Winter is here. All things green are hibernating and garden center sales are dipping as low as the temperature. No matter how many promotions are emailed, those seeds and spades just won’t move off the shelf.

Many businesses have off-seasons for their sales. There’s almost no reason to sell sometimes.

So don’t.

Don’t stop emailing, though! This isn’t an off-season for your campaign. Instead, it’s an opportunity to build respect and trust through relationship marketing.

Create value with your subscribers by sending them interesting content they can use now, nestled in their cozy houses while their garden waits for spring.

Cultivate Respect With These Content Ideas

What can you write about that your readers will give a green thumbs up? While you’re digging for ideas, you might want to try these:

What should your readers do to keep their gardens safe until springtime? They may not be aware of all the steps they should take, so let them know!

Research gardens like those at The Grow Spot. Present them to your readers as pure entertainment, or include ideas on replicating them at home.

Are economics affecting the gardening landscape? Is a new technique catching on? Give your readers the inside edge, and you’ll be one of the trends they follow.

Do you know any gardeners with years of experience and a following of their own? Ask them for an interview. Get the dirt on how they like to garden, and share their fresh perspective with your readers.

Keep your readers busy with wreaths in December and windowsill herb gardens. Include photos and instructions for a complete lesson.

Marie Ianotti, master gardener and author, presents important details to consider. Check them out, then create your own guide for your readers.

When early spring arrives and the rush for lilies and loam begins, your subscribers will be used to getting emails from you with content they appreciate.

So tell them what tools will be useful and what flowers will flourish. Link to products on your web site or provide your store address and hours to complete the sales.

Your readers will already respect what you have to say and expect your information to be helpful, so they’re likely to follow your suggestions.

Laying the groundwork now while the soil is frozen just might help your sales blossom when it thaws in the spring.

What’s Your Winter Strategy?

What content do you send during your business’ off-season?

What kinds of emails earn your loyalty – and your purchasing power?

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It’s time for the annual post-holiday tightening of the purse strings. Consumers are holding tight to their cash, assessing the damage to their wallets and making New Year’s resolutions to save.

So now may not be the best time for sales-focused email marketing. Keeping your readers engaged is important, though. Making them happy is even better.

And what better way to do that then with fun activities that keep them looking forward to your emails?

Here are 6 ways different companies are doing just that.

Give Them a Chance to Shine

REI, an outdoor outfitter, asked their subscribers to send in action shots they were proud of to possibly be featured in future ads.

Not only does this keep their readers responding to their emails (improving their sender reputation), it also tells them how important they are to REI.

An added bonus: those whose pictures are chosen become part of the company’s marketing, strengthening their sense of involvement.

Flaunt Some Freebies

Few can resist the allure of free money, and playing a game to win it is even more fun.

Neiman Marcus’ Butterfly Game is another double whammy. It gets hopeful readers in the habit of clicking through to the store’s site. Then, since the game requires visiting a series of sales pages, it likely leads to unplanned purchases (despite those solemn resolutions…)

Entertain With (Relevant) Videos

Retailer Urban Outfitters linked to a music video by a band popular with their customer base. The email’s only other content was a free shipping offer at the very bottom.

Although watching a video is fairly passive, it is still a fun experience you can offer. And since people like to pass videos along, your message could get forwarded far beyond your email list. So make sure to link back to a sign-up form!

Send A Simple Survey

Surveys keep your readers clicking, show you care about their preferences, and collect valuable feedback for you. Here, Hungry Girl, a food and nutrition blogger, asks her readers to answer an 8-question multiple-choice poll. Kept short and infrequent, surveys are an all-around winner.

Surveys are easy to create with tools like Survey Monkey, which lets you design your own form and tracks the results. And their basic account is free to create and use!

Another free tool is the Google Docs survey builder. Follow these steps to create a form that your subscribers can fill out directly in their email accounts. A related spreadsheet will automatically tally their responses for you.

