorite part.

One of the most powerful things you can do when you know who clicked a link, or didn’t open an email, is segment out those subscribers and broadcast only to them:

Click to see full-size image

It’s an effective way to talk to people who are interested in a particular product, feature, part of your website or anything else you’re linking to.

Plus, when you’re able to identify who didn’t open or click, and then email only those people, you can:

Make an alternate offer
Find out what their objections are
Send other targeted and relevant email campaigns to increase your conversions

Learn More About QuickStats in a Free, One-Hour Webinar

On Wednesday, August 4th, we’ll give you a tour of QuickStats, show you how it works and answer your questions about it, live!

Learn All About Broadcast QuickStats

In this free webinar, you’ll learn about QuickStats, our new tool that will make analyzing your email campaigns and segmenting your list easier than ever!

How QuickStats shows you how your emails performed

How to easily segment your list in 1 click to create highly targeted, relevant campaigns to responsive and non-responsive subscribers

Plus, get your questions about QuickStats answered live!

Date: Wednesday, August 4th
3 – 4 PM ET (Convert Time)

Sign Up Now

What Do You Think?

How will being able to see at a glance how your broadcasts perform, identify potentially profitable subscriber segments, and quickly and easily create and deliver targeted campaigns to them affect your business?

We’d love to hear how you’ll use QuickStats to increase your response rates and conversions – tell us!

Filed Under: autoresponders, New Features Tagged With: aweber, Broadcast, Broadcasts, Conversions, Email Campaigns, Email Marketing Campaigns, email newsletters, Hits Traffic, mailing list, New Email, newsletter, Objections, Product Feature, Quickstats, Response Rates, Segment, Size Image, Subscribers, Targeted Email, Track Email, Web Hits, Webinar

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