AWeber Email Marketing Tips
Award-Winning Autoresponder Series: What’s Working?
MarketingSherpa announced their 2008 Email Award winners recently.
These are always a great place to look for innovative ideas as well as proven/tested tactics that you can use to improve your own email marketing campaigns.
Out of all the award-winning emails they present (and there are a lot!), I was particularly drawn to the best automated/autoresponder series category.
Let’s take a look at what’s working well for companies running autoresponder programs.
Successful Autoresponder Campaign Trends
In reading through MarketingSherpa’s writeup of each winner and looking at the included samples, I noticed a few patterns among the successful campaigns:
Simple Design
Simplicity was a recurring theme in many of the successful campaigns Sherpa profiled, whether on landing pages or in the emails themselves.
GMAC Mortgage had a particularly compelling design that, while simple (it looked to me like a personal letter sent by postal mail on company stationery) incorporated some nice, simple design elements such as their logo and a picture of the mortgage agent. A great example of “Light HTML.”
Short or Long Copy Can Work
Sherpa’s winners included both shorter, more image-heavy emails and longer, text-focused ones.
It seemed to me that short copy with more imagery worked especially well for direct promotions, while longer, text-heavy emails were more suited to educating and nurturing leads.
Freebies
Giving something away is still a great way to attract and engage subscribers.
Examples of winning uses of freebies included:
Include Site Navigation In Emails
Many, if not most, of the winners included some sort of site navigation in the emails, such as links to a homepage, “My Account”/login page or useful tools on their sites.
This can help to raise response because even if someone isn’t interested in your primary call to action, s/he may still be interested in visiting your site for something else (example: I may not want to purchase a product yet, but I might want to read your blog or use your pricing calculator).
It also can help to build recognition of your emails by including design elements that readers will remember from your website.
Try Using Buttons For Your Calls To Action
Several of the winners used image-based “buttons” for their calls to action.
Those with longer, more text-heavy emails also included text links to supplement the button, rather than taking an “either/or” approach to their calls to action.
Preview Panes: Give People Something To Do
As Sherpa’s winners showed us, putting some kind of action near the top of your emails can yield positive results.
Examples of this include:
See the Winning Campaigns For Yourself
To see all the results, head over to MarketingSherpa’s site.
Print This PostRelated Articles
Become a Better Email Marketer
Subscribe to This Blog by Email4 Comments
-
Patrick Henry
As someone who is just starting out in email marketing, there were some great ideas here to focus my marketing campaign. Thanks!
3/18/2008 1:55 am -
I like aweber’s customer support. I am currently using aweber is my main autoresponder. It’s a great autoresponder.
9/29/2009 7:03 am -
I thought adding site navigation in emails was a great idea. Do you have any idea how more effective such emails are?
1/12/2010 4:38 pm -
Email marketing is definitely one major step to converting sales. Especially for online shops and products
7/24/2010 6:38 am
Dennis Hennry
Leave a Comment
Follow Comments
Popular Topics
Most popular articles
From Twitter
What people are saying- SDavisMedia: Just got off the phone with @aweber. Thanks, ^LC, Jordan, and the helpful young lady I spoke with! Great customer service! View
- Garin: @dannyiny Solid @Aweber webinar yesterday Danny! Great analogy and plenty of list building tips. Thanks. View
- darlenecary: Kudos to @Aweber. Had my opt-in form ques answered quickly on the phone View
Follow AWeber
14730 followers
Videos
Videos by AWeberTubePress