Make It a Metaphor

Subscribers often appreciate being provided with valuable information that’s relevant to your email campaign. Use imagery to draw them in, and you may bump up their interest even more.

Beauty Blitz, an online beauty magazine, uses metaphor to invite its readers to a conversation. By presenting their advice page as a counter to sit at and chat with experts, readers are prompted to view the experience as a trip to an actual makeup counter or hair salon.

Not only will they recall past beauty treatments, which tend to be pleasant, but the association lends a sense of authority to the virtual advice counter. What metaphors might work for your campaign?

Show Some Personality

Letting your hair down a bit might get your subscribers’ attention.

Employees at Six Degrees Digital, a design and multimedia studio, came up with a series of “dares” that they could record on video and invited subscribers to vote for the one they wanted to see.

This sort of email can not only get subscribers involved, but keep them checking their inboxes for the winner.

Let’s Talk About Your Subscribers

So think about what works for your readers. Are they kick-boxers? Wine aficionados? Grassroots musicians? What activities might they enjoy?

Your readers may enjoy a chance to share a little about themselves. You could ask them to:

Your readers will appreciate the thoughtfulness of an activity focused on them. Plus, if they are in the habit of responding to your messages, they’ll be ready when your sales offer goes out and it’s time to spend again.

How do you engage your subscribers? Let us know your ideas!

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When you are the sole creator of an email marketing campaign, the content of your messages is near and dear to your heart.

You spend countless hours pruning your emails to perfection, finding the perfect content to drive subscribers to engage with your brand and product.

You might think your messages are the best they can be, but what do your subscribers think?

Invite Feedback: Let Subscribers Rate You

There are a few ways that you can find out what your subscribers are thinking.

Maybe in the past you’ve used subscriber preferences or reviewed unsubscribe comments from previous subscribers to formulate your message content.

Now there’s an even simpler way to measure the effectiveness of particular messages in your campaign and gauge your subscribers interest before subscribers get to the point of unsubscribing.

Add a rating scale to your messages and allow subscribers to effortlessly give feedback just by clicking on a link.

For Example:

A rating scale consists of a few links inserted in a logical order in your message, but there are different ways that you can approach the rating of your messages.

• Use images that correlate with your product or service to create your scale, or use happy/sad faces to cover the range of performance.

Your rating could be as simple as a thumbs up or thumbs down.

In fact, you can use these exact images if you would like!

Just save them, upload to your site, and then put them into your emails.

• Try a rating scale that explicitly assesses your message using descriptive language; sometimes people identify better with words.

Subscribers may identify better with descriptive choices.

Feel free to copy and reuse any of these images as well.

• Simply pose a question about the effectiveness of your campaign, type the numbers 1-5 at the bottom of your email and link those numbers to your thank you page.

Not sure if it’s worth the hassle of inserting images or coming up with clever text? Create a foolproof rating scale in under 2 minutes.

Thank Them for Their Feedback

No matter what type of scale you choose, each of the links on the scale has to go to a thank you page. This will be the same for every link on the scale.

The thank you page should be a simple page that you create on your website to thank subscribers for their response and assure them that their actions will help you create better messages in the future.

There’s no need to be elaborate, but you can certainly use the thank you page to further engage your readers once they have rated your message.

Because the thank you page is the same for each link, when you are inserting the links in your message you have to differentiate between the links so that you can properly track your ratings.

Add ?r=something to the end of each link when you are inserting it into to your message.

For example:

Weigh the Results

With click tracking enabled, once you send messages that contain your rating scale you will be able to view reports that illustrate how many subscribers clicked on the particular links on your scale.

You can also examine the number of subscribers who opened your message, and the number of subscribers that clicked on certain links on your rating scale.

While you can use click-through statistics for any links in your message to measure the effectiveness of your language and particular link text, using a rating scale allows you to explicitly ask subscribers to participate in your campaign.

You don’t ask subscribers outright to click on each and every link in your message by posing a question or asking for a response. The call to action is what makes the rating scale an effective method that differs from regular click-through stats.

