Inbox Ideas: Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Archive for the 'Email Marketing' Category

Cyber Monday: Hype or Holiday Opportunity?

by Marc Kline on November 26th, 2007

Laptop and Gifts If you’ve spent a few days now away from your computer (and your inbox), you might now open email only to find a flood of messages from businesses you’ve purchased promoting specials, with many of them arriving just this morning.

If so, that might have struck you as a coincidence, but it may not have been.

Cyber Monday, a term coined in 2005 by Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation, is ostensibly the day when many consumers return to work after the Black Friday weekend, only to surf online for more holiday deals.

This year, more businesses are jumping on the bandwagon to take advantage of this potential rush. So, should we join them and send out messages to our own subscribers?

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Comments: 11

Tags: holiday marketing, scheduling

How Does Your Business Give Thanks?

by Marc Kline on November 20th, 2007

thank you note If you’re in the U.S. like we are, more than likely this Thursday you will be celebrating Thanksgiving, and as we sit down with our families for dinner we will be thinking of some of those things we’re most thankful for, namely our food, our prosperity, and our loved ones.

I will venture to say that most of us won’t be thinking directly of email marketing, but if it has helped our business to grow and prosper this year, we probably do think of it with a great deal of gratitude at times.

So, before the holiday hits and we shut our computers off, let’s talk for a minute about email and giving thanks.

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Comments: 4

Tags: thank you page

5 Holiday Marketing Tips to Beat a Slow Season

by Justin Premick on November 16th, 2007

Gift Boxes According to the National Retail Foundation, holiday shopping for this year is set to increase, but only by a modest 4%. Just about every other report or story I’ve read about this holiday season has suggested it won’t be a good one.

As other direct and indirect competitors vie for your subscribers’ pocketbooks, how are you going to make sure your business isn’t left holding a lump of coal?

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Comments: 21

Tags: content ideas, strategy

Do Your Post-Purchase Emails Alienate Customers?

by Justin Premick on November 12th, 2007

It happens all too frequently.

A business puts in the time and expense of getting a customer to their website or store, establishes trust and credibility, and gets that person to make a purchase. Which brings them to that critical first post-purchase contact.

Do they use it to provide more value? To reinforce the buying decision? Show the customer how the purchased product is even more valuable than they thought?

Nope.

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Comments: 13

Tags: examples, spam complaints, targeting

Email Scheduling: How Soon is Too Soon?

by Marc Kline on November 8th, 2007

Winter Calendar Somewhere in the back of my mind I was waiting for it –the first Christmas song of the year. This time I was at a local coffee shop (OK, it was the local Starbucks).

John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” made it through about 10 seconds of play. Then, the stereo went silent for about another 10 and we were back to quiet, singer-songwriter cafe music.

From a back room I heard someone scream “It’s too early for Christmas!”. It might seem odd at first, but this got me to thinking about email marketing and how we schedule our messages.

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Comments: 23

Tags: scheduling

Comment Spotlight: The Most Important Email Stat?

by Justin Premick on October 25th, 2007

From time to time comments on the blog are worth discussing with everyone in a new post.

Friday’s post on confirmation rates sparked a discussion of other other stats that we can measure and improve.

Glenn voiced a question that I think all of us have asked at some point:

“In looking at each email list you have available, what sort of metrics are the best to monitor? I think if you had to pick one metric, overall conversion rate is probably best[.]”

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Comments: 7

Tags: email statistics

Tips on Growing Website Traffic

by Marc Kline on October 16th, 2007

How do I get people to visit my website?

Whether or not you’re new to running an online business, this question must have crossed your mind at one time or another. After all, as we often mention in our live email marketing webinars, your email campaign does not exist in a vacuum. If you don’t have traffic coming to your site, it can prove to be difficult to build a dedicated readership.

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Comments: 8

Tags: list building, traffic

Six Ways To Screw Up A Customer Email

by Justin Premick on October 4th, 2007

Bad Email Working with email as much as I do, I’m encouraged to see so many people doing the right things:

Getting explicit permission
Providing valuable, relevant communications
Building trust; treating subscribers like people (and not like numbers)
(the list goes on)

So when I get a marketing email from someone who isn’t doing these things, someone who’s doing all sorts of harm to their brand by breaking some of the “rules” (intentionally or not) of good email marketing, it hurts. As an email marketer, I find messages like this frustrating and offensive.

But rather than fume or shake my head about it, I figured it’d be helpful to show what they’ve done wrong, and how you can do better.

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Comments: 66

Tags: Email Deliverability, examples, relevance

Email and the Art of Teaching

by Marc Kline on September 27th, 2007

Do you remember a favorite teacher? I know who mine was from college: my World Literature professor. He was a a big goof ball. I remember him breaking out into a “Socrates” dance for our class when we were assigned Greek Literature and how he’d always crack jokes maybe only half of the class got.

It was an expression not only of his eccentricity but also his passion for literature and teaching. It was infectious, and it may have been the first class I’d ever taken where most people actually did the assigned reading.