Nearly three quarters of all broadcasts sent from AWeber last month share a common basic characteristic.

It’s not subject line personalization (although many email marketing campaigns do indeed use this).

It’s not that the sender chose to tweet the email newsletter.

It’s not that they were created from blog content using our RSS to email tools.

Nope, it’s even more basic than that. And it might surprise some of you (at least, based on some of your responses to Bob’s recent post on HTML email design examples).

So what is it?

Most Email Newsletters Are Sent In HTML

In August 2009, 73.9% of all broadcast messages sent through AWeber included an HTML version.

For comparison, in August 2008 only 58.9% of broadcasts included an HTML version. In other words, the use of HTML in email newsletters has increased 25.47% in the past year!

Here’s how the percentage has changed over the past four years:

Surprised?

I’ll admit that even I was when I saw the stats. A lot of marketers still believe that plain text is the “default” format to go with (just see the comments on Bob’s post), and while I knew that the reality was different (even 3 years ago, over 53% of the broadcasts sent from AWeber included an HTML version), I didn’t expect such a strong majority of broadcasts to include HTML.

Why Has HTML Email Become So Much More Popular?

I’d like to think that at least in part this is due to the increasing number of HTML email templates we’ve released over the past couple of years.

But that certainly isn’t the only reason, and it’s probably not the primary one. If you’re going to use HTML, you’re going to do so because you’ve found it gets better results than text, or you believe it has the potential to do so.

So what potential/results might people see in HTML email?

• An opportunity to provide an experience that more closely matches the one your customers & prospects have on your website.
• The ability to deliver product and other images directly in the email body; to link text/images; to display content in multiple columns and take advantage of other HTML formatting.
• Easier tracking of activity – no need to type out tracking URLs in the body where subscribers can see them; ability to track opens (even if opens are a somewhat imprecise metric, they can help you to compare the relative success of campaigns).
• You can add a preheader to remind subscribers why they signed up, encourage them to whitelist you and take other actions that can increase response and deliverability.

More on HTML vs. plain text.

Don’t Join The Crowd “Just Because” – But Don’t Avoid HTML “Just Because,” Either

The point here isn’t “hey, 3/4 of broadcasts are in HTML, so obviously yours should be, too.”

It’s this: if you’re sending your emails in plain text only “just because” you always have, or because the people you receive email campaigns from send in plain text, then try HTML – run some tests with it to see how your subscribers respond!

After all, you never know until you try…

More On Email Newsletters and HTML

• Browse our HTML email templates and watch a video on how to use them.
• Video: introduction to AWeber’s email newsletter tools.
• See our Knowledge Base to learn how to send email newsletters with AWeber.
• More posts on email design, including several on text vs. HTML.

Your Thoughts?

Were you surprised to find that so many broadcasts are sent in HTML?

Have you been sending yours with an HTML version, or as plain text?

Share your thoughts on the blog!

Tweet This

Ever since we made the move to our new office, I’ve found myself really cherishing each morning — not only because our office literally feels like home (Eric and I are quite the decorators), but because as part of my morning routine, I get to check out what’s going on in the design community and what our customers are doing with their email designs.

To start my day, I:

1. Water the flowers outside my office.
2. Grab a hot cup of coffee.
3. Catch up on my RSS feeds.
4. Surf Twitter to see what cool stuff AWeber customers have been sending out.

Today, I’d like to give a subtle nod to some customers who put together awesomely designed newsletters:

Let’s See What AWeber Customers Are Tweeting!

Club Caitlin Newsletter – Cooking With Caitlin

I really like the way this newsletter was done. The contrast between the reds and the greens really makes it fun and interesting and its all tied together nicely with the gray background.

Whoever designed this email also spent time laying out the footer of the email (seen below)… something that can often be overlooked and neglected.

FB Gathering

This newsletter design feels fresh. The pastel greens are very inviting and the imagery works well to balance out the newsletter.

Eye Spy Spain Magazine

Not only do the colors work very well but check out the exceptional detail they put into the text header above where the newsletter starts. That sort of detail makes an email look very clean, crisp and extremely professional. Bravo!

Inspiration Is Everywhere!

Now that I’ve shared a few examples of newsletters I’ve found inspiring, take some time to reassess the design of your emails.