What Do You Think?

Have you ever given a company your feedback on a rating scale?

Do you think your subscribers would be inclined to give you feedback this way?

Share your thoughts on the blog!

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2009 was the year of social network integration, testing send windows and organic list growth. While 2010 will bring its own trends, these changes aren’t going away.

Here’s a quick refresher of things that went down in email marketing last year.

These posts highlight some new AWeber features, a few colorful examples and the soundest advice we can offer.

2009: The Year of Posts in Brief

Using Email to Grow a Community: AWeber Talks to User Ramit Sethi
On his personal finance site, Sethi teaches his readers to be rich. Here, he gives a bonus lesson in email marketing success. His tips on building an email community are as valuable as gold.

How To Add an Opt-In Form to Your Facebook Page
Adopting social media techniques was a major move that many email marketers made in 2009. This post teaches you how to add an opt-in form to your Facebook profile, directing new contacts straight to your email list.

And since Facebook has more than 350 million active users, and over 700,000 local business accounts, it may be just the place to expand your online presence.

Design Inspiration From Fellow AWeber Customers
Three cameos of customer newsletters show what’s possible for small-time email marketers. Their clean design and quality content offer inspiration far into the future.

Have a Look At the New Web Form Generator
By far our biggest release of the year, the new web form generator was welcomed with open arms! Gone are the days of manually editing HTML; our web form tool helps you create professional and aesthetically pleasing web forms with absolutely zero HTML knowledge.

Test Results: How Long Should Your From Line Be?
“From” line length can largely impact the open rate of an email, yet it’s easy to overlook in the design process. Review what lengths are ideal in the major email clients.
This type of analysis should also be applied to subject line length. Make sure your subscribers can read the reason they should open each email!

{!firstname}, Think Before You Personalize
Personalization can be powerfully effective when used in the right ways. It can also be easily misused. Learn how to avoid the mistake of assuming that a string variable makes a message personalized, targeted or relevant.

“Do Not Reply” Address? Don’t Bother.
This post examines the trend of using an an unattended email address that discourages replies to emails, and explains why you should never do that with your own campaigns.

Deliver Smarter Autoresponders With Send Windows
Sometimes, certain days or times are ideal for subscribers to receive your emails. Find out why, and then learn how to increase your follow-up messages’ effectiveness by setting up send windows.

2010: Use It Wisely

Email marketing, with the biggest ROI of any marketing channel, is a path that can lead you to success. We hope these posts serve as stepping stones on your journey.

For more inspiration, read through the other email marketing tips that 2009 brought.

What would you like us to talk about in 2010? What steps are you planning to take in the new year? Let us know!

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You’ve got your lists set up. You’re broadcasting menu changes, special events and coupons. Your regulars are responding and new customers are subscribing.

What should you do next?

It might be time to take a look at what the items you have set up to appear in every email. Are you missing any important side notes? What can you add to fill your tables with more hungry customers?

Example: Taleo’s Bill of Email Fare

Our friends over at Taleo Mexican Grill in Irvine, California have the recipe for a well-done newsletter with all the trimmings.

What can your restaurant put in its emails to impress patrons?

Menus

Link to them! A surprising number of restaurants don’t have their menus listed online. Describing your dishes can convince even frequent diners to come in for that interesting new combination or a mouthwatering old favorite.

If your restaurant doesn’t have a web site, you can create and post your menu here.

Coupons

A small discount, exclusive to your email subscribers, may keep guests coming back – and keep them reading your new emails.

Here’s an example from one of Taleo’s emails:

Directions

Provide a link to driving routes, tips on parking, and public transportation information.

Take the guesswork out of getting there, and new customers may become regulars.

Gift Cards

If you offer them, say so.

People are always looking for gift ideas, and are likely too wrapped up in the dining experience when on site to seek them out.

Reservations

If you accept these, provide a link to a reservation page on your site, like this, or display your phone number.

