I have been able to correspond with a lot of our affiliates lately about my introduction as affiliate manger, the upgrades to the affiliate control panel, as well as feedback in general. The information I have received from you has been very helpful.

The one thing that is alarming, however, is the fact that 8 out of about 10 affiliates did not have a signature ad in their email. The signature ad is “prime real estate” for your AWeber affiliate campaign and should never be overlooked by an affiliate.

Let’s take a closer look at the many benefits of inserting a simple signature ad into all of your personal and business emailings.

What Are The Benefits of a Signature Ad?

A signature ad is several sentences inserted underneath your name with every email you send out. It’s like an email business card that’s placed in all of your email messages. Using the signature can boost your affiliate productivity and earnings considerably.

The many benefits of using this often neglected tool are:

• Free Advertising – It costs nothing to put an automatic signature
  in your email
• Efficiency – Its quick and simple to insert a signature file in most
  email programs
• Automation – Your ad is inserted automatically in every email you send
• Recurrence – You signature ad is viewed many times over the
  course of your campaign

There are almost limitless uses of the signature file and it should be included in every email you send.

What Should My Signature Say?

Your signature file should contain a short description of what you are promoting along with your affiliate link. It should be short and to the point (about 2 or 3 lines) and give the reader a reason to click on your affiliate URL.

Your signature should be catchy as well. A great example would be the following:

Unlimited Autoresponders & Newsletters

99.34% email delivered. Free support.

http://www.aweber.com/?YOUR-ID

We provide many more examples in our Affiliate Tip for Signature Ads. You can explore that resource for many more examples of effective signature ads. You can also use your imagination and come up with an ad that will appeal directly to your particular customer or client niche.

Other Uses For a Signature

Your AWeber signature ad does not have to be limited to just email messages. It can be used anywhere you can reach and individual or group of people with text or HTML. You can get very creative with its uses, but some great places to start are:

• At the end of messages in forums
• Facebook, myspace and other social media messages
• Blog comments
• Product or service reviews

You can post your signature ad to any group or message board that will allow you to.

Please verify with the site rules or administrator before you place your AWeber signature ad in any discussion room or service. This will insure you are not spamming and that your affiliate signature ad is not in violation of any rules of conduct.

For more on spam, check our Spam FAQ.

How Do I Create a Signature Ad?

If you do not know how to insert a signature into your email client program, here are some easy to follow instructions for most email services.

If you still have questions, please feel free to contact us. Our customer solutions team would be more than happy to assist you.

We recently set up an easy-to-remember phone number for you to contact us: 1-877-AWEBER-1

In addition to making remembering how to get in touch with our Customer Solutions Team easier, this presents an opportunity to answer a question that I never really was able to demonstrate very well when customers asked:

What good are Global Fields? How would I use them?

In this instance, using Global Fields saved me a lot of time updating our various customer, affiliate and prospect newsletters. Here’s how:

What Global Fields Do

Global fields are kind of like personalization variables that store and display information about you instead of information about your subscribers.

For example, you can insert your signature file into any message using the {!signature} variable. This variable pulls information that you enter into your account at the Global Fields page.

If you ever wanted to change your signature, you would simply update it at the Global Fields page, instead of editing each of your messages individually.

How Global Fields Minimize Tedious Cutting-and-Pasting

If you’re subscribed to our Test Drive, or this blog’s newsletter, or our customer newsletter, you know that you can find our support contact information (phone numbers and hours of operation) near the end of any of the messages we send you.

Between all of our various lists, there are probably close to 100 follow up messages that display our phone number. You’d think changing it would be a lot of cutting and pasting.

The thing is, we don’t actually type the phone number into the emails. We created global fields for US Phone, International Phone, and Support Hours, and we inserted the appropriate variables into our emails:

So, instead of having to cut and paste 1-877-AWEBER-1 a hundred-plus times, I only had to do it once per list, at the Global Fields page:

Before

After

That’s it! One change per list, which took a fraction of the time it would have if I’d had to edit 100+ messages individually.

What Else Can You Use Global Fields For?

Use them to insert any information about you or your business that might change periodically:

Store Hours

Contact Email Address

Mottos or Slogans

…and much more! You’re only limited by your imagination.

Oh, and About That Phone Number…

Just a reminder: the new toll-free phone number is 1-877-AWEBER-1.

AND, this toll-free number works from Canada, too! Those of you in the Great White North can get your questions answered toll-free, just like our users in the States.

The old 800-531-5065 number will continue to work for now, but we’ll probably phase it out eventually. If/when we do, we’ll let you know.

Does your form ask for just the information you need to build and engage a list of subscribers, or does it go above and beyond that?

As MarketSherpa has pointed out, “above and beyond” in this case may lead to signup conversion rates and information quality that fall below your expectations.

