call to action - Inbox Ideas: Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

7 Split Tests You Can Implement Today

by Justin Premick on June 10th, 2008

How many times have you heard “you should test to see what works best for you” or something to that effect? Probably too many to count, right?

The reason you hear it so often is because when it comes to email marketing (as well as any other marketing channel), testing separates the pros from the Joes.

It’s one thing to think we know what works best, but when we apply a little bit of scientific method to our marketing, we not only find out for sure, we learn more about our visitors and subscribers — and that helps us predict more accurately what will work in the future.

The challenge for a lot of people (including us at AWeber) is deciding what to test. There are simply so many small changes we can make to our forms, messages and other parts of our campaigns, that it’s easy to get stuck on deciding where to start.

So, to help you get started with split testing (or to get back into it if you’ve gotten complacent and stopped testing regularly), here are seven split tests you can run on your website to get and retain more subscribers, lower spam complaints, and increase response.

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Comments: 23

Tags: call to action, list building, split testing

3 Tips For More Clicks and Website Traffic

by Marc Kline on May 2nd, 2008

Sometimes our emails are focused on a single goal, aiming the entire message at driving to a specific landing page.

Other times when our purpose is more general, it makes a lot of sense to take a broader approach, aiming to get our subscribers back to nearly *anywhere* on our website. We can let them choose their own adventure from there, hoping they’ll eventually complete a site goal (e.g. ordering, membership sign up, etc.).

For those times, here are 3 techniques that could significantly boost your click through rates back to your website:

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Comments: 45

Tags: call to action, design, traffic

Do Buttons Get Clicked More Than Text Links?

by Justin Premick on March 25th, 2008

Many of our readers have already signed up to the live seminar on split testing that we announced last week.

But even if you can’t make it, you’re probably interested in learning more about split testing now, right?

Fortunately, we happen to have a case study on hand that shows just the sort of information you can learn about your email marketing campaigns by conducting split tests.

Today, let’s look at a split test that we ran on our own blog newsletter to get more of you to come to the site and read the latest posts.

Continue reading “Do Buttons Get Clicked More Than Text Links?”

Comments: 26

Tags: call to action, Case Studies, split testing

Award-Winning Autoresponder Series: What’s Working?

by Justin Premick on March 11th, 2008

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…

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Comments: 1

Tags: call to action, design, examples

3 Tips to Optimize Your Email Landing Pages

by Marc Kline on February 19th, 2008

Magnified URL Address 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.

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Comments: 15

Tags: call to action, email web analytics, recommendations

Here’s An Easy Way To Do Video Emails

by Justin Premick on January 30th, 2008

Videos are a great marketing tool — they get your prospects’ attention, they let you show (not just tell) about your products, and they get passed around (helping you to get more subscribers virally).

However, as many people have found out, creating “video emails” by embedding the video directly in an HTML email (like you would on a web page) doesn’t fly. It’s simply not reliable because most email programs disable or strip out the video.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of video’s appeal in your emails!

You just have to get a bit creative…

Easily Send “Video Emails” Using Image Links

In a recent addition to our Knowledge Base, we’ve shown step-by-step how to drive your email subscribers to watch videos that you’ve posted to your site or video hosting sites like YouTube.

How Can I Add Video To My Messages?

A Couple Pointers

I recommend using an image to link to your video — you can use text, too, but the image will naturally draw the eye and increase your response.

That said, not all of your subscribers will have images enabled in their email programs.

So, remember to put appropriate ALT text for your image, so that if they have images turned off, they know there’s a video to click to.

Example:

Have You Used This Tactic?

Has linking to videos this way worked well for you? Have you learned anything along the way that you think our readers could benefit from when creating their own video emails?

Share your thoughts below!

Comments: 27

Tags: call to action, design, video email