Even if your number is listed elsewhere, seeing it listed for reservations suggests that subscribers call it for that reason.

Hours of Operation

When customers get your updates about happy hour discounts, lunch specials or live music events, they can glance over to see just when to plan their visit.

Save them the hassle of searching for your hours on your web site or showing up to an empty, dark building.

Calender of Events

After you announce a Tuesday-night open mic or a Sunday dinner discount, list it on a calender. Connect to it through a link, display a miniature version that can be clicked to open fully, or provide only the next week’s schedule in each message.

Pictures

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture of colorful, tasty food is worth a thousand tummy-grumbles.

Wild cravings for your food might be the best enticement of all.

Additional Ingredients

Taleo’s email didn’t include mix these in, but others have. And they might just be right for your newsletter.

Mini-Polls

Ask for feedback on your menu items, your seating options, your special events. You’ll collect valuable information, and you’ll show your patrons that their preferences are important.

Reviews

Customer opinions you collect on comment cards can be powerful testimonials.So can emails of appreciation. Consider publishing a response or two per email, possibly in a sidebar.

This is a lot to add, so keep things organized, subtle and listed neatly to keep from overwhelming your readers. Go for a complete, but not cluttered, design. And remember to track your clicks to see which links customers are taking advantage of.

We appreciate your feedback. Please deposit in comment box below.

Which of these have you included in your newsletters? Which do you think customers look for the most? Do you include anything else that your readers seem to really appreciate?

Share your ideas on the blog!

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As I examined my inbox in the days before Christmas, I couldn’t help but notice a growing trend in the email marketing messages I received from retailers big and small.

Almost every other message in my inbox touts a percentage off or free shipping of my purchase in the next however many days.

We’ve blogged about it before – most email campaigns employ some urgency tactics to encourage email opens, clicks and ultimately more timely sales. This sparked a discussion on building trust and credibility.

And while trust is crucial, time and strategy are also important elements of successfully urgent subject lines.

The Clock is Ticking

With the holiday season in full swing, it is typical of retail campaigns to increase urgency in their subject lines.

To boost sales before a major holiday, retailers use their subject lines to highlight products, offer discounts and stress the importance of ordering early for shipping purposes.

You can use the same techniques to drive traffic and sales on your website.

It doesn’t only apply to Christmas. Building urgency is an effective technique when it is used properly and provides real value.

The 3 Top Ways: The Proof is in the (Figgy) Pudding

According to MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, the top three types of subject lines that compel subscribers to open emails contain one of these:

1. Discount Offer
2. Free Product Offer
3. Familiar Brand Name

That’s pretty big news considering that almost every single ‘urgent’ email in my inbox right now contains a variation of one of these.

Would These Examples Drive You to Buy?

Straight from my inbox, each one of these emails mention a discount, a free offer or the brand name.

Think Twice: Are Your Intentions Naughty, or Nice?

While creating a sense of urgency with your subject line is a great way to light a fire under your subscribers, it’s crucial to step back and evaluate when too much urgency is off-putting.

If you offered 10% last week, and you’re offering 20% off now, who’s to say you won’t increase the discount next week?

If you rely too heavily on urgency techniques, you could end up with disbelieving subscribers. Offering too many discounts could sabotage your chances of inspiring real urgency.

How Do You Build Urgency In Your Subjects?

Do you include these elements in your subjects? Others? What have your results been?

Share your thoughts on the blog!

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A carefully planned autoresponder series builds the foundation for a solid email marketing campaign.

To some business owners, creating this series can be a daunting task – but it doesn’t have to be! With a bit of planning, everyone can create an autoresponder series that communicates important information and offers to subscribers, no matter what industry you are in.

For example, let’s look at some easy autoresponder ideas for a specific type of business – a beauty salon. These examples are specific, but you can apply them to all kinds of campaigns.

A Welcome Email

Subject: Greetings and Thanks for Signing Up with A Cut Above!