In the latest Chart of the Week, they illustrate why name and email should typically be all the information we ask for in our email newsletter sign up forms. Take a look:

Name and email are the two fields most likely to be provided accurately, and still, even these fields are “fibbed” sometimes (e.g. 32% of respondents to their survey said they didn’t always provide an accurate email address).

That’s one of a few good reasons to use confirmed opt-in for all of your campaigns. The fact that respondents were generally less willing to give other information accurately (and presumably *at all* in some cases) is a convincing reason to ask for only what you need from your website visitors.

Alas, sometimes less means more! I couldn’t resist .

[Insert clever first paragraph here.]

OK, so that one was on purpose, but we all make mistakes at one point or another, like leaving some text only we were supposed to see. Even Seth Godin does.

No matter how experienced we are with something (or sometimes because we are so experienced with it), mistakes happen.

A mistake here and there is not a big deal! But one repeated over and over is. It’s how we learn from them, and what we do to prevent them from happening that separates the careful, successful newsletter publishers from the error-prone who see inconsistent results.

What To Do to Prevent Mistakes

We can stop mistakes before they happen in our email campaigns by taking a couple of simple steps.

Use a Pre-Send checklist

When you get started with your first email marketing campaign, you really shouldn’t rack your brain with much more than adding some compelling content to your messages and adding an effective subject… just like we do when we send messages to friends.

However, once we’ve got that down, we’ll start trying some different things to optimize our messages. Sometimes we try so many different things that we lose track of the basics.

A good way to make sure we don’t miss the forest for the trees is to use a quality pre-send checklist.

Start with ours and add to it as you see fit.

Test Messages Before Sending

Mom always told you to brush your teeth before bed. Here’s another important habit to learn.

Test your messages before sending them. It’s the best way to put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes to see messages much like they will.

What To Do When Accidents Happen

Sometimes we do our best to run our campaigns through quality assurance, and still we get caught a bit red in the face when a subscriber replies saying something like “Hey, this link doesn’t work”.

Don’t worry. For one, your subscribers can’t see how embarrassed you look. Also, provided these mistakes are an exception to the rule, it won’t make or break your campaign.

The “Ouch” Email. To Send or Not to Send?

In yesterday’s post on Seth’s blog, he apologized to his readers for a mistake he (or more accurately, an associate of his) made.

This is something many email marketers feel tempted to do when a message gets dropped in the mailbox before it should have.

This type of message can be useful, or it can make matters worse, so be careful here. Seth’s post had a moral to it that went beyond just apologizing for the mishap, so it had added value.

Along those same lines, you might add a brief message to the next message you send to subscribers, but generally speaking, emails sent just to apologize are a bad idea.

Most Importantly: Follow Email Best Practices

Again, minor mistakes here and there aren’t the end of the world. But major mistakes could spell the death of the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

For instance, using permission standards with as many holes as swiss cheese (e.g. opt-out emailing, purchased lists) will land you on blacklists. And sending messages that are unrelated to what someone signed up for will severely reduce your deliverability.

The foundation of your campaign should be firmly rooted in the core email marketing best practices. Follow them to make sure your email gets delivered, whether they have a few mistakes here and there or not.

Ironically enough, after reading Seth’s post, I caught an error in one of my own campaigns. Apparently, I put a line break in the middle of a personalization field, causing it to break and show “{!global …” to subscribers.

What small gaffes have you made, and how did you and your subscribers react? Please share and join the discussion.

We know frequently asked questions should be addressed, and one of ours has had to do with who we’d recommend for any number of services besides email marketing

We’ve been hesitant to make all but a few recommendations because, frankly, there are a lot of options out there for services like web hosts, payment processors, and so on.

Well, after nearly a decade of trying and using several vendors ourselves and hearing plenty of reviews from our users and other email marketers, we’re ready to pull the trigger and share some carefully selected recommendations.

Email Is Our Full Time Job, But …

We know that even though email is an important piece to online business, it is not the only one.

We know this because just like you, we’re doing our best to be successful running the online portion of our business, which in our case is what our success entirely depends upon.

If you’re in the market for some other services, check out our newest Knowledge Base article of vendor recommendations:

What Kind of Recommendations Will I Find?

Here’s an example… We’ve been doing live seminars for over a year now. There are lots of services out there that offer webinar software, so before we chose the one we’ve stuck with, we did quite a bit of research and comparison of services including factors like limits on attendees and pricing.

Ultimately, we went with GoToWebinar, and you’ll find that selection under the Live Conference & Meeting Software category.

On the other hand, although we haven’t personally used Dreamhost for web hosting — since our website and database servers are self-hosted at our secure co-location — we’ve heard a lot of great things about the value of their service in comparison with others covering factors like features, pricing, and reliability.