Create a separate email address and start collecting newsletter subscriptions. Maybe you’ll stumble across something that will inspire you to take your newsletter design to a whole new level! Maybe your email newsletter will end up catching my eye…

Tweet This

Sometimes it’s good to step back from discussions like what’s new at Gmail and how to add an opt-in form to Facebook and just talk email marketing basics for a bit.

Today, let’s talk about email design. Specifically, plain text email design.

While creating plain text emails seems easy (and it is) there are things you can do to make your plain text emails more reader-friendly.

A recent email I received illustrates this well:

Evernote’s Plain Text Update

Here’s an email I received from the makers of software program Evernote:

(Click image to see full-size)

Now, we could take the easy way out and say that Evernote should be sending HTML emails instead of plain text – so they could more easily present this information in the excellent way they do on their website and blog.

Instead, let’s focus instead on how Evernote could make it easier for subscribers to get the information they want out of this email.

For the record, I don’t think this is a bad email overall. It has a great tone and a lot of good content in it. I just think that the format makes it hard for subscribers to use and appreciate that content.

Making This Plain Text Email Usable

While this email isn’t just one big continuous block of text, it does leave a few things to be desired…

No Maximum Character Width

Notice how long the lines are in this email?

(Click to see full-size)

Those are being cut off by my Gmail account when it runs out of room at around 133 characters – about twice what we recommend as a maximum line length. And if Gmail had let the, the lines would have run even longer than that!

Keeping the lines shorter would mean subscribers don’t have to move their eyes so far across the page and back to read the email, making scanning faster and easier.

Headers Aren’t Easily Visible and Scannable

If you’re going to have an email with separate topics/sections, it’s best to use headers (just like you would on a web page) to make those sections easy to find as subscribers scan your email.

This email has headers, but fails to separate them from the corresponding paragraphs.

At the very least there should be another line break between the header and paragraph; I’d probably also try making the header stand out a little more with some hyphens or asterisks.

No Separation of Content Within Paragraphs

Each section of this email has a header and then a single large paragraph of text.

Even at the long line lengths shown here, each paragraph is several lines long. If you were to shorten the lines to 60-70 characters, these would be really long.

This email could be far more readable if you broke the paragraphs apart, maybe used some bulleted lists… you don’t have to follow the old “5-sentence paragraph” structure when writing an email!

No Conclusion or Signoff

This email just abruptly ends after the last content section:

What’s strange about this is that the rest of the email actually has a great friendly, personal tone to it… so a signature or conclusion of some sort seems like a no-brainer.

Leaving the signature off makes it feel less like an email you’re receiving from an actual person at Evernote, and more like a machine-written news summary.

Your conclusion and/or signature need not be elaborate (for example, look at the one in Kayak’s email newsletters) but it should be there to bring everything else in your emails back together.

Just For Fun: My Rewrite Of This Email

Here’s that same email content, with ~3 minutes’ work to format it differently:

(Click image for full-size)

It’s longer since I shortened the lines and broke up the text a bit, but I think it reads a lot more smoothly than the previous version.

I’m of course biased since this rewrite is my creation, so I’ll ask you:

Would you agree that the simple layout changes in this version make the email much easier to scan and read?

I hope so.

Plain Text Doesn’t Have to Be Plain-Jane

It’s perfectly fine to send plain text emails; they might work better for you than HTML.

But if you do go the plain text route, don’t assume that means there’s zero design involved!

How do YOU lay out your plain text emails to make them easy to read?

Share your ideas and thoughts in the comments!

Tweet This

Just a quick note to say that the Twitter your email newsletters tool now works for Blog Broadcasts, too.

So you can now use AWeber to convert from RSS to email to Twitter – and get your message out to your audience even more easily than before!

Also, we fixed an oversight where personalization tags were being included in some tweets – so now, if you personalize your email subject lines with say, {!firstname_fix}, that field won’t appear in your tweet.

Enjoy – and don’t forget to follow AWeber, Tom, Sean and Justin (me) on Twitter!

If you follow online marketing circles, you’ve likely seen (and participated in) a lot of discussions about social media and using it to grow your business.

While it isn’t a replacement for email marketing, social media can complement it by helping you connect a larger audience to your site and campaigns.

One social media tool that a lot of you seem to be using (and that we also use here at AWeber) is Twitter.

Today, we’re happy to announce that you can now use your Twitter and AWeber accounts together to expand the reach of your email newsletters.

