Three Easy Ways to Brand Your Campaigns

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Marc Kline

You know that branding is important when marketing your business with print ads.

Well, it’s just as important for your email campaigns.

Take advantage of the opportunities you have to brand your campaigns with this checklist:

Brand your messages

When your subscribers receive your messages, they will open them only if it’s from an address and a name they recognize. Use your company’s domain name to appear professional to your readers.

How to: reference page 5 of our How to Get Started Guide.

If you include your logo in the HTML version of your message and your company name in the plain-text version, it will provide a familiar feel for your subscribers.

How to: reference Sean Cohen’s article on inserting a picture in your HTML messages.

Use Your Own Custom Thank You Pages

If you send subscribers to a page that confirms their request full with the look-and-feel of the rest of your website, it will give them a sense of consistency. This contrasts the minor shock of confusion they’ll feel if taken to a generic page.

How to: refer to our video tutorial on setting up web forms.

You can also change the thank you page subscribers see when they click on your verification link. Just make sure you also tell them they’ve verified their subscription!

How to: reference our blog article on customizing this page.

Customize Your Unsubscribe Page

This probably seems like a very minor detail, but you’ll want to leave your subscribers feeling the same on the way out as they did on the way in. They’re more likely to return to something familiar at a later time.

How to: reference page 4 of our How to Get Started Guide

As always, if you have any questions, just contact our helpful customer support team.

If you find this article and others helpful for optimizing your email campaigns, sign up for regular updates on the right-side of this page.

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9 Responses

Tony Marciante
December 21st, 2006 at 5:59 pm

I have to really compliment Aweber on their level of service and folow up…they are a truly outstanding service so far. I run a blog and website from home to share my restaurant stories and cooking demos…so far, aweber has been a neat new opportunity to share content and follow up automatically…

Chef Tony Marciante
http://www.cheflifeonline.com
Jennifer Knox
December 23rd, 2006 at 2:21 pm

Every day you seem to come up with more ways to make Aweber work better for us! Thanks for these great tips!
Andrew Cavanagh
December 28th, 2006 at 1:50 am

Customized thank you pages are vital.

Here’s a tip that may increase your confirmed double opt in subscribers by 25% or more…

1. On your thank you page tell your subscribers they have to confirm their email address (many smart marketers do that).

2. Offer another opt-in form on that page with a line like…
"Did you enter an email address where your emails might not get delivered like a yahoo account? If you did you can enter your primary email address here…"

See http://www.copywriting1.com and the thank you page…
http://www.copywriting1.com/thankyou.html
for an example of how this works.

My early testing of this method with clients suggests that somewhere around 25% of confirmed double opt in subscribers come from these thank you pages with the added warning and opt in form.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh
Tom Kulzer
December 28th, 2006 at 10:34 am

Andrew,

Great tip! #1 is always something we recommend here.

I’ve never seen #2 done personally, but it makes perfect sense and is something we’ll definitely be testing. Based on the data we see of between 5-15% of all initial opt-ins being invalid addresses it’s a fantastic idea to give visitors another opportunity to provide a real email to subscribe.
Alex Sysoef
January 2nd, 2007 at 3:33 pm

Guys, this is a little tip I have shared with my subscribers that increased my double-opt in confirmation rate to around 80+ %. It involves using personalization script – a fairly simple to implement and explained in details here:

http://www.free-secrets.org/membersnews/december06-1.php

Once this is implemented customers are redirected to custom thank you page, an example of customization can be seen here:

http://www.free-secrets.org/elibrary/subscribe_oto1.php?name=Sam

Note the “name=Sam”. It would be a part of CGI forward variable from aweber subscribe form, normalized (using correct case) via java script and passed onto custom thank you page that just happen to contain also a one time offer. This has proven to be very effective for my list.

Alex
Andrew Cavanagh
January 7th, 2007 at 11:41 am

In the internet marketing niche entering invalid email addresses is now becoming standard practice.

My estimates are around 30%-50% of email addresses entered into opt in forms are bogus.

(In non iternet marketing niches this figure is much, much lower).

I’ve had 2 very successful online marketers tell me THEY enter bogus email addresses to get past optin forms into sites.

You do it so why would you expect your clients to do any different?

If you assume that your prospects are going to enter bogus email addresses (unless you give them exceptional reasons not to) and you design your optin process to get around that you’ll get far more legitimate email addresses.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh
Renee Walkup
January 9th, 2007 at 5:50 am

Your exceptional service impresses me so much that I tell all of our clients during my Sales and Customer keynotes how great your team is. Thank you for being our virtual business partner!
Vincent Harrison
March 9th, 2007 at 2:17 am

I’m probably not alone in being startled by the changes on your site. I am a bit mystified by the web form code changes, as the previous one seemed to be so easy to work with.

All in all, of course, your service is superb.

Vincent Harrison
http://CoolMarketingProducts.com
» More on Plain Text: Keys to a Good Header - AWeber Blog
March 22nd, 2007 at 9:37 am

[…] They’re branded at the top with your header graphic or logo, making it easy for subscribers to recognize them in the preview panes of their email clients. […]