A Note on Affiliate Links

Although we’re using affiliate programs where they were easily located and enrolled in, we’ve also recommended plenty of services that don’t have them.

For any service you do find affiliate links for, you’ll also find a direct link to the product or company website. That’s so you know we haven’t biased our decisions for vendors toward those that offer an opportunity to earn a small reward for a referral.

Did we miss any? Email us your recommendations.

This has been bugging me for a while.

Before sending, I test our blog newsletters to Gmail, along with other popular clients (generally a smart thing to do).

By and large, the messages tend to look fine, outside of one detail that might seem minor to some but meaningful others who spend some time thinking about optimizing emails for best results.

Take a look at a few of the recent tests in my inbox and see if you notice what I’m seeing:

See what I mean? Here’s another view – what I see pop up from my task bar when I receive the tests:

To subscribers, the frequency of “AWeber” and “AWeber Logo” could be trance inducing…at best. At worst, I fear it bores our Gmail viewers (who comprise 15.3% of our active list at the moment) and could suppress our open rates.

Why does that text appear there? Well, we use a template that includes a logo and a header image, both of which we use ALT text for (another good idea).

Meanwhile, Gmail displays whatever the first set number of characters appear in an email (alt text or otherwise) in this brief preview section of the inbox or Notifier app.

What Can We Do About It?

Get a free Gmail account for testing, if you don’t already have one, and send yourself tests of your messages. Do you see the same type of undesirable results?

Whether it’s ALT text or some other headline, it’s a good idea to replace it with something more enticing to subscribers to give them something worthwhile during that split second decision that makes them want to open the message rather than ignore or delete it.

You could tweak the layout of your template, or add some visible text at the very top of your message, but I did something else to avoid messing with the design or content of our messages.

Use an Invisible Image to Say Something Meaningful

In the free image manipulation software we use at our office, the GIMP, I created an image 1×1 pixel in size with a transparent background. Placed in an email, this image effectively goes unseen.

I then uploaded this file to our website and placed it in our blog broadcast template, just beneath the opening “body” tag, to make it the first thing Google “sees” to render in the email:

Remember how Gmail was pulling text from the ALT tags of our top placed images to my chagrin? Well, I found a way to use it to our advantage.

I simply added some ALT text to the image attribute that made more sense for the message I was sending out:

The result? Something much more appealing in the inbox and in the notifier. Check it out:

You can take the same image I used and upload it to your website. Just add the following HTML just beneath the “body” tags like I did:

<img src=”address where you uploaded the file to your site” alt=”text you’d like to appear after the subject line of your message”/>

What Were the Results?

To be honest, I didn’t split test this before implementing. Why? My feeling was that it was one of those limited things worth implementing straight off the bat without testing, but I’m willing to bet it will help our opens given the number of Gmail subscribers we (and presumably you) have.

I hope it helps some of you to engage your Gmail subscribers better. I’m happy because, at very least, I can stop griping about the way it looks when I test.

April 15th, the tax deadline is sneaking up on millions of Americans. Many of us are paying meticulous attention to detail to avoid the dreaded tax audit.

While we have our brains working these analytical gears, why not review our email campaigns for ways we can improve them in measurable ways? Here are 10 things to review once you’ve caught your breath:

1. Does your reply address properly brand your business and make your messages recognizable to email subscribers?
2. Which email newsletters and follow ups have performed better than others in the last year? Why do you think that is?
3. Have you been sending to your list too infrequently? Too frequently?
4. Are there any new pages you’ve published on your site that could use a sign up form?
5. What kind of feedback have you received from your subscribers? What can you learn from it?
6. Is your email campaign using both follow up messages and newsletters to build relationships?
7. Have you noticed a spike in subscribes or unsubscribes during a certain period? Why do you think that is?
8. What kind of plans do you have for the upcoming days, weeks, and months for your campaign?
9. Is the call to action for your sign up form as generic as the word “Submit”? Have you considered split testing another?
10. How much money have you invested into email marketing this past year? What kind of returns have you seen? Do you have an analytics package to track these results?
11. What else should we review periodically? Please share your thoughts and join the discussion.

One of the most important challenges facing restaurant and retail owners is in drawing back return customers to their locations.

Advertising for new customers can be very expensive, while relying on customers to take initiative to come back after a single visit can be risky and unprofitable business.

A popular, tried and true way to boost return business throughout the year is to send personalized birthday emails to customers.

Make Customers Feel Special on Their Birthdays

Personalization is one of those “X factors” in marketing, where singling someone out from a group in a way that reminds them of their individuality can pay great dividends.

What better time of year to single someone out and make them feel special than their birthday? This is when many of us are more than happy to take a break, relax our egos a bit, and celebrate ourselves.

What better time of year to single someone out and make them feel special than their birthday?