Publish Your Email Newsletters to Twitter

Now, whenever you create a broadcast message in AWeber, you have the option to automatically “tweet” that email too!

Here are a couple examples taken from real AWeber users on Twitter:

How It Works

To use this feature:

1. Go to the Broadcast page of your account.
2. Create a broadcast.
3. Before saving your broadcast, mark the “Syndicate” checkbox.

4. Mark the “Twitter” box and enter your login/password

When you send your broadcast, we’ll automatically update your Twitter status with the subject line of your email and a short link to an online version of your email.

Twitter Email Newsletters FAQ

A couple quick questions and answers:

• Can I choose which broadcasts get tweeted?

  Once you enter your Twitter login and password once, we’ll assume you want to tweet all of your broadcasts.

  If there’s a broadcast you don’t want to tweet, just unmark the checkbox while editing it.

• How many Twitter IDs can I link to my account?

  You can link one Twitter ID to your account at any one time. You can change which ID is linked to your account by entering the login/password for it in step 4 above (this will replace your previously selected Twitter ID).

Have any other questions? Post a comment or get in touch with us.

Using Twitter? So Are We.

You can find several of us on Twitter:

AWeber on Twitter

Tom

Sean

Justin

Think you know the best day and time to send your email newsletter?

Ever wonder if your fellow email marketers are all sending at the same time you do?

Convinced your open rate is too low (or amazingly high)?

Some recent statistics pulled from all AWeber users may help you answer these questions:

What Kind of Open Rates Are People Getting?

If you’re sending HTML emails, you probably use your open rate to help gauge your success.

Even though it’s not a perfect measure of whether people are actually opening and reading your emails, it’s useful as a relative measure:

If it goes up over a short period of time, more people are probably reading

If it falls over a short period of time, it’s almost certain fewer people are reading.

Plus, all other things being equal, it can give you some motivation (if your open rates are lower than other senders’) or satisfaction (if your rates are higher).

So, here goes…

When Is/Was The Best Day To Send?

You’ll often hear (at least, I often hear) that Tuesday is the optimal day to send, because on Monday people are catching up from the weekend, and that on Tuesday morning you’ll have their undivided attention before they jump into their work for the upcoming week.

Do the numbers back up that theory? Let’s see.

The breakdown of open rates by day of the week:

Last month, Tuesday was actually the second-worst day to send, at least if you’re measuring by open rates.

(While we’re breaking assumptions, I should point out this, too: the hour of the day that got the best open rate was not 8-9AM, or 9-10AM, but in fact 2-3PM Eastern Time — email newsletters sent during that hour last month enjoyed a 19.1% open rate.)

Does This Mean I Should Switch My Campaigns To Thursdays?

In a word: No.

In both March and February, Thursday newsletters got the 3rd-worst opens vs. the rest of the week.

I hesitated a little to publish these stats, because I’m concerned that people might flock to sending their newsletters at the day or time that happened to get the best results lately.

Please, don’t drastically change your sending times/days just because you see that the average last month, or any month, happened to be higher on a different day or time.

Yes, you might eventually be able to shift your sending schedule, or split test some broadcasts, but if you up and move everything, you may throw off subscribers who are used to hearing from you at the usual time.

“It’s So Busy, Nobody Goes There Anymore”

To get at the other reason for not shifting your sending based on these stats, let’s paraphrase Yogi Berra (see above).

If everyone switches their sending schedule to send on say, Thursday, then recipients will start getting a ton of email that day, and start paying less attention to each individual email.

One possible reason for Thursday’s success last month may be that it wasn’t as popular as say, Tuesday or Wednesday for sending email:

Those higher-volume days mean more emails in readers’ inboxes, which might contribute to reduced open rates. Following that reasoning, some people may look at the low weekend volume (more email newsletters were sent on Tuesdays than on Saturdays and Sundays combined) and see an opportunity to get their audiences’ undivided attention.

My main point in showing these is to point out that our assumptions about what works are often quite wrong, and that you ultimately have to test for yourself to see what best suits your audience.

Some Inspiration… And Some Help

Are you getting better open rates than this?

If so, GREAT! Give yourself a pat on the back…

…but don’t get complacent. Open rates aren’t the be-all, end-all of email metrics. They don’t guarantee that people are reading your emails, only that they have images turned on and that they probably saw your email for at least a moment.