The welcome message should thank subscribers for visiting our salon (or the salon website) and reiterate what subscribers will receive (in this case, promotions and exclusive offers). It can also give subscribers a reason to return to the site – for example, to view our full range of services.

While a welcome message should be simple and to the point, we shouldn’t forget that this is a great place to begin branding our series. Including a simple logo, or working with an HTML email template, can really give our campaign a professional edge and help subscribers recognize us.

Offer a Discount on a Variety of Products!

Subject: 15% Off All Products at A Cut Above

In this message we can include links to the product pages on our site that we are offering at a discounted price, making it easy for our subscribers to click through and eliminating the search for the products they are most interested in. Let’s say our products fall under the following categories:

• Styling Tools (brushes, hair dryers, curling irons, etc.)
• Shampoos and Conditioners
• Styling Products (gel, hairspray, pomade, etc.)
• Accessories (headbands, hair clips, etc.)

With click tracking enabled, we can see exactly which link/s each subscriber clicks. Then we can segment our list later on and send tightly focused messages only to those subscribers who clicked on “Styling Tools” or “Accessories.”

Drive Traffice With a Freebie

Subject: Complimentary Manicure for All Visits Next Week – A $30 Value!

Weekends are normally hectic for beauty salons, so our third email in the series provides incentive for clients to make appointments during the business week.

By offering a free manicure, we are more likely to book appointments with clients who are watching their wallets and would otherwise not come into the salon at all.

Send a Time Sensitive Autoresponder

Subject: Buy a Gift Certificate at A Cut Above and Get a Second at 25% Off – Tuesday Only!

To have this message go out on Tuesdays at a specific time, we can use autoresponder send windows, which enable us to automatically send this message only on a certain day of the week.

Sending our subscribers a “one day only” promotion lets them know that they have to take immediate action. Plus, the savings offered here is significant, so this will really drive Tuesday gift certificate sales.

Things All Businesses Should Consider When Creating a Campaign

• Provide real incentive for subscribers to keep coming back. Whether you send a free gift or advertise incredible sale prices, continue to send specials through email and refer to these offers when speaking with your customers.
• Pick a style and stick with it. Your subscribers will grow to learn your branding and recognize the emails that you send. Once you find your voice and choose a template, your emails will be an extension of your business – you want them to look professional.

Ideas for Other Businesses?

What types of businesses would you like to see examples for?

Share your ideas on the blog!

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If you’re one of the many smart bloggers who also build their email lists and deliver a blog newsletter, I bet you put a lot of effort into creating high-quality content.

Often, that valuable content is timeless, but only appears on the most-viewed part of your blog – the homepage – for a short time. Other posts push it off into your homepage and into oblivion.

This is frustrating – after all, other subscribers could benefit from this content, right? Even if they sign up days, weeks, months or years after you first published it?

Fortunately, with a simple email marketing tactic, you can resurrect your content from the depths of your blog and keep it in front of your ever-growing, ever-changing audience.

Turn Your Blog’s Best Content Into an Automated Email Newsletter

There’s no reason to put all that hard work into creating great content, then get just one round of clicks, comments and other actions from it. Why be satisfied with that?

Much of your blog’s content isn’t only relevant at one particular time. And to borrow from an old NBC slogan, if subscribers haven’t seen an old post, it’s new to them.

Get that old content out to them and make it fresh again!

Create an Autoresponder Campaign For Your Blog in 3 Easy Steps

1. Identify Your Best Content

Go through your old blog posts and figure out which ones are the truly high-quality ones that all subscribers need to see, even if they’re years old.

2. Turn Each Post or Group of Posts Into an Email

There are a handful of ways to go about this:

• The fastest, simplest way is to just copy and paste your full post content into an email, style as you see fit (if necessary) and save. No introduction, no conclusion, just the post as a standalone.

  I don’t necessarily think this is the best solution for everyone, but it’s far better than doing nothing – and if you’re really too pressed for time to do more than that, then at least do that.