Some of us are also willing to spend (or have someone else spend) some extra money on things like gifts and special birthday dinners.

A taylored and targeted offer can be just the thing to make someone feel special and remember us when they’re making the spending decisions surrounding their special times.

Step 1: Collect the Necessary Information

Sending birthday emails is simple.

We just need to collect just two things from our customers at our locations and/or websites:

Their email addresses

Their birthdays

At your location, keep subscription cards at your counter and/or provide them with the bill to dining customers.

On your website, you can simply add a field to your signup form asking for birthday information.

Step 2: Schedule Monthly Birthday Emails

Once we’ve started to collect this information, all we need to do is schedule monthly messages to cover the birthdays of each month.

If you’re using AWeber, just segment your list creating what is called a “view” before and schedule them:

Learn How to Send Birthday Email with AWeber

Send Your Customers Birthday Email

By giving customers another reason to get your email newsletter, advertising birthday specials can help us grow our list of subscribers. Surprising them with special incentives to return to your location boosts business and helps to maintain a profitable subscription.

If you’ve been racking your brain thinking of ways to use your restaurant or store’s list and bring back customers, consider adding a birthday email to your campaign today.

The success of our email marketing campaigns does not rely entirely on the success of our email.

What I mean is, if the goal of our email is not only to drive traffic to our websites but ultimately to convert that traffic into sales, our websites need to do their jobs too.

Email tracking and analytics let us know how our emails are performing. In order to make sure our marketing campaigns are performing as we’d hope as a whole, we’ll also want to take a look at the web pages we send our subscribers to.

Make Sure Your Web Pages Work, Not Just the Links

Before we send our email messages, we should always test them. In doing so, one of the things we’re looking for is working links.

This entails clicking on each link in a message to make sure the correct web page opens properly in a browser. If they do, we tend to close the browser window and move on to the next step in our sending routines.

But wait! Here are 3 other things we should look for before we close out the window:

One or More Clear Calls to Action

Dead ends are always bad when it comes to conversions. Do your emails’ landing pages clearly prioritize where what the subscriber should do once they click through and browse through the first page they see? Or, do they have to really think through what options there are for action?

Something Valuable the Email Didn’t Provide

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with re-purposing content from our websites for email. But if our emails link to pages that don’t really provide anything new and valuable, our subscribers are more likely to close out the window than do anything else on the site..

Analytics Tracking

OK, so this is something subscribers won’t actually see, but if you’ve read to the third tip in this article, you’re clearly interested in the performance of your web pages. The best way to get actionable insight is to install an analytics software on your website.

If you have one and have not yet integrated it with your email marketing campaign, take the small amount of time it takes and do so.

More In-Depth Tips on Landing Page Optimization

Our web pages are an integral part of our email campaigns, even though they’re found in the web browser and not the inbox. They’re something we shouldn’t forget while we’re working on our campaigns.

For more tips on optimizing them, check out some of the free resources over at Marketing Experiments Journal. On their site you’ll find archived reports and opportunities to sit in on live seminars with experts on the topic.

If you aren’t sending a continuous campaign of emails using the feature available to you, there certainly may be messages you should be sending to subscribers that you aren’t. So, we just recently posted on why email marketers nearly always should use both follow ups and newsletters for their campaigns.

What I’d like to point out today are some of the email messages you may be missing from your own inbox that should be there.

A Few Messages That Can Improve Your Marketing

Email is a technology that can help you to market better not only through what you send, but also what you receive.

Here are a few of the emails you might want to find in your own inbox:

Unsubscribe Comments

As Justin has said before, sometimes unsubscribes are good for our email campaigns, when we allow the subscriber to leave comments. They can provide feedback on ways we might not be engaging subscribers who have not unsubscribed yet — and who may not at all if we use the feedback others have provided.

Other Feedback from Your Subscribers

To improve your email, you don’t want to hear just from those who are on their way out the door. If you have the resources to answer some emails here and there, there are clear benefits to proactively soliciting feedback from your subscribers.

Email Reports

You’d love to know things like how many subscribers your engaging with your email and how well your messages are performing. But how often do you want to log into your account to check them? Take advantage of email reports if they’re available.

Tests of Your Own Email Newsletters

If you aren’t testing your messages to review them before sending, start a new habit today. It would be well worth your time because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Reminders from Your Calendar Software

Consistency is an important aspect of successful email marketing, and yet sometimes we get off track and neglect our subscribers with too many days between sendings.

Many of the calendars we use to keep up with meetings and deadlines have an option to send an email reminder some time before an event approaches. This may be a great tool for you to use to keep a regular sending schedule.

Am I Missing Any?

These are the ones I’ve thought of off the top of my head and by looking at my own inbox. Do any others come to your mind? Please share.