Award-Winning Autoresponder Series: What’s Working?

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Justin Premick

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 series…

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:

“Starter kit” with a series of whitepapers and a case study

Free trial/demo of a software

Sweepstakes entry in exchange for customer feedback on a recent purchase

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:

Site navigation links

Link to an online version of your email

Your primary call to action

A secondary call to action, such as driving the user to a helpful resource on your site.

See the Winning Campaigns For Yourself

To see all the results, head over to MarketingSherpa’s site.

Source

MarketingSherpa’s 2008 Email Awards Gallery

Tags: call to action, design, examples

Print This Post

One Response

Patrick Henry
March 18th, 2008 at 1:55 am

As someone who is just starting out in email marketing, there were some great ideas here to focus my marketing campaign. Thanks!