• Copy and paste a compelling excerpt from your article, add a link to read the full post, and then add a brief introduction and conclusion to the email.

  I like this method because it encourages clickthroughs, but you may find that including the full post is better.

  Either way, including an intro and conclusion is a good idea because it gives you a chance to build context and continuity into the series of emails you’re sending.

• If you have two or more good posts on a topic, write an email that combines the ideas in those posts and links to them in context (this is something you might be doing with blog posts already).

  The more posts you have on a topic, the less you need to write.

  In fact, if you have say, 10 posts on a topic, you could write a simple introduction (“a lot of our readers want to learn about ______ because ______, so here are our most useful resources about that”) and then just provide a list of links to those posts.

3. Add Your Emails To Your Follow Up Series

Once you have your emails together, create them as follow up messages.

As you create each one, think about how much time you want to pass between those messages and schedule accordingly.

Remember, new subscribers will also be getting your new posts (right?), so spacing the emails too close together could be overkill, especially if a subscriber gets your new posts and your old posts on the same day.

• One way to get around this: deliver your follow up messages only on a certain day of the week – a day when you don’t send your regular blog newsletter – using Autoresponder Send Windows.

  For example, if you normally email your latest post/s to subscribers on Tuesdays, you might tell us to only deliver your follow ups on Fridays.

  That way, you could deliver these emails as automated weekly tips without sending subscribers 2 emails on the same day.

As you create more quality posts, you can either continue adding emails to your follow up series or edit your existing ones to work those posts into the emails you’ve already created.

Examples of Email Campaigns That Do This

1. Darren Rowse shares how he did this for his site digital-photography-school.com.
2. In our recent video interview with Ramit Sethi, he talks about doing this for his site iwillteachyoutoberich.com

3. At AWeber, we do this in some of our own email campaigns.

   For example, if you join AWeber and subscribe to our customer training series/newsletter, you’ll see some emails that take posts from this blog and rework them into email messages designed to expose you to educational content that you might not have ever seen otherwise.

Do You Revive Your Blog’s “Oldies But Goodies?”

What results have you seen from doing this? Any tips on this for the rest of your fellow readers?

Share your thoughts on this post!

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Recently I had an opportunity to sit down with AWeber customer Ramit Sethi and talk about how he’s using email marketing to market his business.

Ramit writes about personal finance at iwillteachyoutoberich.com and uses email to market that site, his book and other products.

We talked at length about topics that many of you may have questions about when creating, managing and optimizing an email campaign. Today, with a little help from our YouTube channel, we’re going to share those with you.

Using Email Marketing to Grow a Community

In this video, Ramit shares how he:

• Uses email to grow/nurture his community
• Measures success
• Values feedback
• Handles the volume of incoming email and why he believes in being accessible (and doesn’t use a do not reply address)

Starting an Email Marketing Campaign

In this video, Ramit shares:

• How he started email marketing
• How often he sent emails to subscribers
• What he put in his emails
• How many autoresponders he’s sending

More Videos Now At Our YouTube Channel (And More Coming Soon!)

For a couple more clips from our interview with Ramit, head over to our YouTube channel.

There, you’ll find videos on:

1. How he increased his open rate by 50% in 7 days
2. How he got traffic to his site before email (what he did to get people there in the first place so he could start building his list)

Go to AWeber’s YouTube Channel

We’ll be publishing more clips from this interview there soon, so be sure to subscribe to our channel to get notified about new videos!

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One of the most common “snags” many people have when creating email marketing campaigns is creating effective messages. They aren’t sure where to get content, or how to put their message together in a way that gets results.

At noon tomorrow (July 17, 2008) I’ll be joining Markus Allen for a “Stump Markus” teleseminar on email marketing.

We’ll discuss how to craft profitable, response-pulling campaigns — even if you’re not a “copywriting whiz.”

To join us for this free call, tomorrow at 12PM EDT call:

(724) 444-7444

at the prompt, enter call ID 17477.

You can also get the details on Markus’ show here.

See you there!