Plus, there’s always room for improvement, right?

Some ideas that can help you raise your open rates:

Ask people to add you to their address books. Some email programs will display images from senders who are in the recipient’s contact list.

If you are putting pictures in your emails, use the ALT text for those images to pique readers’ interest in what the picture is, so that they enable images. Or, just directly ask readers to turn on images!

Add a picture of yourself to your emails, near/next to your signature. People like seeing your smiling face, and if they see it in one of your emails, they may be more likely to turn on images to see it again later.

What statistics/benchmarks would you like to see and/or learn more about?

Share your requests below or email me your suggestions or drop me a line on Twitter!

After ripping apart some poor email examples, I think it’s high time we point out someone who’s doing an email newsletter right.

I’ve been getting emails from travel planning site Kayak.com for a couple weeks. In each issue I’m impressed by their email savvy, from content to design to the little extras that make me so likely to use them to plan my trips.

Why do I like Kayak’s emails — both as an email marketing guy and as a subscriber — so much?

Examples of Kayak’s Emails

Before we go any further, take a look at 2 issues of their email newsletter that I’ve received:

(Click the above images for full-size versions.)

What do you think of them? Here’s my take:

They Build a Relationship, Rather Than Going For the Hard Sell

As a member of several frequent flyer programs, I get emails from a number of airlines. I also get emails from time to time from other travel sites where I’m a member.

I’ve never received an email campaign from any of them that tries to connect with me. They’re just so… all-sell, all-the-time, all about price.

Kayak, on the other hand, doesn’t scream at me about the latest deals.

Their emails sell the idea of traveling. Each section gets me excited about a destination, as if the emails were made up of postcards from friends who were visiting each place.

And even though I’m not usually looking to go anywhere, I often click through just to see what it might cost to take a trip. Just for fun (when was the last time your email campaign had subscribers going to your website just for fun? Try it.).

They’re Well-Designed and Easy To Read

This is exactly the kind of email that comes to mind (for me) when someone asks for an example of a “Light HTML” email message.

They cleverly separate each section with a header (the destination name).

They provide navigation at the top of the email to each section/destination, and each section has a link back to the top.

Navigation is text, not images, so it’s even useful with images disabled.

They distinguish their own content from sponsored content/ads by using lightly shaded backgrounds. Interspersing shaded sections with the main content also makes the email seem shorter than it actually is.

They put their logo in the upper left-hand corner of the email, so it appears in the preview pane, and they keep it small enough that it doesn’t get in the way of other content at the top of the email.

They’re Targeted To Me

And oh boy, is it easy to see what a trip might cost.

Did you see what they did in the sidebar? They put links to “cheap flights from Philadelphia.”

When I signed up they asked me what my home airport was, and they’re using that to get me from reading their email to making a purchase. The links even go to a flight search page that’s pre-filled with Philadelphia as the departing airport.

With what is really just basic segmentation and personalization — nothing difficult or complex — Kayak makes a smooth transition from inbox to web.

They Encourage Communication

Look at the footer of the email.

Rather than hiding behind a “do not reply” type of address and using email as a way to talk at me, they tell me they want to hear from me!

What’s especially great about this is they give me multiple ways to contact them:

The link in their email goes to a feedback form on their site.

Unlike the company in our email footer example a while back, they send from an email address that forwards to their help desk, so even if I reply instead of using their feedback form, I can still get in touch with them.

Anything Else?

I feel like I’m rambling a bit here, so I’ll turn it over to you.

What did you like about these emails?

Or didn’t you like them (and if so, why not)?

How do you feel you can apply these tactics to your own email marketing campaigns?

Share your thoughts on the blog!

How else can you use a newsletter besides marketing your business?

That question might not occur to most of our users — but AWeber user and goal-setting expert Brad Isaac contacted us recently to share how to put a more modern spin on the family newsletter by using email.

Brad sprinkles in helpful hints with screenshots and a step-by-step walkthrough. Plus, he was kind enough to share the following family email newsletter tips:

In my time at AWeber, I’ve been struck by the number of people who manage newsletters using either our broadcasting feature or Feed Broadcaster, but who make zero use of the ability to send autoresponders and timed follow up messages to subscribers.

I understand, of course, that newsletters contain date and time-specific information, and that broadcasting is the best way to send a newsletter… but why don’t newsletter senders use autoresponders too?